Whether fa'afafine ever held a religious or ceremonial office is the genuinely contested question about the role, and this atlas records it as debated rather than settling it. Popular writing, and some scholarly and activist writing, presents the gender liminal roles of the Pacific as a single sacred third gender rooted in the pre-Christian order, holders of ritual knowledge whose standing was broken by missionary teaching. Pacific ethnographers read the record differently.
Niko Besnier's comparative work on Polynesian gender liminality, and the ethnography collected in Gender on the Edge, treat fa'afafine chiefly as a social gender category of Samoan society and find no documented fa'afafine office in the early record of Samoan religion, which describes its own priests and spirit mediums without assigning that work to gender liminal people. On this reading the sacred third gender picture is a romanticisation assembled largely outside the islands.
What is not debated is that Christianisation transformed the setting the role lives in. Mission Christianity arrived in Samoa in 1830 and the country is now among the most intensively churched societies in the world, so fa'afafine today negotiate their standing inside congregations, families and villages shaped by church teaching, active in church life while some denominations censure them. The debate therefore matters practically: whether the role's dignity rests on a recovered sacred past or on its place in Samoan social life is argued by the camps themselves.