An Organized Rant

Every so often, well-meaning members of my faith begin forwarding well-meaning emails about some new perilous threat (usually in entertainment) to our moral standards, and sometimes even life as we know it.

Last year I got the same email forwarded to me from 4 or 5 different people urging me not to see the movie The Golden Compass.  Far as I could tell, the movie was accused of being a disguised attempt at selling atheism to small children.  Um…okay.

I tried reading Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass once upon a time.  I stopped, not because I found the material offensive to my Christian sensibilities, but because the book was BORING AS ALL GET-OUT.  Talk about convoluted, yikes!

But now the movie is out on DVD, and I was looking for something to watch the other night.  With ghosts of emails past whispering in the back of my head, I rented the movie.

And I loved it!

The actress who plays the main character, Lyra, is AMAZING.  What an immense talent.  And Lyra is intelligent, courageous, loyal, and adventurous.  Nothing can stop this dynamo.  She meets many friends and enemies along the way, and I thought everyone was so interesting and complex.  I loved Sam Elliot as the sky cowboy.  I loved the witch queen.  I absolutely LOVED the armored bear Lyra befriends (voiced by Patrick Stewart, I believe).  Visually, it was stunning.  The costumes were wonderful.  I thought it was well-acted, beautifully filmed, and provided an exciting character for my daughters to meet.

The religious elements?  Ok, I’m not a total dunce, but most of it went WAAAAAY over my head.  Much of the deeper storyline is hard to understand, and I really don’t think most kids will see any connection at all to what is being said in the movie and what they experience in real life at church on Sunday.  I “get” that the Magisterium – who are the bad guys in the movie – supposedly represent the Catholic church.  Did it negatively color my feelings about the Catholic church?  No.  Did my kids even “get” the reference?  Not a bit.  One of the plot points is also that there are other worlds, existing in parallel dimensions, and that while in ours we have souls that dwell in our bodies, in the world of The Golden Compass, their souls dwell in animal familiars (spelled daemons, pronounced demons).  I think there was also some church opposition to these aspects of the story, but I still don’t really see why.  It’s just a story!

I watched carefully and did try to see where the “attacks on Christianity” were coming from, but all I saw was a pretty enjoyable movie.  Nothing to shake my faith.  Nothing to raise my hackles.

But I will tell you what raises my hackles.

Last year I went into a little tirade about why I didn’t think the movie Hairspray should have been touted as a family film.  I find REAL LIFE, ACTUALLY POSSIBLE immorality to be more offensive than the stuff of fantasy movies.  Do kids really think they can cast spells like in Harry Potter?  Do kids really think they’re going to ride on the back of a great ice bear king like in The Golden Compass?  NO!  But could they some day be pressured to make choices that put their standards to the test.  I think too often we’re willing to look past all the silly real-life stuff (like the overwhelming amount of sexual innuendo in Hairspray) and attack things that really do cause us to think and might confuse and scare us (like the writing of Pullman, an author who admits to being an atheist).

My husband would not watch The Golden Compass with me, and I think in part it was because he felt that doing so would go against some unwritten church sanction.  That frustrates me.  I don’t like when members of an organized religion take on something CULTURAL and whip it into something that smacks of DOCTRINE.  The two need to be carefully kept separate!

So, if you are a well-meaning friend, and you have a well-meaning email you would like to forward to me, don’t bother.  I will probably delete it without reading it.  If you’d like to TALK to me about YOUR own reservations, and if we can share personal opinions about things relating to the gospel, then give me a call.  I’d much rather hear an individual’s personal perspective than be swept up into some sheep mentality on a new pop culture crisis.

You might also enjoy these related posts from Tree, Root, and Twig:

1. “I Told You Them Chickens Was Organized”*
2. Book Review: Pretty Neat: Get Organized and Let Go of Perfection, by Alicia Rockmore and Sarah Welch

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