To see the "Golden Compass" or not?

From RIGHTCOAST:

"I read The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife as well. I would have read The Amber Spyglass, but some kid filched my copy. The Golden Compass has now been made into a move coming out this week staring Nicole Kidman, and it is quite justly in my view drawing the ire of various Catholic organizations.

The linked to analysis in the previous sentence does a better job than I will, but any thoughtful person has to recognize that the book is an attempt to malign religion in general, and Christianity and Catholicism in particular. There really isn't any way you can tell a story which involves the Church (called the "Magisterium" in the book, which is the Catholic canon legal term for the teaching authority of the Church, and for the doctrinal content of what is taught) kidnapping children, taking them to a sinister medical facility/concentration camp in the arctic, and performing bizarre and mutilating experiments on them, and not have it be anti-Catholic. But it is not as if this is any big secret, either. Pullman has averred that his His Dark Materials trilogy is about "killing God," who turns out to be an old senile man much in need of offing.

Now such reliable organs as The L.A. Times are coming out to say it is just more of the same old Catholic intolerance and bigotry that is protesting against the depiction of the Church as a bunch of crazed Nazis. Pullman has helpfully elevated the debate by calling offended Catholics "nitwits."

One might complain that had an author written a book about an alternative universe in which thinly disguised Jews tortured children, and, say, manipulated the world through their control of finance, the MSM would find more to protest about. But in today's climate, especially in the UK, one wonders whether even that would do more than get a few rabbis exercised and earn some positive reviews from the BBC. (Catholics used to complain that anti-Catholicism was the Antisemitism of the intellectuals, but this was before the intellectuals went back to antisemitism.)

Pullman's trilogy is a work of considerable literary merit, which does not keep it from being pretty poisonous stuff. Madame Bovary is a really great novel but I suspect that to write it Flaubert had to have been a really twisted guy. The literary organs are falling all over themselves to heap praise upon Pullman's books, of course, having been nauseated by the success of the Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and the Harry Potter series, all of the latter being, in one way or another, powerful teachers of essential bits of the Judeo-Christian world view and virtues, especially for kids. All of these books I am happy to see my kids reading, and they have all (except 4 year old Mark) read all of them. Pullman, naturally, hates Narnia, and is probably not fond of the other books either. He appears to have set out to write the anti-Narnia, and to be fair, has done a pretty good job. Well, if there weren't a battle of good and evil in the real world, LOTR and the rest wouldn't be so entertaining, would they?

The main point of this post, however, is to point out an irony. The villains in the Golden Compass and sequels are the Catholic-Nazis -- a fair characterization of the book's point, since anytime you have villains running concentration camps with medical experiments, that is psychic charge you are invoking. But in fact, if you want to experience the flavor that contemporary fascism would have when translated into first rate children's literature, you cannot, in my view, do better than Pullman's series. ..."

Read the rest by Tom Smith at RightCoast


I think I will give this movie a miss. One of the best comments to this article was from Scott Marquardt. (You have to scroll down a bit to find it.)

Posted by: Scott Marquardt | December 04, 2007 at 07:50 AM

I, for one, am fairly sure we all do have a personal demon. I'm also pretty sure it's not a pet, and it's a bad idea to try to get in touch with it. One of my principal personal demons is Drink, and he is not a cuddly fellow at all.

I don't think that people who are advancing the argument that "our children will all sort out what's good and what's bad because they're smart and they're tough" are right on this one at all. It seems to me like children can very much be influenced for good or for ill -- they may grow up to be pleasant, harmless people, or they may light bonfires in the ruins of our civilization in order to keep warm. Consider the Khmer Rouge -- it took only a little encouragement to make those tykes build pyramids of human skulls like they were LEGOs.

I have met so few well-catechized Christian adults that I despair that any child can navigate the poisonous maze of our culture to find the values, principals, and the God who built our civilization on his or her own. We are sending them into the forest, with nary a trail of breadcrumbs to show them the way home.

I think we turn our childrens' minds over to the ministrations of Hollywood at our peril. To say to a child "this book is good and this book is bad" is not a subject any of us can afford to be agnostic about. We need to provide guidance to them, instead of just assuming that the nanny of our culture is doing the job for us. The nanny is producing a generation of far too many Lindsay Lohans, and far too few Mother Teresas or Catherine of Sienas. I think we do a world of good when we say to a child "What are you reading, and is it rubbish? Here, read this instead."

Keep in mind that we'll all be old someday. Do we really want a generation that has been trained that they can take in any book and it's all OK? Do you want your nurse in the old-age home to be unfamiliar with The Bible, but well-versed in the works of De Sade?

The books we recommend are important, because children are easily mislead, and our time on Earth is finite.