From Madonna to Piss Christ: why religion ruled the 1980s

HISTORY
The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s
Paul Elie
Farrar Straus Giroux, $64

There was a time when Christ was seemingly everywhere and nowhere all at once.

In the 1980s, the Christian messiah infiltrated many parts of popular culture, featuring as the subject of Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ, Andres Serrano’s photograph Piss Christ and Madonna’s Like a Prayer music video. Even so, many said the prophet was absent in an age of weakening morality, the displacement of the family unit and a deadly epidemic spawned from a “gay disease”. Spirituality and sanctity, they claimed, had been exchanged for materialism and mockery.

Such a conflicting tension – Jesus as a figure of provocation to artists and a missing messenger to conservatives – represents the fomenting of America’s enduring culture wars, argues Paul Elie in his new book The Last Supper. The Georgetown University scholar and New Yorker contributor retraces a calamitous decade where artists mined the imagery of Christianity to probe lofty existential issues and triggered heated public conversations on art and sacredness.

When Reagan arrived in the White House in 1981 and broke the figurative wall between church and state, artists began leveraging the divisiveness of religion to challenge its central place in America life. “[T]hey explored the controverted character of religion – its power to divide us inwardly against ourselves and to set us apart from one another in society,” Elie writes.

No part of popular culture was immune from these acts of appropriation (to some) and desecration (to others). The Last Supper frames this output as “crypto-religious”: works embracing tropes from major religions to examine and challenge its orthodoxies.

Painter Jean-Michel Basquiat’s motif of a coronet of thorns echoed Christ’s own crown, signifying the suffering and persecution of the Black experience. The Unforgettable Fire, the 1984 rock album by Irish band U2, “sought to complicate their devotion” to Christianity by wrestling with the conflicting “fires” of destruction and life. Despite claims of “keepin’ my baby,” Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach angered conservatives and the Catholic Church alike after the singer ended public performances with cries of “safe sex!”

So many of these artists, Elie states, “tested boundaries between sex and the sacred. Figures in what we call popular culture engaged questions of faith and art and the ways they fit together with an intensity seldom seen before or since.”

Reimagining the image of Jesus proved one of the most radical gestures multiple artists made, notably Scorsese. The director had been obsessed with Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel of the same name for years, eager to make The Last Temptation of Christ and render a more fallible saviour on screen. But many faithfuls viewed his depiction – one making a “Jesus of history than … the Christ of faith” – as shameful and blasphemous. The religious right did everything to block the film’s release, mounting widespread protests and an aggressive scare campaign. Preview screenings even had to be swept for explosives while Scorsese employed security because of ongoing death threats.

If The Last Supper is exhaustive in its examination of divinity weaponised in an age of excess, it is also sadly dry and desultory. Elie pulls together many disparate artists – from Andy Warhol to Leonard Cohen to Toni Morrison – to demonstrate his compelling thesis, but sometimes lets it unravel under his expansive lens and ponderous prose.

There are unconvincing claims about some artists (such as Toni Morrison’s adolescent conversion to Catholicism and its impact on her writing) and the jarring use of the term “crypto,” which doesn’t quite resonate. (It’s worsened because of our association with the modern digital currency.) A sole focus on New York also does make it seem like this culture war was only waged in the Big Apple when it extended far across America.

The Last Supper may be an intriguing take on a decade defined by major culture clashes, but it suffers the sin of taking one long and circuitous path to get there.

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