F r o m photo by Eric Kelley
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The Glimmer in Pullman's Darkness
here are two different attitudes Christians can have about popular culture, neither of which is entirely healthy. one is to indulge in it—to go to the movies, indulge in hours of tV, stay glued to the ear buds of an iPod, buy all the newest video games—without any real assessment of the messages both these forms and their content are projecting. this is not wise, and far too many Christians today, especially our teenagers, do not seem distinguishable from their more secular peers in their attitudes, values, speech or action largely because buying and trying the newest electronic product on the market is one of their primary goals in life. the other extreme viewpoint toward these forms of entertainment is also dangerous, however. Christians have long had battles over how much to separate from “the world” in order to obey the famous dictum of Jesus to be “in” the world, but not “of ” it (John 17:6-26). the dangers of such withdrawal from the world are many, not least of which is the possibility of failure to obey the command of Jesus to love our neighbor as we should; how can we love our neighbor properly, when we really have nothing in common with him or her? somewhere we must find a balance in our understanding of popular culture and our relation to its forms. While most Christians in America participate in our popular culture, they usually do so with a healthy respect for the power of the electronic media, especially when it comes to their children’s interaction with it, and this is a good thing. Probably because we have a greater understanding than most of our own finiteness, coupled with a deep sense of our fallibility, we know how easily influenced we are toward the bad, the false, and the ugly. We fall short of God’s, and even our own, standards every day, and so we become cautious when confronted with the challenge. sometimes, though, we may miss appreciating the way God shows himself even in the most pernicious representatives of satanic designs in our world. once again, C. s. Lewis said it well. in the early chapters of Mere Christianity, Lewis makes clear that one of the really attractive philosophies, other than Christianity, is dualism, the belief that there are two opposite, but equal forces in the world, Good and evil. dualism is so attractive precisely because it seems so right to us; the Good, when we come to experience it in God is so very good, that anything opposing it seems totally evil and to be avoided at all costs. But Lewis makes clear that dualism in the end is wrong because it puts evil on some sort of equal footing with good, and the scriptures and sound Christian theology have always taught that there is no equal to God and his goodness. he stands alone in all his truth, goodness and beauty, above, and separate from, all his creation. All evil, in fact, is a perversion of the good, and so satan is not an equal combatant of God, but a fallen version of michael or Gabriel. so what does this mean for Christians, as we view
popular culture? more than we can go into here, but one recent phenomenon in the American world of movies illustrates at least one application from which we can benefit. the recent appearance, and dismal box-office failure, of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass has been celebrated by many Christians as a great triumph for the forces of good over the forces of evil in our society. Pullman, once an oxford lecturer of english literature, is the author of a trilogy entitled His Dark Materials, the first of which is The Golden Compass. make no mistake about it, Philip Pullman is an enemy of Christianity. this is not a title we have placed upon him, but one that he has adopted for himself. in a 2003 interview in The Sydney Morning Herald, Pullman stated baldly, “my books are about killing God.” there is no shortage of this sort of attitude in His Dark Materials; as the “good” king ogunwe says near the end of the trilogy, “the Kingdom of heaven has been known by that name since the Authority first set himself above the rest of the angels. And we want no part of it.” Pullman does not reserve his attacks only for some vague notion of Christianity, either; he is often quoted as saying of Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles that they are “one of the most ugly and poisonous things i’ve ever read” and “nauseating drivel.” All this gives us plenty of pause before deciding to read Pullman, so where is the balance in our approach to His Dark Materials? Where is the “true humanity”, the imago dei in his fallenness? i think it is found in his love of story. even though the story of Materials perversely twists the one true story into an anti-Christian paean to the fall, anarchy and evil, it nevertheless reflects a universe in which events are connected and matter, and that is not true of all anti-Christian thinkers today. in his acceptance speech for the Carnegie medal, Britain’s most prestigious prize for children’s literature, Pullman said, “there's more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy”, and there is a great truth in that statement. Pullman’s love of stories even brings out the one glimpse of humility i have found in all my reading of the British author. in a first person description of himself, found on his publisher’s website, Pullman writes, “if you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you’re in danger of thinking that you’re the most important thing. But you’re not. the story is what matters, and you’re only the servant, and your job is to get it out on time and in good order.” And so Philip Pullman — atheist, evangelist for godlessness, “killer of God” — turns out to reflect God’s truth after all, in spite of all his protestations to the contrary. this is the great irony of human culture: no matter how twisted or evil it becomes, it cannot escape living in God’s universe because it has no choice. if we look for them in our culture’s products, we can always find the signs, however faint, of his grace, and give him praise. — drew trotter