Ah, the holidays, when all across the land atheists and anti-Christians are able to enjoy fresh bursts of indignation at the sight of their countrymen celebrating those old retrograde tidings of comfort and joy. The Enlightenment has come and gone, Nietzsche has spoken, and still people persist in singing carols, hanging wreaths and going to midnight Mass as if it meant something.
Even menorahs are beginning to goad the unbelieving. Fresh from a nationwide book tour for “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” the ever-pungent Christopher Hitchens is now being publicly rude about Hanukkah and those of the “ancient and cruel faith” who celebrate such “holy foolishness.”
In a piece posted Monday on Slate, Hitchens — who is part Jewish — scornfully remarked that the menorah symbolizes “not the ignition of a light but the imposition of theocratic darkness.”
Friday, halfway through Hanukkah and in perfect time for kiddies to take in a show over Christmas vacation, comes “The Golden Compass,” from New Line Cinema. The film is an attack on authority in general, and on religious authority in particular, all dressed up in pretty sparkling seasonal gold.
Indeed, the visual beauty of some of the film’s sequences — not to mention the rapturously elegant couture worn by actress Nicole Kidman — brings to mind that moment in Catholic baptisms where parents must reject not only evil, but also, specifically, the glamour of evil.
“The Golden Compass” is glamorous, all right, and almost as pernicious as the trilogy by Phillip Pullman that gave it rise. Alert readers will know Pullman as the militant atheist author of “His Dark Materials,” a fantasy series that opens with the events depicted in the movie.
Pullman has famously said, “My books are about killing God.” So you can imagine my surprise when, having popped into my local Safeway last night, I saw the author’s books on sale across from the egg cooler. “Hmmm,” I thought. “Milk? Check. Butter? Check. Deicidal novels? Nah.”
So, yes, everything you may have heard about Pullman is true. He is English, he used to teach school, and indeed, he’s out to thrust a lance into the side of young believers. Interestingly, while there’s plenty of fantastical weirdness in the books — witches, talking bears, alternate worlds, souls that are external to the body — Pullman’s attack on Christianity is completely straight.
In the third book, for instance, one of his sympathetic adult characters (an ex-nun-turned-particle-physicist) tells two children: “The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.”
The film is not so daring as the books; certainly not so courageous as, say, to name a teddy bear “Muhammad.” But the cheap shots at Christianity come fast and furiously: The villain of the story is the Magesterium, a universal church run by sinister men in black cassocks who hate “free-thinkers and heretics,” sneak poison into wine, and say things to one another like “Mirabile dictu.”
As my Jewish friends say: Oy!
It’s hardly an act of brave cultural daring to poke at the Roman Catholic Church. These days, who hasn’t? Madonna with her crucifixes, the silliness of “The Da Vinci Code,” now a $180 million film in which an evil pope figure runs an Arctic concentration camp where kidnapped children’s souls are cut away. It’s all tosh. Thankfully, the Catholic Church, and Christianity as a whole, have both seen off worse challenges than a bunch of actors pretending to react to computer-generated polar bears.
Like Hitchens’ jabs at Judaism, “The Golden Compass” is probably more irritating than it is dangerous. But Hitchens at least has the decency to confine his attacks on religion to fellow adults, and the impudence to mock even Islamists (the title of his latest book is, of course, a play on the Muslim cry “Allahu Akbar!”).
There’s something much nastier in Pullman’s desire to subvert religious faith in children too young to protect themselves. And it is cheeky indeed that the makers of “The Golden Compass” have timed their film’s release for the start of the seasonal holy days.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
