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You're thinking of His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. He wrote it as an athiest's answer to the stealth christianity of Narnia. It's actually a great premise but falls apart by the third book due to author fatigue.
The basic premise: This is a fantasy reality version of our own world. There is magic and magical creatures but also complex history and dark politics. From Wikipedia:
In Northern Lights (released in the United States and Canada as The Golden Compass), the heroine, Lyra Belacqua, a young girl brought up in the cloistered world of Jordan College, Oxford, and her dæmon Pantalaimon — an animal-shaped manifestation of her soul — learn of the existence of Dust, a strange elementary particle believed by the Church to be evidence for Original Sin. Dust is less attracted to the innocence of children, and this gives rise to grisly experiments being carried out by Church-controlled scientists on kidnapped children in the icy wastelands of the far North. Lyra and her dæmon journey to save their best friend Roger Parslow and other kidnapped children from this peril, with the aid of the Armoured Bear Iorek Byrnison, John Faa and Farder Coram, leaders of the gyptians, the aeronaut Lee Scoresby, and the witch Serafina Pekkala. One of the details I liked is how there are armoured bears ruling the northern lands in what we would know as scandinavia. The king of the bears apes the ways of men and has even converted to christianity to curry favor with the human kingdoms, much in the same way pagan kings converted in our own history.
What you eventually discover is that there is indeed a god, known as the Authority, and the Church carries out his work. And God is malignant. Lyra's father is leading a rebellion against Heaven and has enlisted the aid of peoples from across the multiverse.
Christianity and the Church are often criticized by the characters. For example, Ruta Skadi, a minor character calling for war against the Magisterium in Lyra's world, says that "For all of history...it's tried to suppress and control every natural impulse. And when it can't control them, it cuts them out." (see intercision). She extends her criticism to all organized religion: "That's what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling." In another passage Mary Malone, one of Pullman's main characters, states that "the Christian religion…is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all.".
Overall, I would say the first novel is the best. There are some great ideas in this series and it would actually be well-served by a loose movie adaptation, picking up the strongest elements and fabricating better details to round out the film.
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