In his January review of James Cameron’s latest effort, “Avatar and the ‘New’ Evolutionary Religion,” Christian author Carl Wieland offers a thoughtful response to a recent film: Movies, no less than painting, literature, and other expressions of popular culture, both reflect and influence the worldview of the age and society that produces them. Films in particular (especially box-office hits, as Avatar will doubtless be) can have considerable power to further shape a society’s worldview—a set of beliefs and assumptions that are widely held as ‘givens,’ even if subliminally so. To be most effective at this, a film should not depart too far from what is already held, but rather build on the foundations already laid, reinforcing, deepening and extending the ruling paradigm—to further embed the vision of what their makers think the world ought to be like. It’s unavoidable that the filmmaker’s morality will find its way in there at some point, and Avatar is no exception: The moral of the story seems to be that if the citizens of modern hi-tech cultures were to repent from our wicked ways, we might not only be able to avoid further destroying our own natural world, we would also enjoy spiritual wholeness,
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