Via Martin Marty's Sightings, I see that the soon-to-be-released film based on Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass has dealt with Pullman's rather strident atheism by ... totally ignoring it:
"With $180 million at stake, the studio opted to kidnap the book's body and leave behind its soul." Rosin tells how author Philip Pullman, sometimes described as Great Britain's "Christopher Hitchens for kids," which means would-be God-killer and religion-destroyer, succumbed to fiscal lures and the wiles of Hollywood script-writers and producers to turn an anti-God children's book, one of several that wildly popular Pullman has written, into a theologically nondescript but otherwise highly "descript" film.
Whatever Pullman's motivations may have been for allowing the film to become watered down in this way (and truthfully, he may have had very little say), it's unsurprising to me that his anti-religion agenda has been for the most part elided. I've been curious for some time how they would be able to make a holiday children's fantasy movie out of these books without tampering with the fact that the chief villain of the trilogy is, in fact, God.
Whether it will be a good movie with whatever changes they've made is another matter of course. But it does strike me that to make the His Dark Materials saga without God as the antagonist is much like making The Lord of the Rings without Sauron. In any event, it will be a different story, on a fundamental level, than the book.
However, this has not stopped the ravening hordes of the religious right from beginning its bay and howl:
Predictably, Bill Donohue's Catholic League rose to the bait and is publicizing exposes and responses, directed more to the book and the author than to the sanitized but not dull film version. "Golden Compass: Agenda Unmasked" is the League's blast: "It's a backdoor way of selling atheism. Unsuspecting parents will take little Johnny to see the movie. Johnny likes the movie. Johnny gets the trilogy [which is anti-God] for Christmas."
And this is a problem ... why?
In all seriousness, Donohue seems to be advocating the repression of any actual conversation about religious truth in the public sphere. Is it his aim to protect parents from having to actually answer their childrens' sincere questions about religion by making it impossible to raise those questions without having to face his blustering countanance? It is not, contrary to Donohue's rhetoric, anti-Catholic to challenge Christianity in general, or even Catholicism in particular, to defend and justify its beliefs! While Donohue would deal with such challenges by bullying and bluster, far better would be to attempt to engage the portrayal of religion in Pullman's books, and demonstrate how they are a distortion of religious faith. Donohue's authoritarianism is merely a confirmation of Pullman's points.
There is nothing wrong with advocating atheism in public. Pullman, Hitchens, Dawkins, and their fellows are engaged in a legitimate philosophical inquiry. More's the pity of religious believers are incapable of answering them! (Though, I'll note that I've done so several times on this blog myself).
Nevertheless, I find it amusing that New Line has attempted to deal with the Golden Compass controversy by instructing those involved with the production to "play dumb." Unfortunately, that strikes me as far too apt a metaphor for the entire way we deal with religion in this country in the first place.
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