‘The Last Supper’: Paul Elie feasts on artistic ferment over religion in the ’80s

In his gripping and essential new book “The Last Supper,” Paul Elie captures a pivot point in 20th century social history, when certain ideas about religion, art and sex in the ’80s crashed headlong into each other during an epoch that tends to be shrugged off by historians as a quiet interval between the gas shortages and political malfeasance of the ’70s and the emergent technological revolution of the ’90s. But it was in fact a breeding ground of artistic ferment, in which creatives grappled with what Elie calls crypto-religion, that “liminal space between belief and disbelief” that produced a wealth of thought-provoking popular art.

Elie’s masterful survey is a group portrait of artists and their fellow travelers who participated during a bloody crossroads in American life, when Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the White House in 1980 collapsed the walls between church and state, sparking a counterrevolution across the arts. It is this dialogue, this back-and-forth, that drives Elie’s fascinating survey, placing the reader in the thick of a convulsive era when ideas about the role of religion in modern life were fighting it out in the public sphere in ways that we haven’t seen since.

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Among these voters that swept him into the presidency in 1980, Reagan was a savior, wresting the country away from the unchecked permissiveness and aggressive secularism of the prior two decades into a new era of “family values” that encompassed adherence to the straight and narrow, of which biblical scripture was the key text. Gathering up zealots like Jerry Falwell under his new revival tent, Reagan preached the virtues of heterosexual marriage, of preserving the life of the unborn fetus, of chastity and moderation.

The Roman Catholic Church had Reagan’s back. Pope John Paul II, who had ascended to the papacy in 1978, toured the world like a beatific rock star, preaching the gospel of this new sobriety in football stadiums across the country. This was Christianity leached of all nuance or moral ambiguity, a battering ram of religious doctrine.

What emerged from this great leap backward was a diverse efflorescence of art that directly addressed the very things the church ignored. Elie calls it crypto-religion, in which artists negotiated the “liminal space between belief and non-belief,” and in so doing, created a rich body of work that raised the question “of what the person who made it believes, so that the question of what it means to believe is crucial to the work’s effect.”

Elie’s cast of characters — an eclectic list that includes Andy Warhol, Sinéad O’Connor, Bob Dylan, Bono, Czeslaw Milosz, Martin Scorsese and Robert Mapplethorpe — were, to varying degrees, children of the church who had internalized its tenets at a time when religion was still a central fact of life in America and Europe in the ’50s and ’60s. As Elie astutely points out, even an artist as outwardly estranged from religious life as Warhol carried with him the lessons of the Polish Byzantine Order of his youth. “He made silk-screen images of skulls, memento-mori style,” writes Elie. “He dressed dolls as priests and nuns and photographed them.” As an adult, Warhol attended church, albeit sporadically, and accepted a commission to refashion Leonardo’s da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” for an exhibition in Milan.

Author Paul Elie.

(Holger Thoss)

What these crypto-religious artists shared was a vision of divinity shot through with doubt and wonder, weighing the desires of the flesh against the ephemerality of the holy spirit. It was necessary for these insurrectionists to embrace faith on their own terms, transmuting their internal theological dialogues into popular art. On his 1979 album, “Slow Train Coming,” Dylan had come out in no uncertain terms as a man who now held fast to Jesus love. That record would have a profound influence on O’Connor, the Irish singer who wrestled with God like a scorned lover: “Tell me, where did the light die?” she sang in her song “Troy.” U2, whose lead singer Bono also looked to Dyan as an exemplar, turned the tropes of arena rock inside out, so that a garage-rock classic like “Gloria” becomes a “crisis of faith,” an “anthem of self-surrender” in which the devotion Bono feels “involves something larger than himself, and he’s trying to empty himself of everything that’s not in it.”

As religion and crypto-religion were locked in mortal combat, the AIDS plague was sweeping across gay communities like a firestorm, to the complete indifference of the federal government and their Christian handmaidens. The gay artistic community was ravaged, many of its greatest creative geniuses felled by the disease. But a groundswell of protest art was answering the call with a new kind of ardent feeling that damned the false piety and hypocrisy of homophobic Christian doctrine.

Peter Hujar, who would die from AIDS in 1987, used solemn, stark portraiture to create a new kind of crypto-religious iconography, while his compatriot David Wojnarowicz, another victim of AIDS, channeled his rage toward homophobic indifference into mixed-media pieces that restored his subjects’ bruised humanism.

Then there was Scorsese. The filmmaker, who had been raised in a strict Catholic household in New York’s Little Italy and had in his prior films grappled with ideas of belief in a violent world, was obsessed with adapting Nikos Kazantzakis’ 1955 novel “The Last Temptation of Christ.” It took years to drum up the financing, but when the 1988 film was completed, the religious right did everything in its power to block its release. No wonder: Here was crypto-religious art writ large, a vision of Jesus who was all too human, plagued by doubt and a troubled inner life. It was, according to Elie, the “Jesus of history more than the Christ of faith” — a man first, in other words. This dovetailed with the work of scholars such as Elaine Pagels, who were framing Jesus as a historical figure, rather than the “Christ of faith.”

Where has all of this crypto-religious practice left us in 2025? That liminal space that Elie describes between belief and disbelief has closed, at least for the time being. Yet even as “the American population has become less religious and religiosity more diverse,” the idea of mainstream artists grappling with religion no longer exists, perhaps because such matters are irrelevant in an aggressively outward-directed, spiritually bereft time. Elie’s brilliant book is a bracing reminder of art’s far-reaching power in matters of the heart and soul. His expansive vision of the ’80s rings out like a clarion call for a new era of rigorous artistic engagement with the unknowable and the unseen.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”