Imagine taking all of the worst things about Christianity, the Crusades, the Salem Witch Trials, the Inquisition, Manifest Destiny, the brutal subjugation of the New World and Africa, the guilt, the poor treatment of women, the persecution of men like Galileo who dared to oppose the Church on questions of science, the legalism, the closed-mindedness, the hypocrisy, the apathy toward suffering, everything, all the worst of the worst, and then threw out everything else.  No love, no compassion for the suffering, no Mother Theresa, no C.S. Lewis, no Wounded Healer, no grace, no acceptance, no love for right and justice and peace and hope.  Just a painful trudging through the horrible bleakness of a broken world until finally one day we die and melt away into nothingness.  This is the world of the Golden Compass, this is the Christianity Philip Pullman, this is the world he believes we live in.  I don’t want this to sound like a flat out rejection and denunciation of the books (which as you might guess I just finished) but rather as a rebuttal.

First off, on a literary point, I was frustrated with Pullman because I felt like the first book, The Golden Compass, was far and away superior to the other two books in the trilogy.  I felt like he had a clear focus to the book and it was exciting and daring and then the further into The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass I got the more the books started to loose their focus and sound more and more like propaganda.  Characters randomly popped in and out of the story, what seemed like things that should be major plot points ended up being little more than a paragraph before being passed by, there was no liberating meaning to anything.  It’s as if Pullman decided to turn the phrase, “life sucks, then you die” into a trilogy.  That is one of the things I don’t understand about atheism as a whole however.  It isn’t really an alternative to Christianity.  It is Nihilism.  It is nothingness.  There is no reason to strive for justice and peace and righteousness because in the end nothing matters.  You pass from this world into nothing.  As the character of Mary struggles with in the book, it is freeing but leaves you feeling disconnected.  Even as a political theory Anarchy promotes the idea that when we strip away government and artificial command structures, man will naturally choose what is good and right.  Pullman just says live for the present because there isn’t anything else.  I refuse to accept that premise!  I reject it on the basis that I have inside me a compulsion to be compassionate and seek to help others even when I gain nothing more than the feeling that by doing right I have somehow made the world a better place.  I believe in doing right because I look at the world and see it scared and broken and longing for some meaning to the pain and suffering we see every day and I want to give it some hope.  As long as we are striving to love each other and be good and caring people I think we will make a difference and I feel it is my faith calling me to these things.

I am angry, in a way, with Pullman for not representing all of Christianity.  He only chooses to represent the corrupt and deceitful portions that seek to use guilt and sin as a club with which to batter people into submission to a worldly authority while taking some perverse pleasure in claiming they are saving souls.  I can only imagine when the final day of judgement comes all those who have done wicked deeds in the name of God will look at those they persecuted and weep when they see how their victims exalted all the more in Heaven for their suffering.  I don’t purport to be any kind of saint myself but I can only hope one day when I am judged God will take joy at the times when I strivved to make some kind of difference in the world.  That might be what angers me most with Pullman, the idea there is no ultimate justice.

Not everyone can be a C.S. Lewis or Mother Theresa or Desmond Tutu or Dietrich Bonhoeffer but I don’t think God calls us to be.  I hope though that when non-believers encounter true followers of Jesus their lives are made better for it and they can’t help but ask the reason for their hope.

Filed under: life by Jonathan Assink