The Force is no longer a cosmic linkage between all living things but a shorthand for the discipline it takes to turn the other cheek. The gradual encroach of what we will one day know as adulthood settles myth into metaphor, and generally we miss the strength of our childhood convictions no more than we miss our baby teeth once lost. And so it went for me, with one exception: I never suspected that growing up would take from me my belief in God.
When it happened, it was a loss I felt like a wound that would not heal. You could also say: an action-packed adventure spanning the multiverse. A pointed critique of institutionalized religion and the legacy of imperial Christianity. A bittersweet recounting of first love found and lost. A subversive telling of the Fall, as in of man. But it begins with a child. Lyra Belacqua lives in a world like and unlike ours.
It gradually becomes clear that the heightened global reach of a consolidated and self-protecting church has slowed the progress of science, or, as they know it, experimental theology. As Lyra waits out the meeting by hiding in a closet, we encounter two of the innovations most central to the books. The second is Dust: elementary particles, visible using special kinds of film, which fall from the sky, interacting with nothing but gathering thickly on people.
It was also, for me, the age at which I suffered my crisis of faith. Often I tell it like a joke: Six years of Christian school made an atheist of me! My school practiced a gentle Episcopalianism in which chapel talks were as likely to celebrate goal-setting or poetry as the particularities of the faith.
I was not, in other words, traumatized out of faith. Nor was I argued out of it, exactly, despite lively debates with my best friend over whether the concept of a male savior was inherently sexist.
Rather, I think the religious education I received accomplished what it set out to do: it encouraged me to examine seriously my own faith.
I asked myself earnestly the question: what had brought me to my God beyond the same accident of birth that had once led women to become priestesses of Zeus? And oh, how I looked. How I prayed and bargained and grasped for ideas which might restore my belief. How I searched for signs and felt in the dark for the same listening warmth I had once taken for granted. My reluctant atheism gave me no sense of superiority or pride in my intellect; to the extent that it separated me from others, it made me feel horribly alone.
I had stepped into a world drained of comfort, of hope, of meaning. I stayed up at night rocked with a full-body terror of the approaching void, and wore myself anxious with the existential vertigo that accompanied the dissolution of my apparent moral foundation. What scared me most was the newfound emptiness of the world: without the invisible thread of faith that had once bound existence into something legible, what could reality be beyond an infinitude of atoms senselessly colliding?
Where was I to find not only love, morality, and purpose but even a justification for seeking those things? The convert, reaching the end of a road of trials and exhausted by despair, picks up a Bible or meets a preacher or wanders into a sermon; then, having received the gospel, he feels the emptiness in him begin to heal, filling him with such joy that his life is forever changed.
Well, I had already read the Bible and heard many sermons. Instead I met Lyra. Metatron and his minions in the Church want to control human destiny and enforce their rules on all the conscious beings of all the worlds.
Lord Asriel and his forces want to create a world in which free will is protected, a world in which all thinking beings are allowed to choose the course of their own lives. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, grace is the sanctification God grants to some people.
After Lyra grows up, she has to learn how to read the alethiometer like everyone else. This is because free will has triumphed over destiny. The most offensive thing about the Church in His Dark Materials is its relentless quest to ensure ignorance. Many of the plot lines about destiny, and whether we create it or embrace it, spurred controversy with Christian groups. In , as the film was nearing release, the Catholic League campaigned against the movie and source material. It was No. The Harry Potter series claimed the top spot.
Shortly after the final installment's release, he reportedly told the Washington Post that his aim was to "undermine the basis of Christian belief. Without it, we are like children before the might of the Magisterium. We have each other. When I talked to Weitz in August, he expected that he would still be tinkering with the opening voice-over until just before the release, but the general direction was already set.
What can I say? Any priest or nun was a dogmatic idiot. Sprinkled around the movie will be Latin inscriptions from the Vulgate translation of the Bible, including one in Mrs.
New Line, after all, has a reputation for picking up edgy projects, like Boogie Nights and Se7en. When the studio bought the rights to The Golden Compass , in , it was flush with the success of The Lord of the Rings , and perhaps its leadership imagined making something less anodyne. If so, a more nervous mood has since prevailed.
The studio reportedly has tense relations with its parent company, Time Warner, and may be in danger of losing its independence. Johnny likes the movie. Johnny gets the trilogy for Christmas. It bombed. Right now, the love affair is in limbo. After a rocky start, the studios now seem to view the Christian market as it would a difficult girlfriend: elusive and hard to please; ultimately, you keep your distance but still take pains not to irritate her.
Marketing plans aside, New Line executives likely believe they were doing Pullman no great disservice by stripping out his theology and replacing it with some vague derivative of the Force.
Certainly not something to get exercised over. At the Cannes Film Festival, in a press conference with cast members of The Golden Compass , a reporter asked if there was any pressure to tone down the anti-Christian elements of the story. It fell to the young Eva Green, the former Bond girl who plays the beautiful witch queen Serafina Pekkala, to answer.
Chris [Weitz] can answer that. Pity poor Green. This may have been her mangled attempt to follow orders. At the festival, the studio had delivered a sheet of talking points to the hotel room of at least one cast member, Sam Elliott, who plays a Texas aeronaut in the film. This could be Paris Hilton reading her Bible in prison. Or Madonna preaching about Kabbalah. You can almost see Pullman cringing at the standard Tinseltown crypto-Buddhist babble. Be Spiritual. Praise the Divine.
Offend No One. Then say, Ommmm. Hollywood is in somewhat the same position as Las Vegas these days. It tries to keep the sins hidden away and outwardly present itself as a defender of American virtues: justice, individual freedom, and the power of one innocent soul to save the world. The Golden Compass should not offend, or be controversial at all, Weitz swears.
It will certainly not, heaven forbid, offer any critique of religion.
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