‘Avatar: Fire And Ash’ Defines Hollywood’s New Take On Spirituality
(ANALYSIS) “Avatar: Fire and Ash” has continued the franchise’s unbeatable winning streak. James Cameron’s latest “Avatar” film has grossed over $1 billion at the global box office, making the franchise the highest-grossing trilogy in history, and is one of only four films in 2025 to cross the worldwide billion-dollar mark.
It will likely not break the records of the first or second film. But even so, you cannot argue that the series is anything short of a colossal success.
One of the things few people discuss about the “Avatar” films is how deeply “faith-based” they are. In fact, their spirituality may be one of the most influential things about the franchise in Hollywood. Since the first film graced theaters in 2009, Hollywood has followed its example in portraying religiosity on film — both for good and ill.
READ: How Many Americans Are Actually Spiritual But Not Religious?
The franchise’s spirituality has been very consistent. “Avatar” and its sequels take place on the fictional alien planet of Pandora, where the inhabitants, the Na’vi, depict the worship of a goddess, Eywa, who is the globally distributed consciousness of the world.
The Na’vi can physically connect to Eywa and access deep, spiritually enlightening visions, where they commune with the dead who have been buried at the base of her sacred tree.
The Na’vi pray to Eywa, and she often grants their requests, which range from healing people to attacking and defeating enemies. However, the times when Eywa does and does not answer prayers are not always clear.
Gender coded: Female spirituality and male religion
Eywa’s status as a goddess rather than a god is not arbitrary. Hollywood increasingly portrays faith positively when coded feminine and negatively when coded masculine. Culturally and cross-culturally feminine-associated traits like empathy, community, equality and liberal politics associated with spirituality and virtue.
The Na’avi share all these values, and therefore, it makes sense that their god is a goddess. Last year, this was nearly every Hollywood film’s approach to spirituality, from “Sinners” to “Presence” to “Death of a Unicorn.” But “Avatar” was doing this long before the rest of Hollywood caught up to it.
Meanwhile, villains are avatars of masculinity-associated traits like science, aggression, violence, analytical rationality and conquest. They create technological marvels and warships that fly across the sky and conquer other planets to exploit their resources. They are tough guys — cocky and expansive — whether they are hardened generals like Miles Quaritch or corporate technocrats like Parker Selfridge.
In the very first film, Jake Sully is a soldier disillusioned with a world that has killed his brother and left his own body paralyzed. He is sent to Pandora to ingratiate himself with the Na’vi culture and, in the process, encounters their feminine spirituality. The Na’vi’s faith is based on feeling, community bonding, gentleness, oneness with nature, and a sense of equality among all beings, including animals they kill. Jake then turns to the Na’vi way.
This distinction is carried over into “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” This film interrogates the theology of Pandora deeper than any of the other films. Much of “Fire and Ash” wrestles with how to reconcile the supposedly all-powerful and nurturing mother planet with suffering. This is a common problem in Christian theology. But its “motherly” angle gives the discussion its own distinctives.
“Fire and Ash” follows Jake Sully’s family and the Na’vi as they grapple with the death of Jake's and Neytiri’s son in “The Way of Water”. Jake creates rational plans to acquire guns in preparation for the inevitable return of their enemies — plans that are rejected by the Na’vi tribe because guns are considered corrupting. Jake scoffs at what he sees as blind adherence to faith and points out that Eywa did not save their son. Neytiri snaps back at him not to take away her faith, because it is all she has left.
Jake and Neytiri’s adopted daughter, Kiri, a Na’vi clone conceived in a virgin birth-esque fashion by the first film’s Dr. Grace Augustine and Eywa herself, has the strongest connection to Eywa, yet is frustrated that she cannot access the visions others experience. The film’s new villain, Varang, leader of the aggressive, volcano-dwelling Mangkwan clan, reveals that she led her people into brutality and war because Eywa failed to save them from the volcano beneath which they lived.
The way the film answers these questions is also gender-coded. One of the most well-attested cross-cultural sex differences is that women tend to be more interested in people, and men in things. So when Kiri asks why Eywa has shut herself off from her, the men explain it like a computer firewall.
But the women explain that Eywa must have her reasons, so she must trust her. It’s a person-oriented explanation rather than a “thing” oriented one. Likewise, Eywa’s interventions after that tend not to come when they would make logical “sense”, but when they are emotionally satisfying — like at the climax of a battle. There is no “Pandora apologetics” that tries to make sense of Eywa’s actions.
This pattern extends to moral judgment. Nancy Pearcey notes in “The Toxic War on Masculinity” that Western society shifted dramatically in its views of morality during the Renaissance. Ancient people thought ethics came from reason, and they thought men were more rational, so they were more moral. But the Renaissance changed Western thinking to put morality in the emotions. So thinkers and artists started portraying women with superior moral judgments. (While still assuming men were more rational).
“Fire and Ash” portrays this dynamic regularly. When, mostly but not exclusively male, characters justify morally questionable actions, they do so in rational terms. When Jake Sully explains why he must kill Spider, he frames it logically. When he decides against it, he explains his choice in emotional terms.
Throughout the film, rational strategies — such as using guns — along with the rational strategies of the villains, prove foolish. Sacred spiritual instincts, alliances with whales, and prayers to Eywa (typically but not exclusively spearheaded by women) are ultimately enough to save the day.
Portraying women as more spiritual than men makes a lot of sense, since cross-culturally, women are more likely to be religious than men. But most traditional religions balance this out by making the head deity and (most ) priests male. What “Avatar” does, and what Hollywood has followed, is to make faith a completely feminine project from the goddess to the priestess to the follower, to the personality traits.
This is met by the faith-based film industry leaning much more toward a highly masculine religion that prizes traditionally male-coded traits and treats feminine ones suspiciously. This reflects the increasing split between men and women in America along cultural and political lines, with American men now outnumbering women at church for the first time since they started counting.
Fantasy vs. reality
But the female-coded nature of the franchise’s spirituality is only part of how it defines Hollywood’s modern approach to faith. The other is that its approach to faith is largely based on fantasy rather than reality. It treats faith like wish-fulfillment, not something that can be applied in real life.
Take the central premise of the “Avatar” franchise: the pleasure of watching plucky, spiritually and morally superior indigenous archetypes defeat technologically superior colonizers. This is almost never how history actually worked out. There was no last-minute intervention by the planet goddess.
Most of the time, the stronger side won unless the underdogs were getting help from another major superpower. Likewise, the Christian missionaries who brought colonialism with them often brought their version of morality to the indigenous countries — including and particularly rights for women.
Then consider the Na’vi conception of heaven. They can plug themselves into a tree and experience vivid visions of loved ones, living and dead. Here, they don’t have to deal with the fact that their loved ones are dead and can just visit them all the time. Their faith is, essentially, a way of giving them in fantasy what they can’t have in reality.
It is difficult not to compare this to contemporary debates about AI and virtual relationships, Mark Zuckerberg encouraging AI friends or Elon Musk flirting with AI romantic companions. These relationships are tailored to our desires, but they are not real, which means we must keep paying corporations to sustain them.
Likewise, James Cameron offers a vision of heaven and spirituality that cannot exist in the real world. But if we develop a taste for it, we must keep returning to James Cameron — and Hollywood — to access it.
But that is the opposite of what healthy religion does. Good religion, as Jonathan Haidt notes in “The Anxious Generation” and Ryan Burge in “The Vanishing church,” binds entire communities together around a shared vision. It is lived out in the real world, tested by real relationships and forced to confront grief and problems that have to be really solved and cannot be escaped by retreating into fantasy.
Yet this is unfashionable. As Jean Twenge points out in “Generations,” the real driver of religious decline is the priority of “me, which wants everything customized like algorithms to individual preference. The result is fragmentation, loneliness, fragility, and an inability to endure real life — driving us back, again and again, to the James Camerons of the world for comfort.
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” is a deeply spiritual film, and its portrayal of faith has become the norm in Hollywood since the franchise’s debut. Unfortunately, its faith is not designed to draw us closer to God or to one another — but back to the movie theater.
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” is playing in theaters now.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at josephholmesstudios.com.