The buzz over Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass is heating up as the cinematic release nears. I think most Christians are informed on this topic, and accordingly this will be a brief post, but if the topic comes up, these are a few points of consideration:
1). He is an atheist. He is a militant athiest. He hates C.S. Lewis with a passion and wrote His Dark Materials trilogy as a direct attack against the Chronicles of Narnia. They have a number of similarities - note that Pullman's first book begins with Lyra hiding in a wardrobe.
2). "His Dark Materials" is a line from Milton's Paradise Lost. Pullman's premise is that, in Milton (and thus Genesis) the wrong side won - in essence, God is the faulty tyrant and Satan the 'good' side.
3). Accordingly, the entire moral structure (if you can even call it that) is inversed in the book. Evil is good, and good is evil, but it's really all relative, anyway. Everything flips a Christian world-view and values the opposite of what any Bible-believing person would stand for.
4). At least, unlike Harry Potter or Friends, Pullman's world-view is obvious. He literally says in the first work that God is evil - I suppose we should be thankful he's overtly blasphemous and not subversive. But don't be fooled, he himself has said he's actively trying to undermine a Christian worldview:
"I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief."
He might claim he's going after all organized religion, but don't buy it for a moment. He might just be "creating a story" and not "preaching a sermon," with Christianity as his closest fodder because he grew up around it, but your beliefs will ALWAYS show up in your creative out-put, and there IS a reason it's Christianity he goes after and not Islam.
Obviously, there is no reason to support Pullman. His works are interesting as pieces of Literature, and he does creatively interact with Milton and bring some originality to the "fantasy table," but even though he's writing in the same tradition as Tolkien and Lewis (a phrase that's beginning to really bother me), he's likewise fighting against all of the beliefs and purpose Tolkien and Lewis brought to their understanding and execution of fantasy literature and creativity.
3 comments:
Thanks for the post Leila! I have been hearing a lot on this subject, but you made it simple and clear! Great job professor!
great post. you are the woman.
btw, have you read 100 cupboards? since you are becoming increasingly annoyed with the tolkein-lewis tradition, i won't say that. :) just wondering.
I haven't read 100 cupboards...what is it? You know I love Lewis and Tolkien; I'm more annoyed with the fact that anyone who writes something like fantasy, with a bit of religion or epic heroism or talking trees, gets labeled "in their tradition." Please. It totally discounts their entire purpose for writing and the centrality of Christianity to everything they produced. If you take that away - like with Pullman - how exactly are they 'in the same tradition?'
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