The Golden Compass
Someone just invited me to join a Facebook cause: “don’t support this [atheistic] film, which intends to dissuade our children from belief in God.”
I have two reactions… and then some other thoughts about atheism and culture.
I am not a stauch determinist. Rather than protecting my children from the world, I want them to know how to be a follower of Jesus within the world. Yesterday the neighbor kid (another four year old) said to my son while playing Pokemon, “What the hell is going on?” You know what goes through your mind, right? “I don’t want my kid learning this from other kids, etc.” (My son didn’t hear him since he was so engrossed with Charmeleon.) So after I thought hard for about ten seconds I said, “What did you say?” “What?” he said. “What did you just say?” he didn’t answer but looked sheepish. My son will have to learn who he wants to become. I have a primary role in that shaping. My job is to provide commentary on life, mentor and guide. But I can’t protect him for the garden variety cuss words the neighbor kids teach him. Even now, my kids utter “Ohmygod” instead of “Ohmygosh” like they’re supposed to (which is not even close to Ohmygod). I try and correct them without freaking out and either sounding like a fundamentalist or a theologian (which is dang hard since I can legitmately lay claim to both if need be). Moreover, I am worried that I might turn my children into religious people. You know religious people, right? All about morality, not about spirituality. Religious people do everything right and nothing else. They strain the gnat and swallow the camel. If I want to create one of these religious people then all I need do is freak out, react, and discipline my children (and others) into a set of behaviors. Yes, I will protect my kids from abusers, drunkards, pedophiles, and the like - and I will freak out when necessary. But protecting my kid from beer ads during football, car ads during football, football during football - I shouldn’t do. But I can point out the ploys of how advertising works, how car ads sell image instead of product, and how affluent shallow Americans are so numb we can only get a buzz out of violence and sex… how we don’t talk anymore, we just entertain each other.
Here’s my other reaction: when did the Jesus movement start dancing to the secular media’s tune? This is power politics. This is trying to win a popularity contest - on secular terms. This is distraction. I don’t like it when Christians think we have to WIN at politics using the power-hungry, self-seeking, broken political machinery in place. Don’t get me wrong: I think the gospel is extremely political. Jesus was crucified because Pilate had to make sure he didn’t let “a king” go free. “Are you king of the Jews?” The Pharisees: “We have no king but Caesar.” The sign over Jesus’ head on the cross: “the king of the Jews.” But Jesus didn’t gather an army and go to battle against Rome. William Wilberforce, Martin Luther King Jr, Desmond Tutu all were political. But their politics are qualitatively different than Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Kansas Board of Education. Why? (Discuss it amongst yourselves.) The last Pope, John Paul, dealt with NONE of the media’s “hot issues” that they demanded of him: women’s ordination, gays in the priesthood, pedophilia, celibacy, etc. But he helped bring down communism. He refused to shake hands with bloody revolutionaries (take that Che!). Yet John Paul was immensely popular with young Catholics. He revitalized the Catholic church around the globe. He made Catholicism, spirituality and “political change” attractive to a new generation. He brilliantly called his own tune.
This Golden Compass film - and I don’t know anything about it but I can’t imagine it worse than all the other “banned-by-Christians” movies during my lifetime - will come and go. I don’t know if it’s a Disney animated thing or what — but I won’t take my kids to it. Why? We just don’t need to go. And I won’t protest it. I will continue to desire my children to shine like stars in heaven. And any temporary fireworks The Golden Compass may shoot off to obscure my child’s steady ever-present starlight will fade. I refuse to dance to either the secular media’s tune, or the reaction of Christian determinists’ countertune (it is still the same tune to me - if you get my drift.)
How telling, how revealing, how ironic that this rally cry comes across the Facebook medium! “The medium is the message.” The idea is to get a “flash point” reaction out of this “powerful” social network. The ultimate “win” is that American culture would as a popular whole condemn this terrible film and undercutting our progressive future, our children’s sense of identity and beliefs. Not bad. But I don’t know if our children shouldn’t decide who they are (identity in Christ & “imago Dei”) before they decided “what we believe.”
Okay, other thoughts: Atheism. Let’s just cut to the quick — so they “win.” What? We Christians all get rounded up into a ghetto and made to wear yellow ichthus fish? ‘Bout time! Nothing would blow away the chaff better. …… I’m kind of kidding - kinda. But I do like yellow. It’s the color of real love. Atheism can’t win because it is based on the false assumption of deconstruction - the human story cannot stand a void (insert evolution here just as easily as religion; if this doesn’t suit you, then just insert “the myth of progress”).
I betcha The Golden Compass is based on the myth of human progress; I betcha it’s based on modernism, with an extra helping of post-Enlightenment rationalism. Remember Michel Foucault: “All claims to truth are a bid for power.” Nobody’s listening to The Golden Compass just as they are not listening to Christians who think they can dance to the world’s power-tunes (insert Christian film, music, books, concerts, celebrities, etc).
In the meantime we’d do well to draw very close to Jesus - to richly live out our story in god through Jesus’ revelation… to change the world quietly, subversively, apocalypically, sacrificially - to be Jesus to our world. Pray - not for rescue, but listen for the heartbeat of the Father, to synch up and move as one with the Holy Spirit. I am convinced that is the kingdom of god Jesus spoke of and nothing will stand against it (tho we die). Here, you want to keep you kid from being an atheist? Then walk in the woods with them and instead of just pointing out the wonder of the ”art” discuss the Artist. Wash their world with god (and yes, I intentionally lowercase god these days).
EVEN if God is not great, even if God is a delusion — our myth is better than their myth, because Jesus wins every time. How? Discuss amongst yourselves. Or reply back here.