The story so far:
The people behind the films based on His Dark Materials decided to remove any direct references to god in order to avoid offending religious people.
However, the Catholic League decided that the cuts weren’t deep enough and called for a boycott of the film.
Christian groups such as the Catholic League have criticised the movie and charged the intentional removal of anti-religious themes as a ploy to encourage kids to read Pullman’s pro-atheism books.
So you remove the church from the films (wrongly, in my opinion) only to be accused of doing it to encourage more children to read the books. There’s no way to win in this situation.
And anyway, since when was encouraging children to read such a bad idea? And if christianity is such convincing view of the universe why would you worry if children came into contact with alternative points of view? Sounds to me as though some people are worried that children exposed to alternative explanations of the universe might just see through the nonsense of religion and start thinking rationally.
Which would never do.