Catholic scholar Paul Elie has written a penetrating, provocative, and insightful book. In The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s, Elie explores art, politics, and culture in the 1980s at the intersection with Christianity. His argument is that religion didn’t disappear in the Regan era—instead, people just became “crypto-religious.” 

“Crypto-religious” is a term coined by Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. While living in Paris, where he had moved in 1951 after defecting from the Communist regime, Miłosz received a letter from Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and author. Merton had read Milosz’s anti-communist classic, The Captive Mind. Elie describes the Miłosz’s philosophy: 

Milosz and his ancestors had been Catholics for centuries prior to the Soviet takeover, and his resistance to communism was rooted in the Catholic suspicion of spirit-denying ideologies, but he kept his distance from the Church. “I have always been crypto-religious and in a conflict with the political aspect of Polish Catholicism,” he told Merton. There, the expression was informed by the Cold War and the repressive circumstances of the Soviet bloc, where secrecy about one’s religion was a means of survival. More generally, it evokes the lives of the early Christians in the Roman empire, who kept the faith in secret in crypts and catacombs beneath Rome. In this book, “crypto-religious” is best understood in narrative terms. From novels, movies, songs, paintings, photographs, and the stories of how they were made a sense of what it means emerges. In shorthand, it goes something like this. Crypto-religious art is work that incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief. It’s work that raises 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—so that as you see it, hear it, read it, listen to it, you wind up reflecting on your own beliefs.

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.”

Elie cites James Joyce as an early modernist example:

in his career, the varieties of crypto-Catholic artistry converge. There’s the artist as an exile from his churchy upbringing, who has put away beliefs as childish things; the artist as a priest of the imagination, who consecrates the commonplace; the artist as at once a rebel and a religious pioneer, who follows the spirit to places where ecclesial institutions forbid it to go.

Andy Warhol is portrayed not as a rebel, but also as a Catholic artist who saw “spiritual presence” in ordinary things like a human face or a bottle of Coke. “Firm beliefs have softened,” Elie notes,

rituals been left behind, faith in a personal God thinned out or chipped away—but the sense of a supernatural presence remains, often made more intense by its separation from formal religion. Warhol’s attention to the ‘presence’ of the ordinary was the root of his identity as a popular artist; and it put him squarely in a line of twentieth-century writers and artists with Christian preoccupations—made him traditional, not outré.

If there is a drawback to The Last Supper, it’s that Elie withholds judgment where it is called for. He recounts the blasphemous work of artist Andreas Serrano, who immersed a crucifix in urine, but Elie doesn’t offer any condemnation. He recalls that in the 1980s the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe “draws scrutiny for photographs that blend sadomasochism themes and Satanic imagery,” but doesn’t say why such works are pornographic. The far-left priest Daniel Berrigan preaches that America is every bit as evil as the Soviet Union, even trying to co-opt the Czesław Miłosz phrase “the captive mind” to use against the West—an absurd pilfering of a phrase that had beenused to combat real tyranny.

There are long sections about AIDS and how the disease was interpreted by artists, but little mention that many people, not a few of them gay men, thought the disease might be a lesson that having multiple anonymous sex partners in a warehouse in New York might not be very healthy, not to mention very spiritual, behavior. I don’t want Elie to be a preacher, and his writing is so perceptive that you wouldn’t necessarily want him offering catechism. Still, some things call out for condemnation. Like too many of the ’80s artists he profiles, he can come across as a moral relativist.

I still remember when the crypto-religious commingling with Catholicism literally wafted into my nostrils on March 3, 1989. It was the day Madonna’s album Like a Prayer was released. I was working in a record store in Washington, D.C. The shipment of new albums arrived, and when I opened the box, I was hit with the scent of sandalwood. Madonna wanted Like a Prayer to “small like church,” so she had the first shipment scented with an oil associated with the Christian sacred. Even though I was having doubts about the Catholicism I had been raised with, I remember feeling a bit put off by the scented records. It seemed cheap, gimmicky.

The anti-communist Miłosz, with his honest wrestling with his carnal nature and realistic dialogue with John Paul II when the two men met—“You always take one forward and one step back” the pontiff said to the poet—was even then a more compelling figure. Of course, history has proven Miłosz right.

Finally, missing from The Last Supper is Matt Johnson, the leader of the great English 1980s band The The. In records like Soul Mining, Infected, and Dusk, Johnson wrestled with questions of Christianity, sexual morality, and politics. His lyrics were uncompromising. I still remember the night in November 1986 when Infected was released and a bunch of us went to a New Wave club in D.C. for a listening party. The title track on Infected is about AIDS. The lyrics, which still burn today, were not the kind of morally compromised message we were hearing from the media then—and today.

When desire becomes an illness instead of a joy
And guilt a necessity that’s gotta be destroyed

I can’t give you up, till I’ve got more than enough
So infect me with your love—

Nurse me into sickness, nurse me back to health
Endow me with the gifts of the man-made world
Take me by the hands and walk me to the end of the pier

Run your fingers through my hair and tell me what I wanna hear
Will lies become truths in this face of fading youth
From my scrotum to your womb
Your cradle to my tomb