In The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex & Controversy in the 1980s (FSG, May), essayist Paul Elie looks at everything from Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” and Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and Prince’s “Controversy” to examine the decade when the modern culture war between religious and political conservatives and secular popular artists and entertainers was born. Elie, a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs at Georgetown University, argues that these popular artists were actually wrestling with religious issues, but doing so outside traditional religious spaces. “Paul’s book is an in-depth exploration of a turbulent time in American culture that seemed obsessed with secular freedom,” says Jonathan Galassi, FSG’s chairman and executive editor, “but in fact was shot through with noncanonical religious fervor.” (Elie once edited for Publishers Weekly and FSG.)
Why call the book The Last Supper?
The Last Supper in Christian iconography is both an ending and a beginning; it’s the last meal that Jesus celebrates with his disciples, and in some respects it’s the beginning of Christianity. In a similar way, I see the ’80s as both an ending and a beginning. It was the end of the long historical run where Christianity occupied pride of place in American society. And it was the beginning of the cultural opposite we’re in now, in which multiple religions are contending in a supposedly secular space, and no one faith is going to emerge victorious.
Many of these ’80s artists had a religious upbringing. Why do you describe their works as “crypto-religious”?
Crypto-religious work makes use of religious language, imagery, metaphor, and patterns, but from a position other than that of conventional belief. So, as we encounter that work—the painting, film, music, or novel—we’re forced to ask ourselves, what does the person who made this believe? Institutional Christianity was struggling to speak in a convincing way about matters involving sex and sexuality. For the Catholic church, for example, on many sexual matters, the answer was simply “no.” But people’s lives were more complicated than that, so crypto-religious artists worked out some of the sexual issues for themselves, knowing that many people in their audience were going through the same things.
Is America becoming more secular?
I don’t think it’s a simple continuum from intense religiosity to less intense religiosity to moderate secularism to secularism. In our moment, I see aggressive religion and aggressive secularism having at it—partly because the civic space is multireligious and partly because religious intuitions have lost credibility.
How did you experience the ’80s?
I’m a believing Roman Catholic, and I went to Fordham University, where Jesuit religious culture was really robust during the period the book depicts. The works I depict in the book spoke to religious questions with a power that I didn’t find in the diocesan newspaper or in the pageantry associated with the cardinals and the pope. When Morrissey, in the song “Accept Yourself,” asked, “When will you accept yourself?” he was posing a question about sexuality that his fans will recognize, but it’s also a question that was posed all through Catholic education at that time. Part of being Catholic is recognizing that we’re limited creatures, that we don’t have all options open to us, so on some level we have to accept ourselves.
