Last night, I caught a few minutes of Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone on ABC Family (background noise while I was eating dinner - my other options were Sex and the City or How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days). During the transition to commercial, Mr. Announcer pronounced that Harry Potter was part of their special “25 Days of Christmas” programming, brought to us by New Line Cinema’s The Golden Compass.

There’s something quite hilarious and more than a little contradictory about that. ABC Family is touting the fact that Harry Potter (a movie and book series quite heavily criticized by religious groups) is part of their Christmas programming. That heathen, Harry, is sponsored by The Golden Compass, which right now is garnering all kinds of attention because The Catholic League and Focus on the Family (among others) are calling for a boycott of the movie for its anti-religious basis.

For those who aren’t familiar with the books or the movie, here’s some basic info. Philip Pullman wrote a trilogy of childrens’ books (not young children - young adult/intermediate fiction is more appropriate) collectively entitled, His Dark Materials. That title comes from Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, about the Fall (of Adam and Eve, and the rebellion of the angels led by Satan). The specific quote is:

Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look’d a while,
Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith
He had to cross.

The books in the trilogy are The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, and they center around a pre-teen orphan girl named Lyra who is living and attending a boarding school in a sort of alternate universe Oxford. The college is run by a religious order known as the Magisterium - they’re quickly revealed to be corrupt and working on an evil project based in some crazy fundamentalist-like beliefs. I don’t want to belabor with details but, essentially, it turns out that our heroine is a child born out of wedlock (gasp!) and the evil agenda involves separating children from their souls (which are corporeal in this universe and take on animal forms) before they reach puberty.

Hanna Rosin, in The Atlantic Monthly, wrote a great piece about the movie called, “How Hollywood Saved God.” The full article is available only to subscribers (hi!) but here are some of the more interesting segments. Rosin interviewed Philip Pullman and spoke to him about how the studio has sterilized the movie and removed basically all the edgy religious elements:

In discussing the film, he chose his words carefully, acknowledging that his role now is to be “sensible” so that the next two films get made. Nonetheless, he was honest about what was missing: “They do know where to put the theology,” he said, “and that’s off the film.”

Long silence. Then, “I think if everything that is made explicit in the book or everything that is implied clearly in the book or everything that can be understood by a close reading of the book were present in the film, they’d have the biggest hit they’ve ever had in their lives. If they allowed the religious meaning of the book to be fully explicit, it would be a huge hit. Suddenly, they’d have letters of appreciation from people who felt this but never dared say it. They would be the heroes of liberal thought, of freedom of thought … And it would be the greatest pity if that didn’t happen.

I didn’t put that very well. What I mean is that I want this film to succeed in every possible way. And what I don’t want to do, you see, is talk the other two films out of existence. So I’ll stop there.”

Then later:

When pressed, Pullman grants that he’s not really trying to kill God, but rather the outdated idea of God as an old guy with a beard in the sky… The Narnia series, in his view, embraces a worldview that comes close to “life-hating ideology”—punishing, misogynistic, racist, and death-obsessed. By contrast, his own books are filled with a kind of warmth, an exuberance for finding utopia in this life. When he loses patience with his Christian critics, he lists the values he promotes in his own stories: tolerance, love, kindness, courage, duty, individual freedom over blind obedience.

He also talks about how his books celebrate sexual awakening - and not preteens having sex, but teenagers awakening to the knowledge of their bodies and sexuality… much like Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge.

The San Francisco Chronicle published a piece on Friday, by Mark Morford, about the religious groups’ boycotts of the movie -”Jesus loves ‘His Dark Materials’: Shrill Bible-thumpers boycott ‘The Golden Compass’; world’s children grin devilishly.”

Pullman’s luminous novels have nothing to do with rejecting faith or destroying the spirit or inhibiting the exploration of what it means to be divine. They are, in fact, the exact opposite. They relish spirit and the magic of belief and love, are soaked through with divine inspiration of a kind any intelligent Christian (or honest spiritual seeker of any stripe, for that matter) should crave the way Lindsay Lohan craves cocaine. This is what makes them so incredible.

No, the nefarious thing the books aim to kill is, well, religious authority. It’s about the destruction of dogma. It’s about power, about who wants to control and manipulate life on Earth; it is about blind, ignorant, even violent adherence to insidiously narrow codes of thought and belief and behavior, sex and desire and love.

This, of course, is the God of organized religion. This is the false deity that promotes numb groupthink and inhibits growth and abhors the feminine divine (perhaps the books’ most beautiful, inspiring theme), the same paranoid, dreadful God that votes for George W. Bush because, well, he will smite the icky gays and protect us from vile pagans and Buddhists and Muslims and feminists and frumpy genius atheist British writers.

He goes on in much of the same vein. I’ll be seeing the movie; the books are good. The previews look good. Daniel Craig looks good. There are murder plots, trepanned heads in jars, a battle royale, armor-wearing polar bears, and there will have to be lots of wicked cool special effects. So we’ll see.