The Last Supper
Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s
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- £12.99
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times | Named an Essential Read by The New Yorker
This enthralling group portrait brings to life a moment when popular culture became the site of religious strife—strife that set the stage for some of the most salient political and cultural clashes of our day.
Circa 1980, tradition and authority are in the ascendant, both in Catholicism (via Pope John Paul II) and in American civic life (through the Moral Majority and the so-called televangelists). But the public is deeply divided on issues of body and soul, devotion and desire.
Enter the figures Paul Elie calls “crypto-religious.” Here is Leonard Cohen writing “Hallelujah” on his knees in a Times Square hotel room; Andy Warhol adapting Leonardo’s The Last Supper in response to the AIDS pandemic; Prince making the cross and altar into “signs o’ the times.” Through Toni Morrison, spirits speak from the grave; Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen deepen the tent-revival intensity of their work; Wim Wenders offers an angel’s-eye view of Berlin; U2, the Neville Brothers, and Sinéad O’Connor reckon with their Christian roots in music of mystic yearning. And Martin Scorsese overcomes fundamentalist ire to make The Last Temptation of Christ—a struggle that anticipates Salman Rushdie’s struggle with Islam in The Satanic Verses.
In Elie’s acclaimed first book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Catholic writers ventured out into the wilds of postwar America; in this book, creative figures who were raised religious go to the margins of conventional belief, calling forth controversy. Episodes such as the boycott sparked by Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video and the tearing-up of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in Congress are early skirmishes in the culture wars—but here the creators (not the politicians) are the protagonists, and the work they make speaks to conflicts that remain unsettled.
The Last Supper explores the bold and unexpected forms an encounter with belief can take. It traces the beginnings of our postsecular age, in which religion is at once surging and in decline. Through a propulsive narrative, it reveals the crypto-religious imagination as complex, credible, daring, and vividly recognizable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Elie (Reinventing Bach), a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, probes the origins of the American culture wars in this detailed if oblique history. At the center of his account are the so-called "controverts" who used "crypto-religious" language, tropes, and images to undermine traditional religious beliefs in the 1980s. They include Andy Warhol, who expressed his complicated religious identity in silkscreen prints of apostles and Brillo boxes, the latter of which played on Catholic-inflected notions of the "ordinary as holy," according to Elie. Also spotlighted are Madonna, who embodied a "struggle with traditional female ideals—of womanhood and motherhood, of virtue and erotic power," and Martin Scorsese, whose long-delayed The Last Temptation of Christ cut against Christian ideas that Christ's teachings were self-evident without historical interpretation. Elie situates this artistic ferment against the backdrop of an American Christian culture and a Catholic church that was grappling with sexual abuse within its ranks as well as the AIDS crisis. In the process, he probes how artists and popular culture understood and reacted to shifting currents of "authority and individual conscience," devotion and desire, and institutional hypocrisy. While the implications of those questions are fascinating and the individual artist profiles are vivid, Elie struggles to slot the book's various elements into a cohesive argument. It adds up to an intriguing yet disorganized portrait of a tumultuous decade.
