Marketing a Kids' Film About Atheism

Someone tell James Dobson he can retire. Hollywood has called off its war on God.

I've been wondering for a while how New Line Cinema would handle the unambiguous anti-religious message of His Dark Materials, the fantasy trilogy whose first installment, The Golden Compass, will be released in December. If Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code could inspire protests and boycott threats from Christian groups, how much moreso books that explicitly tell their youthful readers that it's okay not to believe in God?

Now we have our answer: The studio is caving.

According to The New York Times, "the books' religion-touched heavies were massaged into more generalized, authoritarian villains" in the adaptation of The Golden Compass, while Kidman, who is Catholic, insists she wouldn't participate in a movie that was anti-Church.

I discovered His Dark Materials a few years ago, after a mention of the series in The New Yorker. The books may not be anti-Catholic per se -- they are largely set in a parallel universe where Calvinist doctrine is ascendant -- but they are as anti-religion as you can get. The heroes include a pair of gay angels, a band of witches, and a lapsed nun who traded her vows for a life of sex and science; among the villains is a zealous priest who doubles as an assassin. A successful resolution of the plot requires God to be euthanized and an adolescent girl to give into sexual temptation.

They're pretty great books.

But New Line has evidently chosen to duck the controversy rather than embrace it. Why? I'm guessing the marketing folks have been thinking a lot about The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, which has earned three quarters of a billion dollars worldwide, a tally that was widely credited, correctly or not, to the enthusiastic embrace of evangelicals.

But Materials is no Narnia. The books' theology (atheology?) is integral to their appeal; without it, they're just stories about talking bears and a plucky street urchin. And it's not as though controversy doesn't also sell tickets. Just look at The Da Vinci code which managed a similar worldwide take despite terrible reviews. Shouldn't a tie go to the author?