The Golden Compass

Before long the much-anticipated film “The Golden Compass” is going to be released, and there’s every chance it’s going to be this year’s Christmas blockbuster. If you enjoyed watching the “Lord of the Rings” or “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe”, chances are you’re going to like this movie every bit as much. Having Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman as two of the main characters won’t hurt box office performance either!

The film is based on the first book of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy and though it’s meant to be a series for children, the themes it deals with and the writing itself are equally challenging for adults.

The heroine of the book is Lyra – a wild young girl, living in a parallel universe to ours. When we first encounter her she’s living in the Oxford of her universe under the care of benign academics, but in time we learn that Lyra has a destiny which is to take her not just to the snow-capped ends of her own world, but (quite literally) through the fabric of space and time and into other worlds.

In Lyra’s world, the church Magisterium rules everything with an iron fist, but it’s as corrupt and misguided as any totalitarian regime could ever be. An alliance, working against the church, is slowly forming and its ultimate aim – and Lyra’s destiny – are one and the same (look away now if you don’t want a plot spoiler!). Lyra’s great task is to destroy the ‘Authority’. Her destiny is to kill God.

In the final book of the trilogy “The Amber Spyglass”, Lyra, helped by her friend Will, achieves her goal. She finally comes face to face with the Authority (who, in his dotage, has relinquished control to a power-mad angel called Metatron) and watches the Ancient of Days crumble into dust before her very eyes. His death paves the way for a new era where the power of the Magisterium has been broken and everyone is set free to be a citizen of what Pullman calls “The Republic of Heaven”.

Unsurprisingly there’s been a strong outcry against these books in some Christian circles, and it will be interesting to see whether Pullman (a vocal atheist) has been able to resist the studio’s inclinations to tone down his anti-religious message. Not much chance of an anti-God movie doing well in the huge American market!

No doubt there will be angry protests by well-meaning believers (think Ted and Dougal outside the cinema saying "Down with that sort of thing"!) but I think a better way to proceed is to engage with these books and films and enjoy them for their brilliant storytelling, but to critique them.

It strikes me that Pullman is very obviously setting up a straw man (straw God?) so he can knock him down. Whatever the church’s admitted failings in the past and present, the story the church is charged with preserving is not one of dominance, arrogance and military might, as he implies.

At this time of year Christians celebrate the very opposite: that the God whose word brought the cosmos into being was contracted to a human span. As Paul writes of Christ in his letter to the Phillipians, “he did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant. Being made in human likeness. and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death - even death on a cross!”

Whatever validity there is in Pullman’s criticism of the church, and however poorly the church has lived up to its message, the core of Christian faith is unalloyed. The unsearchable, unknowable God, at one point in history, shed his glory, gave up his divine rights and lived among us in human form so we could understand him better. Does that sound either authoritarian or coercive to you?

Enjoy the books, and enjoy the movies, but remember, Pullman’s offering us only one side of the story.