How Sex and Religion Collided in 1980s Culture

New York Times

25-05-2025

What, you thought our long national nightmare of celebrating the 50th anniversary of 'Saturday Night Live' was finally over? Keep dreaming.
Paul Elie's new book, 'The Last Supper,' is gilt-framed by two musical performances on that show: Bob Dylan singing 'Gotta Serve Somebody' in 1979 during his evangelical Christian period, and Sinead O'Connor, in 1992: doing an a cappella version of 'War,' then ripping up a picture of Pope John Paul II to protest sexual abuse of children within the Roman Catholic Church.
Just as anniversaries are arbitrary, overmemorialized round numbers, no decade is merely 10 years. Elie extends 'the long sixties' (identified by the literary critic Fredric Jameson) through the beam projector of religion.
In his '60s-inflected 1970s, 'American Catholicism became thoroughly ordinary, the old works and pomps yielding to trapezoidal churches, felt banners, leisure suits, strummed guitars, Palm Sunday processions around the parish parking lot, and confession brought out of the booth and into folding chairs.'
In the nasty and brutish '80s, however, Catholicism roared back in new, subversive forms, with retaliation from the establishment trailing close behind. Andres Serrano's photograph 'Piss Christ' and Robert Mapplethorpe's 'The Perfect Moment' retrospective had both been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and many in Congress rained hellfire and brimstone once they were on view.
It was an origin story of the culture wars that have, lo these many years later, come to seem perpetual. Also playing a sometimes contested role as interfaith change agents: Morrissey and Toni Morrison, the Neville Brothers and Salman Rushdie.
Elie is a senior fellow at Georgetown University who contributes regularly to The New Yorker and has written lauded books about Bach and four Catholic authors.
The title of his new one, taken from Andy Warhol's final series, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's depiction of Jesus and his Apostles, also suggests a closing feast for the monoculture, before the internet inexorably hacked it to bits. 'The Last Supper' is really a progressive dinner, as Elie visits figure after figure and place after place — though again and again touching down in New York.
'A symbolic landscape out of Dante,' he writes. 'Famed for hedonism, it was a hive of asceticism, too.' Where else do so many people live alone in what is romantically called a studio?
As AIDS invaded, of course, swaths of the city also then became the second circle of hell. Elie writes about the high-level clergy who so gravely failed the sick and dying, in their insistence on continuing to denounce homosexuality as a sin, and the few who stuck their necks out, like the draft-record-burning Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan. ('Warhol's radical double,' Elie calls him, 'elfin, tricksterish, a master of the mass media, always ready with an apt comment.')
'The Last Supper' is preoccupied with a then-emergent sensibility that Elie terms 'crypto-religious,' a term borrowed from the poet Czeslaw Milosz. Crypto-religious works use the language and symbols of faith outside their conventional context — in theory inviting the audience to consider the artist's beliefs, and their own.
A white flag draped around Bono's shoulders? 'A cloak of crypto-religiosity.' Leonard Cohen's 'Everybody Knows'? 'A tutorial in crypto-religiosity.' Martin Scorsese's 'The Last Temptation of Christ'? 'A crypto-religious leap of faith.' Prince's eight-minute anthem 'The Cross'? 'Crossing over into the crypto-religious once and for all.' Madonna seeing stigmata on her hands and boogieing with a gospel choir in 'Like a Prayer'? Crypto-religious to the max.
Anyone who lived through the period will summon their own examples. Anna Wintour putting a model in a sweatshirt with a bedazzled cross on her first Vogue cover in 1988. The 1990 Life magazine photo of David Kirby looking Christlike on his deathbed that roiled the Catholic Church and was later used in an ad for Benetton. This was also the time when celebrities were elevated to 'icons,' a religious term — and a movie star celebrity was elected to the White House.
Another C-word Elie has us puzzle over is 'controvert'; usually a verb, it's used here to describe someone who, as opposed to a convert, is divided within, arguing with himself. Warhol and Berrigan, John Lennon, Bono and Scorsese's Jesus all qualify.
'The Last Supper' is incontrovertibly erudite and panoramic, but also crowded, sometimes confounding and walled off from the present moment — when crypto is actual currency — to which its subject matter is so foundational. One notable empty seat at its groaning table: Donald J. Trump.