Every year at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England, a guest is invited to speak on the subject of religion and education. Sometimes, a prominent bishop is asked to deliver a lecture, but, as a rule, the event isn’t exactly a big draw. This year, the auditorium was filled, and another room, with a video feed, had to be set up for those who couldn’t fit into the main hall. The speaker, Philip Pullman, is fervently admired for his sophisticated trilogy of children’s novels called, collectively, “His Dark Materials.” In Britain, his books have sold millions of copies, and his often contentious essays on subjects ranging from censorship to education—“We need to ensure that children are not forced to waste their time on barren rubbish” is a typical declaration—appear regularly in the London papers.

In some ways, Pullman was a natural choice for the lecture: he was born in Norwich, where his grandfather was an Anglican parish priest, and the university, which is renowned for its creative-writing program, has given him an honorary degree. In his books, fantasy is a springboard for exploring cosmic questions about the purpose of human life and the nature of the universe. Nevertheless, the selection of Pullman was surprising: he is one of England’s most outspoken atheists. In the trilogy, a young girl, Lyra Belacqua, becomes enmeshed in an epic struggle against a nefarious Church known as the Magisterium; another character, an ex-nun turned particle physicist named Mary Malone, describes Christianity as “a very powerful and convincing mistake.” Pullman once told an interviewer that “every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don’t accept him.” Peter Hitchens, a conservative British columnist, published an article about Pullman entitled “This Is the Most Dangerous Author in Britain,” in which he called him the writer “the atheists would have been praying for, if atheists prayed.”

Pullman is a rangy, spirited man in his fifties with a bristling fringe of gray hair; at times, he resembles an intelligent and amused stork. At the lectern, he began, “Quite what prompted you to ask me to talk about religious education I can’t immediately see. . . . Given that I’ve voiced some criticisms of religion in the past, and that various Christian groups have expressed their criticisms of me, it might be that whatever I said on the subject would be hostile in any case.” He smiled. “Well, I hope it won’t be that. But we shall see.” He went on, “I don’t profess any religion; I don’t think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality’; but I think I can say something about moral education, and I think it has something to do with the way we understand stories.”

Pullman had called his lecture “Miss Goddard’s Grave,” after a tombstone, first pointed out to him by his mother, in the churchyard in Norwich’s old city center. The stone’s inscription praises “the Talents and Virtues of SOPHIA ANN GODDARD, who died 25 March 1801 Aged 25. The Former shone with superior Lustre and Effect in the great School of Morals, the THEATRE, while the Latter inform’d the private Circle of Life with Sentiment, Taste, and Manners that still live in the Memory of Friendship and Affection.” Who Miss Goddard was Pullman could not say; perhaps he’d look her up one day in the county archives. “There must have been a portrait made at some stage,” he speculated. “People have always liked looking at pictures of young actresses; they still do. Perhaps it’s still hanging in a house somewhere in the city, or at the back of an antique shop, with the title ‘Unknown young woman, late eighteenth century.’ There’s a story there.”

People in the audience had chuckled when Pullman read the line about the theatre being a “School of Morals,” but he insisted that the inscription wasn’t ironic. In the eighteenth century, he explained, people like Miss Goddard had wisely sought ethical instruction from the theatre and in novels. “We learn from Macbeth’s fate that killing is horrible for the killer as well as victim,” he said, before reading a passage from “Emma,” by Jane Austen, in which the heroine is mortified when Mr. Knightley reproaches her for mocking poor, garrulous Miss Bates. The scene, Pullman said, shows that “we can learn what’s good and what’s bad, what’s generous and unselfish, what’s cruel and mean, from fiction”; there is no need to consult scripture. As Pullman once put it in a newspaper column, “ ‘Thou shalt not’ might reach the head, but it takes ‘Once upon a time’ to reach the heart.”

Only a few of the people who had come to see Pullman appeared to be under twenty-one. Strictly speaking, the three novels that make up “His Dark Materials”—“The Golden Compass,” “The Subtle Knife,” and “The Amber Spyglass”—are children’s books, but their ideal reader is a precocious fifteen-year-old who long ago came to find the Harry Potter books intellectually thin. It’s possible that as many adults now read the trilogy as do children. Robert McCrum, the literary editor of the Observer of London, has celebrated Pullman’s “well-made, absorbing characters,” “supreme elegance of style and tone,” and dexterous handling of “very big ideas.” “The Amber Spyglass” won the 2001 Whitbread Prize for best children’s book, then went on to win the Whitbread Book of the Year award, too—the first children’s book to do so.

In his speech, Pullman contended that the literary School of Morals is inherently ambiguous, dynamic, and democratic: a “conversation.” Opposed to this ideal is “theocracy,” which he defined as encompassing everything from Khomeini’s Iran to explicitly atheistic states such as Stalin’s Soviet Union. He listed some characteristics of such states—among them, “a scripture whose word is inerrant,” a priesthood whose authority “tends to concentrate in the hands of elderly men,” and “a secret police force with the powers of an Inquisition.” Theocracies, he said, demonstrate “the tendency of human beings to gather power to themselves in the name of something that may not be questioned.”

This impulse toward theocracy, he announced at the end of his speech, “will defeat the School of Morals in the end.” He sounded oddly cheerful making this prediction; in his books, Pullman enjoys striking a tone of melancholy resolve. He continued, “But that doesn’t mean we should give up and surrender. . . . I think we should act as if. I think we should read books, and tell children stories, and take them to the theatre, and learn poems, and play music, as if it would make a difference. . . . We should act as if the universe were listening to us and responding. We should act as if life were going to win. . . . That’s what I think they do, in the School of Morals. And Miss Goddard’s portrait hangs on the classroom wall.”

The following morning, I joined Pullman as he stopped by the Norwich branch of Ottakar’s, a British bookstore chain. We slipped into a tiny, windowless back room, so he could sign a cartload of books. As he scribbled his name on the title pages, one of the store’s employees explained that Pullman’s public signings are complicated productions. “When ‘The Amber Spyglass’ came out, we had to hire a hall,” he told me. “More than nine hundred people showed up.” Pullman’s fame is only likely to grow: New Line Cinema, the studio responsible for the “Lord of the Rings” films, is preparing three movies based on the trilogy.