|
The Golden CompassA film called The Golden Compass falls within the genre of children’s fantasy. The movie is based upon the award-winning trilogy of novels, His Dark Materials, by Phillip Pulman. Pulman is a militant atheist who is said to despise C.S. Lewis and the famous Chronicles of Narnia. His motivation in writing his books was specifically to counteract the Christian influence of Lewis’s work on children. In 2003 Pulman gave an interview in which he said that ‘my books are about killing God’. Christian parents will have to decide how best to respond to this movie in their children’s best interest. The three options are: a) to ban your children from seeing it — but some would say this would run the risk of creating a mystique about the film as the ‘great forbidden’; b) to let your children decide for themselves whether or not they want to see it and make no comment; or c) to watch the movie with them and then talk through the issues raised. Most children are going to see this kind of stuff somewhere and sometime anyway, so it is better if the parent is the person who explains it and talks through the real message behind the story, and what the Bible would have to say about its ideas. © Evangelicals Now - December 2007 |