The Golden Compass- Part 3 (Contains Spoilers)

As promised, here are my thoughts on the His Dark Materials series now that I have read all three books. I guess the best way to go about this is to address the individual cries of outrage that I encountered before reading the books.

The author says these books are about killing God! Well… in my opinion, that is not really what the books are about. I understand that the author himself stated that his books are “about killing God.” And perhaps that is what he meant for them to be about. But as I stated in my previous post, the way he portrays “God” is so fundamentally unlike the Christian God that, in my opinion, it is truly not a parallel at all. The “God” character in the books is really not the creator, he’s an angel who duped all the other angels into thinking he created them and everything else, he gave control of heaven over to another angel years ago, and he’s old, feeble, powerless, frightened, and relieved to be put out of his misery. That description is so far removed from the God I have a relationship with that I just cannot agree with the statement that these books are about killing God.

Children are killing God! Hmm… again, I am going to have to disagree. If you refer back to my last post, you will see that while Will’s knife was the only thing that could defeat the Authority, he was never aware of that fact. It is not as though he set out to use it against “God” with malicious intentions. As a matter of fact, if you look back at my last post, you will see that Will and Lyra actually meant no harm whatsoever— they didn’t know that the angel in the cage was the Authority, and they felt sorry for this angel and wanted to help him, which is why they opened the cage. This is a far cry from what the alarmist emails would have you believe—that children were purposefully, maliciously setting out to kill God. I am happy to inform you that this was not the case.

The Church is portrayed as the bad guy! Well, in this story, they were pretty rotten. The Magisterium was not full of love, mercy, and grace. However, this fictional representation of the Christian church was also following a non-God (as has been discussed above) and their legalism and fear and desire to make the human race free from sin (by figuring out how to separate people from their daemons) suggests that they had no hope of redemption through Christ, or at least no real understanding of redemption. Then again, if “God” wasn’t really God, the whole death and resurrection of Christ really would have no eternal implications anyway. And that makes me wonder—if we had no possibility of a relationship with God because of our sinfulness, and no hope of redemption through Christ, wouldn’t it just be a matter of time before someone came up with the bright idea to try to separate our souls from our bodies to avoid the effect of original sin? While the Magisterium in the story was certainly terrible and corrupt, I can understand what would drive them to be that way.

These books promote atheism! This one is true. This is encountered heavily in the last few chapters when the children have a discussion with Mary Malone (the character who represented the serpent). She was once a nun but became an atheist and she explains why—she says that she saw that there wasn’t really a God at all (and in the context of this story, isn’t that actually true?), and that the Christian religion is a “powerful and convincing mistake.” She had once wanted to serve God with her whole heart. But while she was still a nun, she decided that she wanted to experience relationships with men, she wanted to do things that were “off-limits,” and she asked herself if it would make any difference to say her prayers and confess to the priest and promise never to fall into temptation again. She concluded that it wouldn’t: “There’s no one to fret, no one to condemn, no one to bless me for being a good girl, no one to punish me for being wicked. Heaven was empty. I didn’t know whether God had died, or whether there had never been a God at all. Either way I felt free and lonely and I didn’t know whether I was happy or unhappy, but something very strange had happened.” While she still believed in good and evil, she thought of them as names for what people do rather than believing in powers of good and evil that are outside us.

The religious institution in this series, the Magisterium, was corrupt, hypocritical, legalistic, judgemental, and oppressive. While some characters' hatred of the Magisterium could potentially be described as promoting atheism, it appears to me that hatred would be a natural and acceptable reaction to such a corrupt institution. But there are real-world parallels here: When Christians behave in ways that are corrupt, hypocritical, legalistic, judgemental, and oppressive, people notice. And many times it doesn't just turn them against Christians; many times they end up rejecting the God that Christians claim to serve as well. In the story, the actions of the Magisterium turned people against both the religious institution and "God;" in the real world the way Christians act can often turn people away from God too.

The story itself was actually quite good, and I enjoyed it. But the last several chapters just didn’t measure up. The series was going along at a good pace, it was very entertaining, the plot was fantastic, and then it just sort of… fizzled. Suddenly “God” was dead and “heaven” was overthrown. So then what? As much as I enjoyed the majority of the series, the ending was rather unspectacular.

I understand that there are people who do not want to read the books; my advice is to go with your gut. If you're comfortable with reading them and interested in reading them, go ahead. And if you're uncomfortable with reading them, then don't do it. If your children are reading them, I would definitely recommend that you read along too and discuss the themes (especially atheism) with your kids, talk about how the “God” in the story is nothing like the real God, and how the church in the story really had no hope of redemption. It is actually a very good exercise in reaffirming what we believe as Christians.