Despite the significance of Philip Pullman’s award winning His Dark Materials trilogy, and the widespread acknowledgement that it contains anti-religious themes, there has been no serious theological engagement with this important work. This article is intended to address this lack. The key religious themes of the trilogy are isolated and are seen to reflect a characteristically modernist critique of religion as an outdated power structure, opposed to intellectual enlightenment. Hal Duncan’s less well known The Book of All Hours is utilized as a natural conversation partner to Pullman’s trilogy, one that, by contrast, reflects a much more postmodern understanding of power structures, in which the instinct to coerce is a universal human one, manifested in, but not limited to, religion. The conversation between the two works facilitates theological reflection on the gospel’s critique of religious practice and suggests that there is much in these books that the church should heed.
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