The Golden Compass Has no Moral Compass

CFP: The Golden Compass Has no Moral Compass

The Golden Compass was created with the benefit of a multimillion dollar budget and big name actors such as Nicole Kidman, Kevin Bacon and Sam Elliot. It opens December 7, and promises to be action-packed and visually stunning in the epic tradition of Narnia or The Lord of the Rings.

But upon closer review, it becomes abundantly clear that both this movie and the man behind it have a very certain anti-Christian axe to grind.

Based on the first of three secular humanist children’s books by avowed atheist and British author Phillip Pullman, The Golden Compass provides the opening “down with God” salvo in the author’s His Dark Materials trilogy.

Pullman leaves little question as to his books’ central theme. “I don’t profess any religion,” he is quoted as saying. “I don’t think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty understanding what is meant by the words ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality.’”

Ironically, Pullman’s confident pronouncement that there is no God appears to take an exclusive backseat to his hatred for the very God he denies. “My books are about killing God,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald in a 2003 interview. And in the trilogy’s final offering, The Amber Spyglass, he does just that--he knocks off the Almighty in a delusional fit of grandeur.

Pullman’s books drip with moral relativism, that deceptively sweet, yet fruitless nectar of the secular humanist. His portrayal of God--which is clearly intended to personify the Christian church--is that of an evil authoritarian who spitefully stifles human creativity, arbitrarily punishing mankind for very naturally and properly entertaining base impulses with unfettered license.

“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 never had been a God at all.”

And isn’t that what atheism is all about, really? Our fallen desire to have, “no one to punish [us] for being wicked.” If we can convince ourselves that there is no God, then we escape accountability for what we do, or so we believe. It’s not so much a-theism as it is anti-theism. In fact, atheism is every bit a religion as any other. But in the church of the non-believer, the high priest is cloaked beneath the vestment of pseudo-"science" and parishioners worship at the altar of moral anarchy.

Still, like so much else in our culture, Pullman’s aversion to God would appear to boil down to sex. Mary Malone explains that her desire for sex was her primary purpose for abandoning the God in Whom she no longer believes. “And I thought: am I really going to spend the rest of my life without ever feeling that again? ... And I took the crucifix from around my neck and I threw it in the sea. That was it. All over. Gone. ... So, that was how I stopped being a nun,” she recounts.

Psalm 14:1 tells us, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good.”

With The Golden Compass, Phillip Pullman shares his heart with us--a heart that says, “There is no God.” And he clearly wants to influence your child’s heart as well. This movie’s creation--or chance materialization, take your pick--has a specific agenda. It is clearly targeted toward unsuspecting children with the furtive goal of enlisting the next generation of “fools.”

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