Philip Pullman's Not Really an Atheist!

I will admit to not finding a direct statement of atheism when I recently read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. At one point I suggested that his "spirit" inhabited (I was going to say spirit filled, but figured that might give people the wrong impression) worlds was pantheistic. I stand corrected. Reading Donna Frieitas and Jason King's Killing the Imposter God (Jossey Bass, 2007), I realize that they are correct in saying that he might be better defined as a "panentheist." Freitas and King make the important point that Pullman's own professed atheism can skew how the books are read. He may very well be an atheist, but these books are not atheistic propaganda. Yes, a "god" dies, but it's an imposter.

Freitas and King suggest that it is the "Dust" that is the source of divine presence in the books. This Dust is, as the character Mary Malone discovers, is conscious. Indeed, Dust seems to be the source of consciousness, though "the Church" mistakenly believes that it is the source of original sin.

Freitas and King read Pullman through a lens that includes feminist and Liberationist and Process categories opening up a whole new way of looking at the books. I find their interpretation very helpful, because frankly there's a reason why I tend to read non-fiction -- I'm a fairly linear thinker!

It is not God who dies in this series, it is a particular conception of God -- a God that is "external, static, and wholly other -- acts like a chain on humanity, restructuring every person's "will to power" (to use another famous Nietzschean phrase) or, to put it in the language common to liberation theologians, their will to be empowered. (p. 17).

What has been overthrown in the books is a traditional -- Platonic influenced -- theism. The problem is that Pullman is on to something, he just doesn't know what it is. They write that while the categories available to Nietzsche was less than that present today, Pullman would have been well served to look at the broader possibilities.

Pullman write this trilogy during a theological era when alternative visions of the divine abound, so it is hard to understand how Pullman overlooked all these available alternatives and why he seems unable -- or at least unwilling -- to consider his own alternative divinity in the trilogy. Pullman has by no means killed off God in general. He has killed off only one understanding of God -- God-as-tyrant-- and an oddly antiquated and unimaginative one at that. Pullman has done away with the malicious, lying, controlling, manipulating being in charge of his universe in order to put an end to unjust cruelty and domination. But he says nothing about the many other gods that are worshiped across the world's religions or about more sophisticated understandings of the Christian God." (p. 19)

I've not finished the book, and I know that the perspectives of the two authors won't suit everyone, but at the very minimum they encourage us to look at Pullman's imaginative portrayal of religion in a different way.