This Friday, The Golden Compass, a new film based on a series of fantasy novels by British author Philip Pullman, will hit theatres nationwide.
It's no different than previous popular movies based on fantasy novels such as the excellent Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia.
But unfortunately for The Golden Compass, its author is a well-known, outspoken atheist and the series of novels has been described as "anti-Christian" and even "anti-God."
As a result, many Christian groups are calling for film boycotts (a la The Da Vinci Code). Amongst those groups expressing concern are Focus on the Family and the Catholic League.
Sadly, this Fear of the New is nothing new for evangelicals or our Catholic brothers and sisters. It's quite common for us to view anything that doesn't fit in our safe, conservative Christian box as foreign and dangerous.
And I don't get it.
After all, the books aren't targeting Christian theism so much as they are targeting oppressive religious authority. And that's something Christians should condemn just as vehemently as any non-religious person.
Pullman put it this way in a recent interview: "Religion is at its best when it's far from power, when a religion gains power, it goes bad."
In light of the many recent scandals involving abuse of power amongst evangelical leaders, one would expect evangelicals to see Pullman's point and agree with it, to some extent at least.
Surely the lesson of sex scandals involving Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Ted Haggard, as well as the financial scandals of Oral Roberts and Kent Hovind teach us that, at the very least, religious authority is frequently abused.
Yet the protests of The Golden Compass continue to come from Focus on the Family and the Catholic League.
It's as if some evangelical and Catholic groups have come to the conclusion that the only way to retain members and grow is by wielding an oppressive, authoritarian religious power that is defined primarily by what it is against (namely homosexuality, atheism, evolution, and anything else that threatens a religious conservative agenda).
The greatest tragedy of this attitude is two-fold. First, that well-intentioned groups like those mentioned above end up destroying any shred of credibility they had in the general culture. Focus on the Family represents the opinion of a significant number of evangelicals and those evangelicals do a number of great things. The People's City Mission is run by evangelicals, Samaritan's Purse, a philanthropic organization doing great things in third-world countries, is also run by evangelicals.
Likewise, there have been many wonderful Catholics who have done tremendous humanitarian work, Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II are two that come to mind. One of the things I most admire about Catholics is their interest in social welfare. The current pope, Benedict XVI, even made that the topic of his first encyclical upon becoming pope.
The world is a better place because of those people and it is their religious belief that motivates their social action.
But because of their over-the-top, simplistic response to cultural issues like film, politics and music, many evangelicals and Catholics have lost their ability to speak meaningfully to anyone outside their fold. This creates a discord in public dialogue that is regrettable and should not exist.
Second, these groups resort to methodology that Jesus himself explicitly condemns in the gospels. The group that received the harshest, most devastating criticisms from Jesus (and again later in the epistles of the apostle Paul) were the religious people that attempted to use religion as a means of condemning, judging and oppressing the non-religious and the not-religious-enough.
The reason for the withering criticism in the gospels is simple: The scriptures really do teach us how to live in the best possible way. They teach us that it is better to serve than to be served, that generosity is better than stinginess, that love is better than hate, that honesty is better than deception, that affirmation and acceptance is better than rejection or exclusion, and countless other valuable things that guide us as human beings who are attempting to live a full, complete and satisfying life.
And when people use Christianity as a means to oppress - something that has tragically happened far too often in the past 2000 years - Christianity ends up becoming the thing it was meant to destroy. Rather than liberating people from their own self-centeredness, it enslaves them to meaningless standards that create judgmental, arrogant and secretly miserable, religious people.
The Christian story as described by Jesus is a profoundly beautiful story of freedom that is inviting, mysterious and ultimately fulfilling.
But as can be seen by the sheer volume of Golden Compass protesters, far too many Christians reject this story for one of religious authoritarianism. It is that sort of oppressive religiosity that led to the writing of Philip Pullman's novels. And Pullman is not alone in his scathing critique.
Jesus is on his side too.
Jake Meador is a sophomore English and history major. Reach him at jakemeador@dailynebraskan.com.
