Secular longing ... <em>The Way</em>, starring Martin Sheen, offers a broad definition of spirituality.

Secular longing ... The Way, starring Martin Sheen, offers a broad definition of spirituality.

In The Way, Martin Sheen plays a Californian doctor who carries the ashes of his dead son along the Camino de Santiago, the 1000-year-old pilgrim's route through France and northern Spain.

He teams up with a chubby Dutchman who smokes a lot of dope, an angry Canadian woman and an Irish writer who refuses to enter any church.

There is audience suspicion of companies doing ‘Godsploitation’ movies. 

The film was written and directed by Sheen's son Emilio Estevez and it is profoundly concerned with issues of faith, although not simply the Catholic faith that Sheen follows.

It offers a wide definition of spirituality - too wide for some conservative Christians. Just the dope is enough to keep many of them away.

That is one kind of faith-based movie. Here is another: Fireproof, from 2008, in which former child actor Kirk Cameron (of Growing Pains) plays Caleb, a Georgia fireman trying to save his marriage.

His father gives him a handwritten book that requires him to complete one task a day for 40 days.

By day 20, he's ready to give up. His wife remains impervious to his determined attempts to be kind, thoughtful and loving. ''She just doesn't love me,'' Caleb tells his dad, as they walk a leafy path beside a lake.

The father (Harris Malcolm) tells him to ask God for help but Caleb doesn't want to hear that. ''I don't need a crutch to get through life,'' he says.

''Son, Jesus is much more than a crutch,'' his father says. ''He has become the most significant part of our lives.''

Are you on the edge of your seat yet? Nor was I. Fireproof is a trudging movie by my standards as a film critic - earnest and dull - but my standards are irrelevant. Fireproof was a hit on the American Christian circuit, grossing about $US33.5 million. It claims to be the biggest independent American movie of 2008.

It was made for just $US500,000 by two brothers, Alex and Stephen Kendrick, associate pastors at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia. They co-write. Alex directs and often stars. Many of the crew are church volunteers. They have made four features and the latest, Courageous (2011), has already outgrossed Fireproof (Courageous is out on DVD in Australia). After each movie, the brothers pray for guidance about what their next project should be.

Christian movies are big business in the US, like Christianity itself. Most of the Hollywood studios have been keen to get a piece of that action since at least 2004, when Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ took $US611 million by splattering blood all over the audience.

Hollywood tried to turn itself into ''Holy-wood'' by starting faith-based marketing departments at every major studio. The Weinstein Company signed a first-look deal with Impact Entertainment of Tulsa. Rupert Murdoch's 20th Century Fox set up Fox Faith and Sony set up Affirm Films, distributor of Fireproof, Courageous and the recent Soul Surfer, about the girl who lost an arm in a shark attack in Hawaii.

The vice-president of Affirm Films, Rich Peluso, says the faith-based film market continues to expand. ''In the US, there are 140 million people who go to a Christian church every week and they engage with entertainment, same as everyone else,'' he says. ''From Hollywood's point of view, it is a smart decision to try to engage with those people.''

He sees the Kendrick brothers as the new frontier - not making blockbusters but films that work consistently. ''The Passion of Christ is not a story you can make every year,'' Peluso says.

Films such as Fireproof and Courageous can be made cheaply and marketed straight to faith-based communities.

''We happen to know where they are every Sunday … It is not monolithic but you can engage them through certain periodicals and websites they trust,'' he says. ''They want to engage with the stuff and not be offended. Us Christians, we watch TV and listen to the radio and go to the store … It's not rocket science.''

A lot of believers don't trust Hollywood and it is mutual - if many Christians believe the devil lives in Beverly Hills, many film people regard the Christian heartland as ''flyover country''. Even so, the relationship goes back a long way. Hollywood has been making ''Christian'' films since its beginning and Christians have had a huge impact on Hollywood. The Production Code, which governed Hollywood censorship for 35 years, was written largely by two loyal servants of the Catholic Church, journalist Martin Quigley and Jesuit priest Daniel A. Lord. In the 1950s, the Bible and its offshoots had a golden age in Hollywood epics including Quo Vadis, The Ten Commandments, The Robe and King of Kings, when Charlton Heston was Moses, Ben-Hur and El Cid the Moor-slayer and Frank Thring was nervous (he usually played the villain).

The bubble burst in the 1960s, when movies gave up trying to please parents and went after kids. The gap between Tinseltown and American believers has been widening ever since. Or it was until September 11, 2001, when the world turned.

The past 10 years have seen a return of the sacred, in a business more familiar with the profane, but the sacred now has a militant tendency. Gibson's Passion was virtually a call to arms to Christians to defend their faith against the newly militant Islam; the violent fantasy 300, hugely popular with young men, was a call to stop the hordes from the East, as the Spartans did at Thermopylae. These are from the pointy end but there are many other films of a less-violent spirituality.

Some of them are challenging, such as Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (Malick is a Catholic); others are just barmy, such as Legion, in which Paul Bettany played an angel with attitude, or The Book of Eli, in which Denzel Washington was a post-apocalypse warrior defending the last copy of the good book.

Others are harder to classify, such as The Way, which expresses a secular longing for the kind of spiritual certainty that drove pilgrims along the Camino.

The audiences differ for all these movies and the industry is already adjusting to fragmentation.

Some companies go after just one corner - there are specialists now in the African-American gospel market as well as the teen-horror faith market (God help them, literally).

Of course, there is audience suspicion of companies doing ''Godsploitation'' movies. Cary Granat, the chief executive and co-founder of Walden Media, probably the most successful company in the field of Christian movies (The Chronicles of Narnia), told Variety recently that Christians did not want marketing on a one-off basis from companies that were also putting out R-rated horror films.

Walden is owned by Philip Anschutz, a Denver oil billionaire who also owns 20 per cent of the US's movie theatres. Anschutz is conservative, born-again and in a position to exert a strong influence on the film industry's direction.

Hollywood's belief in faith-based film may already be fading. Some of the deals of a few years back have folded; many of the movies they made failed at the box office. Hollywood has learnt you can't just put a cross on a hill in a movie and expect devout audiences to rush in. Christians apparently like good stories just as much as non-Christians - possibly even more, given they are raised on some of the best.

The Way opens on Thursday.