Read Faith central on the row

The religious furore surrounding the new film The Golden Compass has moved to the US where Christian groups are again up in arms about the content of the dark fantasy which is released in America this Friday.

The Catholic League, which has already called for people to boycott the film in the UK, has been sending out leaflets denouncing the movie, which is based on the book Northern Lights, from Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy.

The League’s president, William Donohue, has criticised The Golden Compass, which stars Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, and Dakota Blue Richards, as being anti-religious.

The books are a fantasy trilogy which trace the fate of a young girl, Lyra, as she becomes drawn into an apocalyptic battle of good against evil. Evil in Pullman’s books is represented by the church, called the Magisterium, whose acolytes kidnap orphans across England to subject them to horrible experiments in the frozen northern wastelands.

“The Catholic League wants Christians to stay away from this movie precisely because it knows that the film is bait for the books,” said Mr Donohue.

“Unsuspecting parents who take their children to see the movie may be impelled to buy the three books as a Christmas present. And no parent who wants to bring their children up in the faith will want any part of these books.”

In a review of The Golden Compass, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops warned of the movie’s “anti-clerical subtext, standard genre occult elements, character born out of wedlock, a whisky-guzzling bear".

But it also said that “taken purely on its own cinematic terms, [it] can be viewed as an exciting adventure story with a traditional struggle between good and evil, and a generalized rejection of authoritarianism."

The Golden Compass opens in the UK tomorrow, and the US on Friday. In the US the film will be released in some 3,000 cinemas and according to the US film industry magazine Variety, only 60 have so far refused to screen it.

Last week Pullman described his detractors as “nitwits”.

“To regard it as this Donohue man has said - that I'm a militant atheist, and my intention is to convert people - how the hell does he know that?" he said, in an interview with Newsweek magazine.

"Why don't we trust readers? Why don't we trust filmgoers? Oh, it causes me to shake my head with sorrow that such nitwits could be loose in the world."

The author’s attack on organized religion has been toned down for the film, in a bid to attract as wide as audience as possible, something director Chris Weitz has acknowledged.

“In the books the Magisterium is a version of the Catholic church gone wildly astray from its roots,” Weitz wrote recently in a national newspaper.

But he warned: “if that’s what you want in the film, you’ll be disappointed”.

Kidman, who was raised a Catholic, recently told The Times: “I was raised a strict Catholic and the last thing I want to do is have my grandmother turning in her grave.”

The Golden Compass is the latest in a long line of films to create controversy over religious beliefs.

Some religious groups accused the Harry Potter series, based on the books by J.K.Rowling, of promoting witchcraft, while Jewish groups called for boycotts of Mel Gibson’s 2004 epic The Passion of the Christ, claiming it was anti-Semitic. The film went on to gross over $600m worldwide.

And last year The Catholic League denounced the blockbuster The Da Vinci Code and its central tenet that Jesus Christ had a child by Mary Magdalene whose descendants still survive today.

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