Jesus and Pullman

Christ is mentioned in passing and the agents of God in the church do wear crucifixes. But there is no discursive effort to engage with Christ in the trilogy. God is not interested in saving people, largely, I presume, because they are not his beloved creation.
The absence of Christ seems a somewhat less scrupulous move of Pullman’s, since saving sacrifice is given considerable prominence in the work. As the story develops, the rebels, the heroes of the work, take on the ‘great enterprise’ of saving people from this tyrant God, and from death (which is his prison-house).
Their leader is Lord Asriel, Lyra’s father, who has often treated Lyra with indifference. Asriel is joined by Lyra’s mother, also long absent from Lyra’s life. Both come to discover Lyra’s importance in defeating the forces of God. And both come to realise that they do in fact love Lyra profoundly. This moment comes in their climactic fight with Metatron, when they further realise that defeating him and stopping him from reaching Lyra will mean sacrificing their own lives. And so that is what they do out of their love for Lyra, so that her work of saving all peoples might be achieved.
Their sacrifice of love is coupled with Lyra’s own sacrifice of separation. Lyra’s parents’ deaths enable her to complete her task of freeing souls from the land of the dead. But to do this Lyra must undergo separation from Pan, her d¾mon (in Lyra’s world humans have a living, speaking manifestation of their soul/consciousness that takes the form of an animal and is called their d¾mon). This is explained as the most terrible, costly separation for someone from Lyra’s world — a great forsaking of relationship — but it ultimately leads to her rescue of souls.
So Pullman ignores Christ, making no effort to address his sacrificial death on the cross out of his great love for us, or his suffering for our sake, paying the price to set us free. At the same time he explicitly denounces Christianity as the cause of our problems: ‘The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all’, Lyra is told (The Amber Spyglass, p.464). And yet without shame he transfers to the rebels a story of their costly sacrifice in the name of finally defeating God and claiming victory over death.
It is true of course that if you strip Christianity of a creator-God, who therefore has no right or place as our judge, then really you have no Christianity at all. For what Christ came to do in being punished for us by that righteous judge would become utterly meaningless. But to say that Pullman’s story is not anti-Christian, merely ‘anti-religious’ will not do. How many children among the general population do you know who have a reasoned grasp of what Christ achieved on the cross to set us free, that they can see an aping distortion of it when it comes along?