The Pelvic Atheism of Philip Pullman
Posted Dec 17th 2007 8:14AM by Dinesh D'SouzaFiled under: Pop Culture, Christianity, Controversy, Atheism
Just in time for Christmas, Hollywood has released The Golden Compass, a film based on the first book of a trilogy of children's novels written by atheist Philip Pullman. Pullman is not a fan of his fellow childrens' writers J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis. He denounced the Lord of the Rings trilogy as "infantile" and absolutely hated the Chronicles of Narnia, calling it "morally loathsome" and "one of the most ugly and poisonous things I've ever read."
This is downright weird.
One may find the Narnia stories simplistic or windy or whatever but it takes a particularly demented mind to see them as loathsome and ugly and poisonous. Tolkien's work is pure genius and the film adaptations of Lord of the Rings have been widely acclaimed. So what is Pullman's problem? Basically his objection comes down to the fact that Tolkien and Lewis were Christians and their work embodies powerful Christian allegories of good and evil, sin and redemption.
Some critics have objected to the overdrawn contrast between the forces of light and the forces of darkness in Christian fiction, but Pullman's trilogy is no less Manichean. The only difference is that in Pullman's world the evil regime is run by God Himself. Pullman pictures a kind of Calvinist moral structure, run by a kind of Catholic network called the Magisterium, and behind the whole oppressive system is a tyrannical God. As Pullman envisions it, the church kidnaps and tortures children and subjects them to hideous experiments in which their bodies are separated fro their souls and the children are turned into zombies who are then left to die. Pullman's trilogy finally ends with God being killed, the collapse of the Calvinist moral rules, and the emergence of sexual freedom.
Profoundly stupid stuff. I was not surprised to discover that Pullman is a big fan of atheist Richard Dawkins. Pullman speaks of religion in terms that could be lifted directly from The God Delusion. Pullman has been quoted saying it is not even possible for God to exist. "Every single religion," he says, "that has a monotheistic God ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him." Actually this is flatly untrue of Judaism and Hindusim and only in a very qualified sense true of Islam and Christianity. It would be more accurate to say that every atheist regime, from Communism to the Nazi regime in Germany, has systematically persecuted and killed its opponents for practicing traditional religion and for not accepting their secular race and class-based ideologies.
Certainly Pullman knows that there is nothing oppressive or murderous in today's Anglicanism. He is free in his native London to believe or not to believe. What is it then about religion that he's so strongly opposed to? For Pullman, as for many atheists, the problem with Christianity seems mostly to focus on sexual freedom. Reviewing Pullman's work in The Atlantic Monthly, Hanna Rosin writes, "The most curious aspect of Pullman's theology is the primacy he places on teen sexuality...the whole series builds up to a celebration of losing your virginity." So here is Pullman's case against religion. Basically, religion is what asks you to pull your pants up. This may be termed Pelvic Atheism.
True to form, Hollywood has stripped Pullman's movie of its overt anti-religiosity. The evil guys in the Hollywood version are not God's minions but a kind of amorphous Nazi-type dictatorship. Pullman can take solace, however, in the fact that the movie will probably lead a lot of people to read his books. Aren't we fortunate to have an atheist children's novelist whose main objective seems to be to corrupt the minds and morals of the young?
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