Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, or A Secular Humanist's Primer

A good friend of mine recently loaned me her copies of Philip Pullman’s bestselling His Dark Materials trilogy: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. This is someone whose taste I respect, so when she raved and gleefully handed me the stack of books, I was interested. I had no idea I was about to read the most pointedly anti-Christian work I’ve ever come across. I don’t recommend reading these books. In fact, I recommend not reading them, and by extension, not seeing the upcoming film version of The Golden Compass. Most of what follows would have to be considered spoilers, but I wish someone had spoiled these books for me before I started them. In truth, I only finished them so that afterward I’d be able to say what they are without someone complaining that I hadn’t really read them.

Although there are three books, there is only one long story. Ostensibly, it is a young readers’ fantasy in which characters move in and out of many parallel worlds, all variations of Earth—some more “varied” than others. The heroes are Lyra (a child of a parallel Earth) and Will (a child from our world), both on the verge of leaving childhood and becoming young adults. In Lyra's world, every human is spiritually attached to a daemon--often described as that person's soul--which shifts into various animal forms until adulthood when it takes a permanent form. A daemon speaks almost exclusively to its human and is not to ever be touched by another human.

Initially, it seems the villain is Mrs. Coulter, who is abducting and torturing children with the sanction of the Catholic church in Lyra's world in an effort to keep them from becoming sinful adults. Part of this process involves severing the connection between human and daemon, which usually results in the death of the child. Lyra and her friend, Roger, narrowly escape this fate and seek sanctuary with Lord Asriel.

At this point, it seems Asriel is the villain. He murders Roger, severing the boy from his daemon as part of a successful experiment designed to open a gateway to other worlds. This is part of Asriel's long term plan to gather an army from the many worlds so he can go to war against God. At the end of the first book, Lyra vows to hunt down and kill Asriel to avenge Roger, but that goal is quickly forgotten in the second book and not at all addressed by the third. (This loose end is not anti-Christian. It is merely bad writing.)

Instead, Lyra teams up with Will to help find his long lost father, John. They acquire the magical knife of the second book’s title and use it to cut windows from world to world. Along the way, Will is befriended by Balthamos, an angel who wants Will to join Lord Asriel and use the knife to kill God. Balthamos and other angels are described as weak and jealous of humans' physical form. Eventually, the group finds John, but he is killed almost as soon as he is found. He lives just long enough to confirm Balthamos's claim that Lord Asriel is right, God is a tyrant, and the knife must be used to kill God once and for all.

Lyra and Will are skeptical of this and choose to venture into the world of the dead so Will can learn more from his father and so that Lyra can apologize to Roger for having led him to his death. (She seems to have forgiven or forgotten Asriel’s responsibility and now blames herself. This, also, is not anti-Christian, just bad writing.) In the world of the dead, the children discover that all thinking creatures are condemned by God to eternal psychological torture in the form of whispers of guilt and slander. Eventually, they cut a window out of the world of the dead, freeing the ghosts to blissfully dissipate into nothing.

Lyra and Will finally make their way to the site of the battle between Asriel's forces and God's. Here, the real villains of the story are confirmed to be God and His heir-apparent, Metatron. Both Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel become fellow heroes with Lyra and Will when they sacrifice themselves to kill Metatron. God, Himself, dies in Lyra’s arms, too old and frail to hold His own existence together. Thus, the heinous and tyrannical Kingdom of Heaven is destroyed.

Meanwhile, Will has discovered he too has a daemon, and Will and Lyra have fallen in love. In their overwhelming passion for each other, they forget the taboo and touch each other's daemons. At this moment, "having felt a lover's hands," the daemons take their permanent shape, signaling Lyra and Will are now adults. Unfortunately, the two must be forever separated as they attempt to build the "Republic of Heaven" in their home worlds.

It doesn’t take a very close reading to discern this trilogy is not a story for the story’s sake, but Pullman’s attempt at a secular humanist's primer. He works very hard to teach children that:

1. God, if there is one, is your enemy.
2. Morality is relative.
3. The physical is superior to the spiritual.
4. Romantic love is the foundation of maturity.

I don't believe in church-sponsored boycotts, but I do believe in individuals choosing not to subject themselves and their children to material which is clearly designed to propagate the falsehoods listed above. I hope the word about this gets out before the release of the film so parents can make informed decisions.