Atheism for Kids?

Whether it’s evangelical Christians banning their children from reading Harry Potter’s magical adventures or extremist Muslims burning Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses,” religious fanatics the world over are hostile toward books that go against their holy books.\nReligious intolerance to literature is positively medieval, yet quite common today. So pardon me while I invoke the inflammatory, anti-religious fanatic Christopher Hitchens: Religion ruins everything; especially children’s fantasy series.\nThis time around, it’s the Catholic League v. “His Dark Materials” series.\nNormally Catholics tend not to jump on the culture-warrior bandwagon. We tend to leave that to the censorship-loving, Bible-thumping Protestants. \nBut of course, most crazy Protestant antics barely hold a candle to the historical record of the Catholic Church. Catholicism is in many ways the Original Gangster of religious censorship, or at least religiously-motivated folly. The Church is one of the most powerful institutions ever. Just like a nation or an empire, the Church has waged wars, owned land, carried out mass killings, built monuments to itself, experienced power struggles between ruling parties and more.\nPhilip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass, the first installment of the “His Dark Materials” trilogy, sees the Church as a powerful state-like institution. His books take place during a pseudo-dark age in a world similar to, but not quite Earth, in which the Church is a looming authoritarian presence. “The Magisterium,” as the Church is called, persecutes heretics, controls the academy and is in the middle of enacting an Inquisition-meets-eugenics campaign on little kids.\nIndeed, Pullman’s books are anti-Church. More importantly, they are anti-dogma, and that is different from being pro-atheist or anti-Christian. But never mind those niceties. According to the head of the Catholic League, Bill Donohue, Philip Pullman’s books “promote atheism and\ndenigrate Christianity” and “sell atheism to kids.” The organization has called for Catholics to boycott the film version, which was released last month. \nThe Catholic League calls the book bigoted, implies that any supporter of Pullman is a “Christian-hater” and declares that Pullman’s agenda is to do no less than to “seduce (children) into embracing atheism and rejecting Christianity.” In step with the Catholic League, Catholic parishes in my hometown of South Bend, Ind., have sent letters to parishioners denouncing the ‘agenda’ of Pullman’s books and warning against seeing the film. \nI would not be saying anything groundbreaking if I were to explain that religious censors rarely understand the nature of what they are censoring, banning, boycotting or burning. Nothing says “Dark Ages” like tossing books (or humans) into a heaping pyre of religious fervor.\nWhen it comes down to it, the Catholic Church is upset that they have been again confronted with their own bloody, corrupt and bigoted history. Pullman and others are correct to warn about the dangers of orthodoxy from powerful institutions. The Church, unfortunately, only proves Pullman right when it, in the form of American parishes and the Catholic League, forbids any knowledge of ideas that contradict the Church’s authority. What is even more frightening, condemnation of Pullman’s books forbids any meaningful examination of the history of the Catholic Church as an institution.\nIf the Catholic Church ignores its past or glosses over the ugly parts, it has already become, like the god of Philip Pullman’s trilogy, irrelevant and dead.