The Sacred and Profane Decade

One of the stranger moments in the history of American popular music occurred in the winter of 1986, when the chorus of the hottest song on the pop charts featured Greek lyrics from a Christian prayer. Teenagers speeding with their friends rolled down their windows, let the wind blow their Aqua Netted hair, and yelled, “Kyrie Eleison“—Lord have mercy—”down the road that I must travel!” At keg parties in fraternities and sororities across the land, college students sang, in the native language of their social organizations, “Lord have mercy through the darkness of the night.” And while it’s true that many of the song’s fans probably thought they were singing “carry a laser,” Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie Eleison” topped the Billboard 100 for two consecutive weeks. As Tom Breihan describes it, the hit pop song is “a textbook example of ambiguous worship music.”

Paul Elie does not discuss Mr. Mister’s curious hit in The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s, but it’s the kind of thing he’s interested in—songs, novels, paintings, and other creative works that incorporate religious images and themes, though often in opaque or unusual ways. Elie borrows the term crypto-religious from the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who used it to express his simultaneous conviction about the importance of religious belief and his distance from orthodox Catholicism. Elie explains, “Crypto-religious art is work that incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief.” Such art, according to Elie, provokes audiences to wonder what the artist believes, which in turn inspires them to consider what they themselves believe.

In practice, the meaning of the Greek crypto, hidden, rarely applies—Elie uses crypto-religious to capture virtually any representation of religion in art. It can mean rooted in religious belief, respectful of it, skeptical about it, or even what orthodox believers would call heretical or sacrilegious (though Elie never does). He offers a thoughtful exploration of Bob Dylan’s “Christian phase,” which began in 1979, but it’s never clear how crypto-religiosity is remotely helpful in better understanding Dylan’s religious faith during that period. The same is true of U2’s early years. Elie occasionally likes to ascribe religious significance to nonreligious works and events by comparing them to what he often, unfortunately, calls “churchy” things, such as hymns and rituals and conversions, as if such things can be made crypto-religious merely by the power of Elie’s metaphor.

This lack of focus applies to the art and artists Elie explores, too. In his excellent 2003 book The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Elie crafted a compelling four-way biography of influential Catholic writers Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, and Thomas Merton. It was an ambitious project, but a focused one. In The Last Supper, Elie’s timeframe is more limited, but he incorporates a far larger cast, a feature that renders his storytelling fragmented and unfocused. He writes about fiction and poetry (Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, and William Kennedy), the visual arts (Andy Warhol, Andres Serrano, and Robert Mapplethorpe), and rock and pop (Dylan, U2, Leonard Cohen, Madonna, and Prince). Clergymen, activists, and politicians also play important roles as they weave in and out of his vignettes. There are interesting stories and personalities here, but too often Elie awkwardly bounces from one to another (he calls the book “a sequence of tales of the crypto-religious”) or includes unconvincing or irrelevant examples.

A handful of narrative threads loosely bind the book, including the religious impulse behind Andy Warhol’s final years. Elie emphasizes Warhol’s religious upbringing and continued interest in Catholicism, which included frequent Mass attendance. Warhol’s last major work—a series of reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper—is, Elie argues, a crypto-religious expression of his Catholic devotion. When Warhol juxtaposes the image of Christ breaking the bread—”this is my body,” Christ told the Apostles—with a cartoon of a muscle-bound man saying, “be a somebody with a BODY,” Warhol is both expressing his own sense of himself as a Christ figure and challenging “a church apprehensive about homosexuality.” This kind of interpretation, provocative but unpersuasive, appears throughout the book.

Elie devotes significant attention to Martin Scorsese’s passion project, The Last Temptation of Christ. The film faced many obstacles during its long trip to the big screen, as religious leaders tried to block its production and led protests condemning it when it was finally released in 1988. Elie chides the protesters for not actually watching the film, including the scene that caused the most controversy, in which Christ imagines having sex with Mary Magdalene. Elie suggests that priests should have watched the film with their parishioners—it was a teachable moment!—and insists the protesters got it all wrong, as the movie was a sincere exploration of the belief “that Christ is fully god and fully man.” As a matter of Christian teaching, that’s just silly. Christians believe Christ was fully human, but also perfectly human—that is, free of sin, and therefore not given to thoughts that he himself condemns during the Sermon on the Mount. Instead of acknowledging the director’s ignorance on this matter, Elie points to Scorsese’s authority as a former altar boy and accepts his common error of reducing our humanity to our capacity to sin. He even turns Scorsese into a Christ figure. Consider how he describes a period before the film’s release: “For the next forty days or so he will be in the wilderness, put to the test, made to stand in the crossfire of the culture wars in a spiritual exercise.”

You’d think that in a book this long, the author would have space to avoid oversimplification. Not so. In this Manichean tome, progressives are the forces of light, conservatives the agents of darkness. Pope John Paul II, Cardinal John O’Connor of New York City, and the Lutheran pastor turned Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus are comically villainous. During his discussion of the controversy over Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Elie lumps Cardinal O’Connor in with Ayatollah Khomeini, simply because both leaders called the book offensive without having read it—even though O’Connor explicitly condemned Khomeini’s fatwa urging Rushdie’s murder. In Elie’s telling of history, progressives never pick a fight—the culture wars only break out when conservatives overreact, deflect, or scapegoat. This leads to many implausible or outright contradictory claims. He condemns modern conservative Catholics for rejecting the ordinary as a site of the transcendent, even as he identifies what comprised ordinary Catholicism in the 1970s: “trapezoidal churches, felt banners, [and] leisure suits.” And surely Elie has heard of Opus Dei, a lay prelature that’s the preferred whipping boy of progressive Catholics, and whose primary purposes include the sanctification of everyday life.

Conversely, Elie’s unwillingness to scrutinize the artists he writes about is something to behold. He can’t muster any criticism of Andres Serrano’s notorious “Piss Christ” (a picture of a crucifix immersed in a jar of urine), unironically describing it as “a crucifix aglint in golden light.” He likewise withholds judgment when he describes Mapplethorpe’s sexual predilections: “He was drawn to extremely fit Black men, whom he sought to dominate in the sexual act, capping the domination by calling them an unspeakable word over and over again. … He would cry out to his partners to ‘Do it for Satan.’ … He blackmailed men he had photographed, threatening to disseminate the shots he’d taken of them. He ate shit.” Meanwhile, conservatives are criticized for “demonizing” Mapplethorpe. Elie suggests it’s “hard to say” what got people so riled up about the video for Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”—after all, it only depicted “Madonna picking up a dagger and seeing her palms stigmatized,” “a hint of saint-on-singer lovemaking,” and “images of a saint’s arousal.” We may never know what all the fuss was about! And while Elie does get around to condemning AIDS activists for desecrating the Eucharist during Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, he maintains “the cathedral action was not a violation of sacred space but a reclamation of it.”

As frustrating as this book is, it has several compelling accounts of artists drawn to religious imagery and ideas, especially The Neville Brothers and Patti Smith. (The pages about the English rock band The Smiths are much less convincing, in part because Elie omits their most relevant song, “Vicar in a Tutu.”) Ultimately, though, even as Elie mourns the tone of the culture wars in the 1980s, he doesn’t seem to have gained much perspective in the intervening years. His occasionally novel interpretations do not redeem (see that crypto-religion?) his predictable progressivism.

The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s
by Paul Elie
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pp., $33

Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author, most recently, of 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read).

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