"Every Church Is the Same: Control, Destroy, Obliterate Every Good Feeling": Philip Pullman and the Challenge of Religious Intolerance‪.‬

No children's books since C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia have combined popular success and religious advocacy as effectively as Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (1995-2000). But quite unlike the Christian-inspired Chronicles, Pullman's fantasy series is unreservedly hostile towards organized religion. How many children's books, after all, kill off God? Or include a statement like this one: "The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake ..." (Amber Spyglass 441)? And no other religion gets Pullman's approval, either: "Every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.... For all its history [religion] has tried to suppress and control every natural impulse" (Subtle Knife 50). The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass are, as one writer put it, "rip-roaringly unputdownable" (Ross). Over twelve million copies have been sold worldwide (Cieply), and in 2001, The Amber Spyglass won the Whitbread Prize for book of the year--a first for a children's book. In these three books, Pullman sets out to replace the great mythic stories of Christianity, rejecting the power and authority of the divine in favor of the intellectual potential and moral responsibility of humans. Natasha Walter finds that Pullman "fulfills an often unassuaged longing in this secular age" through his depiction of "a great battle between good and evil ... where everything is at stake, where you have to take sides" (Walter).