Killing the Imposter God -- Review


Donna Freitas and Jason King, Killing the Imposter God: Philip Pullman’s Spiritual Imagination in His Dark Materials. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2007. xxiv + 224.

With the release last fall of the movie The Golden Compass, based on book one of of the youth oriented fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman’s works became the topic of conversation. By his own admission, the trilogy, has theological implications – and more directly, raise the question of the existence of God. We heard that he is the Christopher Hitchens of children’s literature. I have given a review of his books elsewhere, but here I wish to address an intriguing interpretation of his work.

Killing the Imposter God, written by Donna Freitas and Jason King, takes a theological look at the trilogy. The two authors are theologians with sensitivity to the intricacies and complexities of literature, and they confirmed my suspicion that this series has a strong spiritual dimension. Indeed, they bemoan the fact that his atheistic protestations color the way many readers approach the books.


[H]e has made it virtually impossible for readers to engage his trilogy without his personal views about God perched somewhere in their minds” (p. xviii).


That is unfortunate there seems to be a very rich spirituality present in them.

Freitas and King look at the books from a number of theological angles – including liberation, feminist, and process theologies. As they examine Pullman’s words, they discern a panentheistic view of God. That is, God is to be found in the World – although not identical to the World. While this may not be traditional theism, it is also not atheism. They write:


So His Dark Materials replaces the classic God of Western Monotheism – a God separated from matter and the human race, a God who dominates both time and space – with a God that is part of time, matter, and space, yet also retains a degree of independence. God is among us and is affected by people – God is interdependent with us – yet without taking away anyone’s freedom (p. 32).


And the key to understanding the presence of this divine force is Dust, which in their view is the Divine Presence. A divinity does perish near the end of the final volume, but the God who dies at the hands of Pullman’s protagonists is the tyrannical God of medieval theology.

Although the Narnian books are religious classics, many would find it difficult to consider Pullman’s works religious classics, but this is the view held by these two interpreters. But, to see them in this way, one must change the lenses. One must be willing to let go of old forms of divinity, and embrace a new way of thinking. In this way of thinking, things like consciousness and freedom are to be promoted. Indeed, an awareness and exploration of our sexuality is to be celebrated rather than suppressed. This is a theology that celebrates both the spiritual and the physical dimensions of life, and insists upon the very divinity of humanity. It’s not that we are omnipotent, but because we are made up of Dust – in body, soul, and spirit – the very presence of God is to be found within us. In these volumes a figure known as “The Authority” (God) wishes to suppress our understanding of the divine presence, but Freitas and King suggest that this “Authority” is an imposter god, and not worthy of our service.

The character of Lord Asriel, the one who seeks to destroy the Authority, operates on the Authority’s terms, but two children, Lyra and Will, bring an end to the Authority’s reign not by way of violence, but through love – love for others and love for each other. Although an erotic love emerges between them and empowers them, in the end this love, as powerful as it might be, gives way to a greater love, which enables them to sacrifice their own relationship for the greater good. In this telling of the story of salvation, salvation is found in the midst of this act of divine love.

Freitas and King address the question of why the children and not Lord Asriel. As they point out Pullman doesn’t put much stock in childlike innocence. Indeed, neither child is innocent. Lyra is known to lie and Will did on occasion engage in violence to protect himself, Lyra, or his mother. The children in the alternative world of Cittàgazze, a world largely devoid of adults, don’t display innocence either, for they turn on Will and Lyra and attempt to kill them. The characteristic that enables them to overthrow “The Authority” is compassion. They write of compassion, that it “lies at the heart of the ethics of His Dark Materials, and the centrality of this virtue to Pullman’s vision helps explain why children are harbingers of salvation.” The reason why they are the harbingers of salvation is that in their innocence they’re better able than adults to love. The truth is, they tell us, “all human beings are capable of compassion.” The reason the children are the bearers of salvation is quite simple.

Unlike adults, however, children have access to little power and so are more likely to rely on love. Children can be cruel, to be sure. But if they want to be otherwise, and certainly if they ant to save the world, they have little to work with other than self-giving, self-sacrificing agapic love (Freitas and King, p. 93).

The truth of this assessment is shown in the fact that in Pullman’s universe, it isn’t the powerful, but those without power, who achieve the desired outcome – to quote St. Paul, “for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10 NRSV).

Readers of Freitas and King’s wonderfully revealing interpretation of the trilogy may not be completely convinced that God is present within these pages. The reader will have to recognize that Pullman often takes shots at a caricature of the Christian God – perhaps even creating a straw man in his attack on what he sees as the oppressiveness of institutional religion. Some may find this a cold and soulless world. Read from the perspective of a fearful traditional theism, one will see here an attack on Christianity and the church. Freitas and King invite us to look at the book from a more imaginative perspective. From this perspective the books offer an alternative that is liberating and empowering. They insist that the trilogy will make us think about God and how we live our faith. Most will find things to argue with, but the time spent with this interpretation of Freitas and King offers a rewarding way of reading Pullman’s work.

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