In the prologue to his new book The Last Supper, Paul Elie remembers being a young man in the 1980s, “riding the D train with The Village Voice and the Pensées in a black messenger bag.” His reading material was fitting preparation for this book, a masterful survey of pop culture—if a less sure treatment of religious controversy—in the ’80s. His canon is capacious: A-sides and B-sides, major works and minor, early stuff and late, live performances and music videos, installations, short films, feature films, essays, novels, memoirs, biographies. Elie deftly intercuts figures and artifacts in an elaborate chronology of the decade. It is a decade in which, he says, we are still living.
Elie describes the long 1980s as the full flowering of postsecularity—that phase of modernity in which religion rebounds from its losses, but religious authority does not. Religious topics and images suffuse a public that is rife with variance and contestation. The sacred mixes with the profane, if indeed the profane can still be called profane. Beheld by Andy Warhol, a soup can is sacralized, announcing that “presence is everywhere.” If this age has a dogma, it is that the ordinary is extraordinary.
A religious age produces religious art. But the art of the postsecular age, Elie proposes, is “crypto-religious.” Elie uses this term to denote art that “incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief.” Its styles are many: enigmatic (Bob Dylan, U2), rebellious (Madonna, Sinead O’Connor), sensuous (Prince, Leonard Cohen), ironic (Warhol), esoteric (Brian Eno, Arvo Pärt), blasphemous (Salman Rushdie, Andres Serrano), satanic (Robert Mapplethorpe). In every case, the artist’s religious profession is elusive. Crypto-religious art always “raises the question of what the person who made it believes.”
Elie’s canon encompasses any and every religion, but Catholics, more or less lapsed, are his most numerous and most typical subjects. Elie, of course, is the longtime Catholic correspondent for The New Yorker. But there is a further necessity. Catholicism is the great instance of a doctrinally and culturally thick religion that relaxed during the long 1960s, cutting loose millions of adherents and cutting slack to those who remained, even as its imperious phase lived in memory. So it supplies in spades the raw material of crypto-religious art: a public heritage that can be invoked, evoked, traduced, and remixed by artists who are shaped or exercised by it while disregarding its strictures.
Mark Judge dubs Elie’s book an exploration of “Art, Religion, and Culture in the ’80s:”
Put more simply, The Last Supper explores the deep hold Christianity still held on many people during the 1980s, including famous actors, artists, and writers. They took their religion seriously. Elie is a magnificent writer, and The Last Supper is deeply reported and researched. It powerfully evokes a time and place. Take, for example, Elie’s description of New York City. In the 1980s “the city was characterized by its celebrity nightlife: discos, launch parties, black limousines, lines of cocaine on the counters of mirrored bathrooms. And it was defined by squalor and decay.”
Despite these signs of moral decay, pilgrims to the city saw excitement and opportunity:
And yet those of us who had come from somewhere else were struck by by the stone-and-iron solidity of the city, not by the signs of decay. New York City at that moment was as ancient-looking as Rome. It was an unreconstructed place, free of the shopping malls and space-age sports arenas that had transformed the mainland. It was still in touch with the dark forces of clan and tribe and territory, of sin and retribution, and the Old World feel of the city was what set it apart from continental America.
Elie concludes that “the city was powered by the shared belief that it was the center of everything and that being a New Yorker gave your life meaning and purpose. It was this belief that drew you there and held you there.” Anyone who was alive at the time and familiar with the place can vouch for the accuracy of this assessment. It was a thrilling time to be a young artist, or even a young fan.
Artists like Madonna, U2, Sinead O’Connor, Martin Scorsese, and Andy Warhol saw the spiritual in art, film, dance, everyday objects. “As moderns,” Elie writes, “they affirmed the integrity of ordinary experience, in defiance of the Church; as Catholics, they saw the ordinary as imbued with a supernatural presence, in defiance of modernism in the arts.” This caused them “to express their Catholicism furtively—and cryptically.”
While ‘80s artists were creating “crypto-religious art,” at the Free Press, Madeleine Kearns describes Catholicism on the upswing: How Catholicism Got Cool.
Why are so many adults in the once-secularized West seeking to be baptized into the Catholic Church? I’ve been reporting on the rise in religiosity for a while now, and have heard many theories: Modern Americans are starved of beauty, meaning, purpose, and community. The Church of Rome offers all these things, but so do other religions. So: Why Catholicism?
“In an age of instability, people are attracted to ancient traditions; in an age of therapy-speak, there’s something appealing about the tough demands of Catholic doctrine,” Dan Hitchens, a senior editor at First Things and former Catholic Herald editor, told me. “Catholicism also has a visual and aesthetic heritage which has translated well into online culture. Catholics have turned out to be surprisingly good at using the internet to evangelize.”
To find out more, I tracked down a handful of the several thousand or so American adults who were baptized this past Easter, and spoke to those who hadn’t been raised Catholic, to find out why the religion appealed. Most of them were in their 20s, which makes sense: The Catholic boom is especially notable among Gen Z. A 2023 study by Harvard University found that the percentage of Gen Zers identifying as Catholic jumped from 15 percent to 21 percent from 2022 and 2023.
Why am I reading this story in the Free Press rather than the New York Times? Perhaps this cultural hot take from the Gray Lady a month ago explains why: “The New York Times just ran a 1,400-word story to explain what cross necklaces are.”
