In the modern political imagination, the state does far more than govern; it catechizes. State power is sustained not only through bureaucratic mechanisms but through the production of narratives that render its authority both necessary and salvific.
Auron MacIntyre, podcast host, writer, and political commentator associated with Blaze Media, calls our current operating authority the “Fifth Republic." This system constitutes the fusion of public and private managerial power under the moral canopy of Civil Rights. And, again, this is not simply a political order but a sacramental one, complete with its own rituals, saints, and demons.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the mythopoetic universe of James Cameron’s Avatar franchise, where the resurrection of Colonel Miles Quaritch becomes a ritualized return of the figure that progressive moral imagination casts as its perennial adversary. In him are condensed the traits often associated with white Christian identity, traditional moral frameworks, and the populist energies that animate large segments of American life.
Quaritch is a symbolic composite of everything the progressive project understands itself to resist. And because this adversarial figure is essential to the coherence of that project, he must be continually resurrected, re‑inscribed into the narrative again and again, so that the struggle against him may perpetually reaffirm the righteousness and necessity of the regime’s ideals.
Cameron’s films are often read as ecological parables or anti‑imperial critiques, but this misses the deeper structure of the narrative. The Avatar universe is a catechism in the moral logic of the Fifth Republic, a world in which legitimacy is derived from the perpetual struggle against oppression. In this sense, Civil Rights (understood not as a discrete set of legal protections but as a governing logic) becomes the animating principle of the story. It is the grammar through which good and evil are named and through which the audience is invited to participate in a ritual reaffirmation of the regime’s moral vision.
In the Fifth Republic, the modern state legitimizes its power through the Civil Rights. What this means is that the State must continually identify and ritualize an oppressor figure so that managerial power can present itself as the guarantor of peace, inclusion, and justice.
In this liturgy, Quaritch is indispensable. He is the necessary antagonist whose existence justifies the salvific mission of the Na’vi and their human intermediaries. His resurrection in Fire and Ash is not a failure of narrative imagination but a requirement of the regime’s sacramental economy. Just as the modern state requires the perpetual re‑creation of enemies to sustain its claim to protect the innocent, Cameron’s story requires Quaritch to rise again and again. His is a figure whose persistence ensures the ongoing need for secularized redemption.
Quaritch's' very existence is a sacrament of what progressives have deemed an illegitimate power, a visible sign of the invisible sin that structures the world. And, of course, because the Fifth Republic’s governing logic requires a perpetual struggle against oppression, Quaritch cannot be allowed to die. His death would signal the end of the liturgy and the collapse of the narrative that sustains the regime’s moral authority. This is a theological necessity for the modern state but it is also the paradox of the Fifth Republic: the regime must continually produce new forms of of domination it claims to oppose because, without them, its authority would lose its sacramental grounding.
The Na’vi naturally function as the protected class within this moral universe, the people whose suffering gives meaning to the struggle. Their innocence is a symbol of the world as progressives believe it ought to be. Jake Sully, the human who becomes Na’vi, is the mediator figure. He is the White Liberal savior who embodies the Progressive regime’s promise of transformation. His role is not unlike that of the modern citizen who internalizes the state’s liturgy and readily participates in its rituals of inclusion and exclusion.
What emerges, then, is a cinematic theology of power. Avatar is a mythic performance of the Fifth Republic’s governing logic that teaches its audience to see the world through the lens of perpetual oppression and perpetual redemption. In this sense, Cameron’s films extend the liturgy of the modern state into the realm of imagination.
The danger, as always, is that such narratives obscure the violence they themselves will sanctify. By ritualizing the figure of the oppressor, the regime ensures that its own coercion remains hidden beneath the mantle of justice. The resurrection of Quaritch, or the oppressor, is a political necessity. It keeps the liturgy alive, the sacrament of struggle intact, the managerial order justified.
For any state that seeks to sustain its power and authority, its myths must matter as much as its laws. Cameron’s Avatar saga offers a glimpse into the kind of stories that sustain it: villains must be resurrected so that the regime may continue to save us from them. The task of the theologian is not to reject such stories outright but to unmask the liturgies they perform and to reveal the ways in which they shape our imaginations and our loyalties. Only then can we begin to imagine a different kind of politic.
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