Nietzsche said, “It is our taste which now decides against Christianity, not our reason.” Accordingly, for a century the battle in the West has been for the imagination. And artisans of the imagination have been of three kinds.

First, believers like J.R.R. Tolkein, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Madeleine L’Engle, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and of course, C.S. Lewis have helped us imagine that what we see is not all there is, and that the Christian story makes all other stories make sense. Such verbal craftsmanship has helped us inhabit a reality in which, to elide Tolkein and Oliver Goldsmith, every fairy tale bears the trace of Grace stooping to conquer.

Walt Disney embodied a second approach to the imagination. Disney sought to fill a cultural mindscape with myth and story and legend, minus the specific content of any particular faith- or truth-claims. As Mark Pinsky (The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust) quips, Disney and his “Imagineers” have taught us to “wish upon a star, but not pray to a living God.”

A writer like Philip Pullman represents a third approach to the mind’s eye, one hostile to Christianity and aggressively promoting of an alternate vision of the divine.

When my kids were growing up, our family read through Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass). Precisely because Shari and I love the richness that writers like Lewis and Tolkein draw out of the Christian narrative, we wanted our sons to see — and have their faith hardened on the anvil of — a contrary vision. As I read the series, I kept thinking: “I’m reading anti-Narnia. Nietzsche’s quest for a ‘nobler god’ has found its end.”

I was not surprised later to find out that Pullman thought little of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. I was surprised only to find that he had the cheek to write them off as mere “religious propaganda.” If there’s ever been a case of “religious propaganda,” it’s Pullman’s trilogy. In volume one, we find that the fall of Genesis came through denial of one’s true self. In volume two, we encounter a reverse Garden of Eden scene, in which adolescents attain personal liberation through sexual exploration. And in volume three, Pullman updates Milton’s Paradise Lost (from which Pullman borrows the title of his trilogy). In Pullman’s inversion of Milton, cosmic liberation comes when angels justly rise against a senile and corrupt Ancient of Days.

Here’s the good news and the bad news about the movie The Golden Compass (Book One in the trilogy). The larger cosmic issues (which in the books are handled in a decidedly anti-Christian fashion) are treated — at least in this movie — as just so much Hollywood “good vs. evil.” Despite the fact that there is this overbearing Magisterium — a transparent foil for institutionalized religion — moviegoers are mercifully spared the mystifyingly bad theologizing and the stupefyingly ridiculous misquoting of the Bible that characterizes the book. This Magisterium is simply promoting itself and trying to control people so they won’t do “bad things” (as Nicole Kidman says, and that with a straight face, despite the fact that she is talking about surgery that separates a person from his or her soul). Sinister enough, but unlike the book, almost comically so. Further, it was a directorial kindness to condense the story to a manageable two hours, thus rescuing viewers from pages of Pullman’s pontifications.

The visual and conceptual universe the movie creates is stunning. The England of The Golden Compass exists in a universe that is parallel to ours. It has developed the way Jules Verne might have liked, with technology that looks more primitive, more innocent (especially when it comes to weaponry), more, well, Victorian. At the same time, the technology of The Golden Compass’s England surpasses ours. None of the motorized vehicles in Lyra’s England seems to pollute the environment. When did you last have a machine that reveals all truth? Or envision a mechanism that can separate a person from his or her soul (meaning this England’s technology is arguably even more morally ambiguous than ours)?

For all the remarkable digital enhancement, though, thanks to a line from Manohla Dargis’s New York Times review of the film, I couldn’t help but wait for the battle between the polar bears to end with an exchange of Coca-Colas.

Rather than concluding with the book’s rather grim story of the fate of the friend Lyra has been seeking to save, the movie ends with Lyra bravely setting out on the last leg of her journey to help her father, the mysterious Lord Asriel. We won’t know where Director Chris Weitz is taking us until the sequel — for which the ending of this movie is an even more unconcealed setup than the ending of the original Star Wars movie. In interviews, Weitz has stated he knows that in the movies about Books Two and Three he’ll have to deal more straightforwardly with the “angels and God” thing, so we’ll have to wait and see where this is all going.

But for now, the movie version of The Golden Compass is Pullman Lite.

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Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Seminary, has some trenchant thoughts on the books and the movie at his blog.

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Before the movie was released, I was asked to make some on air comments for Fox Network’s Local News 3, available here. Or simply go to http://www.myfoxorlando.com/myfox/ and search: New Movie Might Be Controversial