When we have doubts or questions about our faith or what faith is, often we turn to a holy person or a sacred text. However, if I am to believe spirituality exists, I have to believe that it manifests itself in every single facet of the world around us.

Though I imagine many will not be a fan of the idea, films can guide us to many of these important questions about our faith, or lack thereof, as a whole.

The 1998 film City of Angels, starring Nicholas Cage, is one way of looking at the idea of religion and idolatry. What I mean by that is that there is an ongoing debate, to this day, regarding our natural inclination to humanize the divine. In City of Angels, an angel of death falls in love with a human woman and becomes a human to be united with her.

We view angels as agents of the divinity, and to give them human qualities, desires and flaws, and to many people this is unsettling. Often we lean toward placing our religious ideas in a world apart from ourselves, for if spirituality is something above us we can not hope to put it into a human context.

To some, anything that classifies the divine as human is creating something that’s easier to associate with and pray to, and this can be taken as a sort of social idol. But often we need to view even the mysterious and spiritual parts of our lives in human terms, because after tragedy we don’t always want a faceless, unknowable force. We want something to care for us in a human way.

2005’s Constantine, starring Keanu Reeves, centers upon a man who had attempted to kill himself in his youth and, to keep from passing into Hell, wanders the Earth trying to perform a selfless good deed to get back into God’s good graces.

In this film, the forces of both heaven and hell work against Constantine at different points in the movie, and in this way cautions us against placing so much faith in the divine that we forget to help ourselves. Constantine is able to save himself not because he chose one side over another, but because he did a good thing for another human being.

Other films opt not to talk about any religion in specific, but invent their own in an effort to give all sides of the religious spectrum something on which to agree. The Star Wars Hexalogy is a perfect example of this. The Force is portrayed as neither good nor bad, but in actuality contains qualities of both benign and malign forces.

It all ultimately depends on whom is using the force or, more specifically, how a person engages in his or her faith. It is up to the individual to understand the force, as Episode III is able to show that neither the Jedis nor the Sith are paragons of morality.

The Jedi fall because they attempt to repress all emotional engagement, which is the cause Anakin’s madness when he is told he can’t be with the woman he loves. The Sith are not wholly evil either, because they at least understand that allowing your emotions to master a part of yourself is necessary to appreciate life. Their flaw is in letting their desires completely master their minds.

1999’s Dogma may have one of the best messages of any film ever made. It asks you not only to decide what religion means to you as an individual, but it reminds us that religion is the pursuit of knowledge, not the attainment of it. Throughout our lives we will constantly have our faith tested, and Dogma shows that this is often the nature of religion: to constantly explore what our faith means to us.

Going beyond both Christianity and American films yields even more fascinating material.