'But in envisaging a modern world held back from developing by a repressive Catholic Church, Pullman follows a long-standing SF tradition.'

Science fiction author Philip Purser-Hallard looks at ‘what if’ scenarios when applied to Christianity

In surgically separating Philip Pullman’s novel Northern Lights from its overt religious content, the makers of the film The Golden Compass have done it a disservice in a number of ways – most obviously in rendering the third novel effectively unfilmable.

A less blatant result is simply making the history of Pullman’s invented world less interesting.

In the novel, one key historical difference is that John Calvin – the protestant reformer who turned 16th-century Geneva into a repressive theocracy – instead succeeded to the papacy, and extended his dogmatic rule across the whole of Christendom.

In the film, the Magisterium are just a bunch of sententious, apparently secular, old men.

Although alternative-history stories are routinely associated with science fiction and fantasy, they needn’t be either. Many are set in contemporary worlds without unusual scientific or magical advances, which differ from ours only through history having taken a different turn.

As with future histories, it’s often in their treatment of Christianity and church history that these ‘if-worlds’ become most interesting. One popular scenario (along with ‘Hitler wins’ and ‘ Rome never fell’) is to undo the Protestant Reformation.

Establishments and Reforms

Pullman ’s invented world is more complex than this – his ‘daemons’ have been around throughout history, for example, and even biblical events may have occurred differently. But in envisaging a modern world held back from developing by a repressive Catholic Church, Pullman follows a long-standing SF tradition.

Keith Roberts’s Pavane (where the Spanish Armada conquered England and nipped the Reformation in the bud) has the church finally forced to release the technologies it’s been sitting on for generations, ushering in a fast-track industrial revolution. (It also suggests that in a less technological world, the English countryside might still be visited by fairies.)

Other books imagine decisions taken by Roman Emperors altering the religious history of the West, as drastically as Constantine’s decision to establish Christianity as the state religion.

In Dan Jacobson’s The God-Fearer, Judaism found favour instead, and ‘Christers’ have become a persecuted minority in Europe. John Ford’s fantasy The Dragon Waiting has Julian the Apostate reversing his uncle Constantine’s decree and re-establishing Rome’s religious pluralism. By the time of the (riotously pagan) Renaissance, ‘Yeshites’ are just one tiny sect among many.

Jesus Lives

These worlds are thought-experiments in historical evitability, which try to glean which elements of our own history – and our faith – are essential, and which are merely contingent on our past.

Jacobson speculates about what could have happened to his own religion had it found itself in charge, while Ford wonders (among other things) how Christianity would have coped if it hadn’t.

Philip K Dick (the author of the archetypal ‘Hitler wins’ story, The Man in the High Castle) once planned to write an alternative-history novel where the Kingdom of God really did, as Jesus apparently envisaged, appear on Earth during the lifetime of his disciples.

For a while now (OK, I admit it – it’s ever since I saw The Last Temptation of Christ), I’ve wanted to write a similarly theological alternative history, with Jesus avoiding crucifixion, and living on into old age.

It’s difficult to know what form Christianity would take in such a history. It’s all but impossible to imagine the teachings of the elderly Jesus, his youthful passion tempered by an old man’s contemplation.

His later followers, without the branding of the cross and the lure of martyrdom, might have developed quite different attitudes to life, death and the acceptable treatment of human flesh.

Quite possibly, Christianity would never have become a religion at all. But that, too, could tell us something important about our history, and maybe also about our faith.

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