Relax, Parents, "The Golden Compass" is just a story

Thursday, December 13, 2007

When I first read about the fervor over the anti-religion theme of the movie, "The Golden Compass," I wondered why religious people, and Christian parents especially, would find this movie so offensive in a world already hell-bent on negating the effects of God.

This movie is just another front on the secular war against religion and God specifically. It's really no different than the war parents have to wage against the peer pressure on their children to shoplift, spend time in internet chat rooms that their parents have already forbade, and of course, drinking and doing illegal drugs.

Somebody is always going to try and sway our kids away from what Mom and Dad feel are healthy practices and habits, or ideologies.

Just the other day I was relating my own mother's tale of coming home from high school in the 1930s, and enthusiastically expounding on this brand new concept teacher called Communism. It was a mighty attractive alternative to the capitalism of the United States in that - the way her teacher explained it to the kids - EVERYONE would share in the wealth of this country, all would have an equal share of the money. To a teenager living during the Great Depression, struggling alongside her parents and her brothers, wishing her folks had enough money to buy clothes and food and pay for her two brothers' cataract surgeries, this Communism had to be seen as a miracle cure for the poverty epidemic she knew.

But, as parents are supposed to do, her father listened to her and then explained why he preferred the freedom of making his own money and being the one to decide what he would do with it, all without the interference of the federal government.

Mom listened and learned, sharing with me in her later years how fortunate she was to have had a father who listened to her and was willing to talk about such things. I, too, thought how lucky she was to have had this opportunity to hear both sides of an issue and then, presumably, have the freedom to choose for herself which ideology was the best for her.

That's the way it should be: Children will always learn about something Mom and Dad don't want them to know, and then Mom and Dad have the opportunity to offer their opinion, their ideology, the other side, as it were.

Children will always be vulnerable to scintillating and alluring ideas, they'll be out there in the world, like little magnets, attracting all sorts of perverse and unhealthy concepts and practices.

They have to make choices, all day long; it's part of maturing. We adults just have to give them alternatives, something to choose between.

In the case of the movie, "The Golden Compass" there are alternatives, such as "Bible Stories." I probably would have said to my children something like,

"God gives us an imagination so we can make up stories. You just have to remember that not all stories, even the exciting ones, are true."

Relax, Mom and Dad, just tell the kids it's another story.