**Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for Avatar: Fire and Ash and Avatar: The Last Airbender.**
It’s not new for a big Hollywood movie to feature violence. It’s not new for a big Hollywood movie to feature the “little guys” taking on the “big guys.” It’s not new to be rooting for those bad guys to get their comeuppance.
But sitting in a dark theater at the end of 2025, I witnessed Avatar: Fire and Ash tell me quite explicitly that, in certain circumstances, it was morally wrong to not commit violence. That kind of explicit theme is a lot more rare.
That I did not see coming.
The existing trilogy goes a bit further into philosophical discussions than the average blockbuster science fiction film, explicitly rejecting principled nonviolence.
James Cameron’s Avatar movies, “the ones with the blue people” as I’m often prone to call them, depict a clash between Earth humans (that’s us) and the native Na’vi (the blue people), as humans come to the Na’vi’s planet, Pandora, to exploit their resources. So far there are three movies, with plans for more. The main character, Jake Sully, is a Marine who’s had his consciousness transferred into a Na’vi grown in a lab that was spliced with his DNA.
Sully eventually becomes sympathetic to the plight of the people and ends up leading, in each film, rebellions against the encroaching humans and their corporation, RDA. The former colonizer is now enmeshed with the colonized, much to the chagrin of the humans who now want him out of the way so they can continue their extraction of “unobtanium.”
Cameron’s Avatar movies don’t shy away from fighting. In fact, in each movie there are groups who don’t want to fight. But they are always convinced going to war is the only way to protect themselves and avoid utter eradication. Indeed, it’s repeatedly suggested fighting is the only way to preserve the native people against their off-world threats.
The existing trilogy goes a bit further into philosophical discussions than the average blockbuster science fiction film, explicitly rejecting principled nonviolence. In Way of Water, one of Jake Sully’s sons meets Payakan, a member of the whale-like, sentient species called Tulkun who are hunted by humans for their biological properties. Payakan is exiled by the Tulkun because he broke the Tulkun’s pact of nonviolence while fighting back when his family was being massacred by whalers.
We feel for Payakan, unfairly accused of murdering his pod. But while earlier he had engaged in self-defense in the midst of being hunted, at the end of the movie, he comes in to save the day, tipping the battle in the protagonists’ favor.
This storyline is then developed more in Fire and Ash, where the Tulkun—pacifists with an emphasis on passive—are scolded for their nonviolence and disengagement from the war. Payakan gives his own testimony, speaking on behalf of all those killed, urging the Tulkun to abandon their custom and join the war. And eventually, join they do. The climactic battle of this third film sees the Tulkun obliterating the human colonizers. It’s the exact advantage the inhabitants require.
The solution to violent powers is… to fight back.
Or is it?
Jesus’ teachings have traditionally been understood to reject lethal violence. The Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7) offers a myriad of examples, calling believers to be peacemakers, to not murder or even hate, to not resist an evil person, to love your enemy. Paul picks up the same theme in places like Romans 12, suggesting we don’t repay evil with evil, we live at peace with people, and we never take vengeance since that’s God’s job. It’s notions like these which convinced early Christians (and many today) to reject any and all forms of life-taking violence.
The Cross reinvents suffering at the hands of violence as an act with its own power and virtue.
And that includes for “good” or “just” causes. Because the means matter, not just the motives. Tertullian, in his late second-century work On Patience, dismisses any difference between provoker and provoked, saying, “Yet each stands impeached of hurting a man in the eye of the Lord, who both prohibits and condemns every wickedness. In evil doing there is no account taken of order, nor does place separate what similarity conjoins. And the precept is absolute, that evil is not to be repaid with evil.”
But the whole early Christian view can perhaps best be summed up by Clement of Alexandria’s statement around the third century: “Above all, Christians are not allowed to correct with violence the delinquencies of sins.”
But with time, this basic nonviolent stance has been thoroughly questioned. From Augustine to Aquinas to Niebuhr, Christian theologians began to consider exceptions. Many instances of killing and violence were allowed, with a focus on the result of the acts of violence rather than the act itself. After all, there are great evils in the world. If we refuse to fight back, won’t evil just compound even more?
Indeed, Dietrich Bonhoeffer asks much the same question we all might be thinking in The Cost of Discipleship: “It is obvious that weakness and defenselessness only invite aggression. Is then the demand of Jesus nothing but an impracticable ideal?”
It’s easy, after all, for the Tulkun to practice their nonviolence when they had no aggressors. But should they hold to their principles even after the introduction of humans who threaten their very existence?
Bonhoeffer’s answer to his own posed question is that the Sermon on the Mount and the Christian call to nonviolence isn’t idealistic. Well, it is from a secular perspective, because only the Cross imbues nonviolence with some sense. The crucifixion of Jesus means Jesus claimed victory over sin, evil, and death, showing that you don’t need violence to conquer. You don’t have to fight to win. You can save without having to kill someone.
In fact, the Cross reinvents suffering at the hands of violence as an act with its own power and virtue. Bonhoeffer, using the word “passion” for talking about suffering and violence done to us as it was to our Savior, says: “Jesus calls those who follow him to share his passion. How can we convince the world by our preaching of the passion when we shrink from that passion in our own lives?”
In other words, we insult Jesus’ sacrifice at the Cross when we choose fatal violence to avoid our own suffering.
Christian nonviolence is only logical in light of a Savior who understands that suffering, though uncomfortable, isn’t something to avoid. It may just be the noblest of paths. But this commitment to avoid violence never meant we are supposed to be passive—like the Tulkun who stay still while their calves are murdered. Our witness is instead to resist violence, without using the tool which we condemn, by showing the insanity of violence and the power of Christ’s love.
We show this actively, not passively. We use our voice as prophetic witness. We place our influence and talents and gifts in service of banishing violence from everywhere it creeps in. We leave God to sort it out, instead of imposing us as master over a life. And, when necessary, we use our bodies as shields. This ultimately finds more success than the quick solutions that violence brings.
Our witness is instead to resist violence, without using the tool which we condemn, by showing the insanity of violence and the power of Christ’s love.
This is power in resisting the urge to fight. Bonhoeffer also writes, “Violence stands condemned by its failure to evoke counter-violence.” This is exactly what Jesus’ ethics achieve. For a statement like “If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also” (Matt. 5:39) becomes active resistance when we realize that by presenting another cheek, the act becomes a metaphorical “slap in the face” for the one doing violence. (See also Prov. 25:21-22, which is quoted in Rom. 12.) Violence is always illogical, but it must first be made to look in a mirror.
Interestingly, in the Avatar movies, the casus belli for war with the humans each time is the reasoning that if they aren’t stopped, they’ll keep coming back to inflict more harm. But we are three movies in, with likely more on their way, and guess what? The enemy does keep coming back to inflict more harm! Violence hasn’t yet solved the problem, not permanently, despite that being the rallying call.
So the movie undermines its own spoken message. Violence is only bringing more violence.
But a commitment to avoid inflicting bloodshed breaks that cycle that keeps insisting that inflicting bloodshed will ever bring peace.
Yet Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender is worlds away from the Avatar movie franchise in its approach to violence. The TV show also features clans based around elements, hostile takeovers, animals with too many legs, spirit gods, and an Avatar. But this animated property has a very different kind of moral.
Aang dismantles the means of violence instead of inflicting it himself.
Avatar: The Last Airbender demonstrates throughout the series many profound truths, like the possibility of redemption and the imagination it takes to choose nonviolence. In this show, Avatar Aang does not sway from his nonviolent upbringing—even when given opportunities to kill, and even when his rival, the Fire Lord Ozai, uses any means necessary, including violence. Aang holds fast even when counseled that there is no other option but to abandon his “quaint” principles.
As Nick Cialdini points out in his reflection on Avatar and cruciform nonviolence, the show deconstructs the commonly believed notion of a dichotomy between “kill” or “be killed.” In truth, those aren’t the only choices—only the easiest ones. Aang chooses a different path to defeat his enemy that doesn’t require him to sit back or to kill—he instead removes Fire Lord Ozai’s powers for good.
Aang dismantles the means of violence instead of inflicting it himself.
That sounds more like Christian nonviolence than what James Cameron was trying to suggest.
To be clear, however, I’m not saying the nonviolent way of Jesus (or of Aang) is easy. It’s often harder, less efficient, and will still often lead to suffering. Bonhoeffer himself, whom I quoted extensively, seems to have struggled with this very dilemma later in his life, as he contemplated the moral cost of violent action against Hitler. It appears he eventually drifted toward the moral gray despite the strength of his convictions in The Cost of Discipleship.
I realize that’s not the best sales pitch.
And believe me, I know the way of the Avatar trilogy is certainly enticing, especially when we are the underdogs under the boot of a seemingly unstoppable force. It can feel like the only moral choice is to exchange some morals for others. Certainly, we are left with a myriad of “what if” questions, many of which have no clear answer. There are all sorts of logistical difficulties that your mind may jump to, or you might be thinking of how the most vulnerable victim of violence is supposed to deal with nonviolence.
These are all valid feelings. It would take many more words than allowed to address everything, and even then, the answers won’t satisfy everyone.
But I can address the feeling of tension in trying to balance the imperative to help those in need with the imperative to not do evil. Justice, hospitality, and love of our neighbor are certainly important Christian causes. However, so is the call to not engage with evil tactics in the pursuit of good ends. “Never pay back evil with more evil” Paul says in Romans 12:17 (NLT). Is one imperative more important than the other?
I don’t think we can pit “love of neighbor” against “love of enemy” with an argument that says it’s acceptable to kill an enemy because it saves a neighbor. That’s because with Christ, a neighbor even includes those that are “enemies.” There aren’t actually different rules.
Whether the enemy is the Fire Nation or the RDA, we are called to love them in a way that sees their humanity while resisting the pull to sin along with them.
We see this clearly in Luke 10:25-37. We first met an expert in the law that sought to justify himself by hoping Jesus’ definition of neighbors was narrow. Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan to demonstrate that the category of “neighbor” is more expansive than we ever thought. Samaritans and Jews were not friendly, yet love is meant to transcend those man-made barriers. Indeed, we find, the Venn diagram of neighbors and enemies is a perfect circle. And the religious teacher is left disappointed that he isn’t off the hook for even loving those against him.
But the most important thing to remember when we wrestle with the tension of nonviolence is that prioritizing not killing even when it’s the most “efficient” means to eradicate evil is exactly what happened in Jesus’ crucifixion. The Cross shows a commitment closer to the depiction in Avatar: The Last Airbender than in Avatar, the movie with the Papyrus font.
This priority is illustrated by the fact that Jesus purposely chose a way to conquer sin and evil without shedding any blood but his own. He came to the capital city on a donkey, not a brilliant white horse. He acquiesced to the authorities. He did not send 10,000 angels to vanquish his foes, and indeed he told Peter to put away his sword (Matt. 26:52-54). He fought back not with force, weapons, or might but by being the recipient of evil—only to prove that not even the grave could hold him.
In the light of the resurrection, evil has no power. Death has no power. Violence has no power.
So why would Christians use those when we have Jesus’ example?
Christ alone has power to end the oppression of sin in our world. It’s through this power that we might do impossible things like throw down our weapons and seek an imaginative route to stop evil without using life-taking measures. It’s by his death that we can love our enemies, seek peace with those that want to harm us, and refuse to take vengeance when we are wronged.
Because whether the enemy is the Fire Nation or the RDA, we are called to love them in a way that sees their humanity while resisting the pull to sin along with them.
That’s the way of Jesus.
