If an alien landed in my back garden tomorrow, and I asked her to look around and create a list of the biggest threats to Christianity today, what might she come up with?
Secularism, perhaps? Consumerism and greed? Apathy? There are any number of possible answers. But if this alien was to judge by which phenomena seemed to produce the most angry and upset reactions from Christians worldwide, she might answer, ''Hollywood movies''.
The reaction that films like The Da Vinci Code and The Golden Compass produce in certain Christian and Catholic circles is, to say the least, strident. Archbishop Angelo Amato, then Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, called for Catholics to boycott The Da Vinci Code film, saying that it was 'full of lies, mistakes, and theological errors about Jesus, the Gospels and the Church''. The reaction from some evangelical groups was even more fierce.
The latest film to be labelled 'anti-Christian' is James Cameron's Avatar. It is a tale of a paraplegic ex-marine and his integration into a tribe of blue-skinned aliens, the Na'vi, through a surrogate Na'vi body called an 'Avatar'. The highest grossing film of all time, it has been criticised from almost every angle. Political conservatives call it anti-American and anti-white, whereas liberals think that it belittles the native aliens by implying that they need a 'white messiah' to save them. But some of the strongest criticism has come from religious, and particularly Christian sources.
Abhorrent
Ross Douthat, a savvy Catholic New York Times columnist, called it ''a long apologia for pantheism''. The American website Movieguide (the self-styled ''Family Guide for Christian Movie Reviews''), said: ''Avatar has an abhorrent New Age, pagan, anti-capitalist worldview that promotes goddess worship and the destruction of the human race.''
So what's going on here? Does Avatar have a profoundly pantheistic message? Will it damage viewers' faith? The only thing to be done was to volunteer as a guinea pig and watch it myself. Of course, in the interests of a varied test sample, my family came too.
We all loved it. It doesn't have the most profound plot or complex characters in the world, but that's hardly the point. Avatar's planet, Pandora, is the most visually well-realised world in cinema history. It's three-dimensional in more ways than one, with dozens of species of flora and fauna forming a whole ecosystem. JRR Tolkien talked about 'sub-creation' - the ability of a human to in some way echo God's creative act through making an amazing alternate world. Cameron's Pandora is a perfect example.
A lot of the Christian reviewers have trouble with the Na'vi's relationship with the planet. The Na'vi have a series of nerve endings in their hair that they can use to mentally communicate with the flying reptiles that they ride, with horses, and the consciousness of the planet itself, which they call 'Eywa'. Much of the Na'vi's spirituality (and Avatar's plot) revolves around Eywa, and it's this that led to the accusations of Pantheism.
But this is ridiculous. No one in the film ever implies that the planet is God; simply that it is observably a living organism. Not divine, but another wonderful and mysterious part of a wonderful and mysterious universe. What is there in that to be afraid of?
Some of the other criticisms are even stranger. Avatar is certainly anti-capitalist if that means valuing people and nature over the pursuit of wealth but surely that makes it more Christian, not less?
But even if Avatar did have some kind of anti-Christian agenda, is that any reason to boycott a film? Everything Archbishop Amato said about The Da Vinci Code is probably true. There are whole documentaries, books, and a long Wikipedia page entirely devoted to its historical errors. But are we really so insecure about our beliefs that we flee in terror from Dan Brown? Why not just see the film and discuss it, and maybe even use it as an opportunity to examine why we believe what we do?
Siege mentality
Believing that the movies are out to get us is just a symptom of a wider siege mentality. One need only look at Ireland to see that the first reaction to any perceived threat to Catholicism is often fear. All too often, we try to push away discussions rather than engage with them.
The remedy is not to become more aggressive, but rather, listening to and appreciating the views of those who disagree with us, and then calmly and confidently explaining our opinions, to exchange ideas rather than reject them.
Pandora is an extraordinary creation. But so is our universe. And if we approach it and its people with open minds and without fear, we might find that it's the most mysterious and wonderful place of all. But close our eyes and flinch away, and we just might miss it.
