. . . has begun.

One of the big Christmas movies this year is going to be The Golden Compass, based on the first book of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials book trilogy. The trilogy is described by one writer as “a series that follows the adventures of a streetwise girl who travels through multiple worlds populated by witches, armor-plated bears, and sinister ecclesiastical assassins to defeat the oppressive forces of a senile God.”

Well, you can guess what’s coming. Fox News beat the drum against the film a couple of weeks ago; Britain’s Sunday Mirror newspaper wrote about it last weekend. But now that the Urban Legends Reference Pages has picked up one of those mass-forward e-mail alerts about it, it’ll be taking a quantum leap into the culture over the next few weeks, leading up to its release on December 7.

The possibility of a harmonic convergence of manufactured outrage is grand. Pullman is an outspoken atheist, so we’ll be hearing about the whole Evil Atheist Conspiracy to subvert Christianity. We’ll be hearing about Hollywood’s hatred for all that normal Americans hold dear. And because The Golden Compass is coming out in December, we’ll be hearing about the gross affrontery of attacking Christianity during its holiest season. (Watch the wingnuts go for a twofer by subtly attacking those awful Hollywood Jews who must certainly be behind the film.)

What the coming kerfuffle portends is not what the kerfufflers think, though. In 2007, three of the year’s best selling books have been anti-religion: God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris, and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. A recent poll showed that a majority of young people believe Christianity is judgmental and hypocritical, and some Christians are eschewing the term “Christianity” altogether. Now, here comes The Golden Compass. Although it will not be—and don’t believe anybody who says it will be—overtly anti-religion or anti-Christian, the fact that The Golden Compass got made at this time should remind us of something significant about our culture: The smothering, overweening religiosity of America in the last several years is but a temporary wobble. Unbelief—or at the very least, a preference for the secular, and for the rational instead of the magical—continues its unstoppable march.

The kerfuffle on the right is the bleat of people who are losing—and who know it.