Were the 1980s a Golden Age of Religious Art?

Writing about religion is funny. The category is so encompassing as to include in its godlike scope even logical opposites and antinomies, such as belief and unbelief, the otherworldly and the this-worldly, that which is understood to be factual and that which is promulgated as imaginary. A person who writes a book about religion may struggle more over what not to include than over what to include. Theology was long ago demoted from its institutional role as the queen of the sciences, but religion, as an object of systematic or catch-as-catch-can learning, still presides unacknowledged over every other object of study, at least in this way: that it potentially includes them all.

Such an all-inclusive object of inquiry naturally raises one’s suspicions. If everything is religion, then perhaps nothing is — or at least the category is too big to use. Paul Elie’s The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s initially raised such questions for me. Beginning with Bob Dylan’s late-’70s religious turn and ending, more or less, with Sinéad O’Connor’s infamous 1992 Saturday Night Live appearance, the book offers “a sequence of tales of the crypto-religious” in 1980s art. It ranges widely but returns frequently to Catholicism, Elie’s childhood religion, and to New York City, his home during those years. He borrows the term “crypto-religious” from the poet Czeslaw Milosz, and he defines it as “work that incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief.” A lot rests on how he means “conventional” here: I’d call Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), with which Elie engages at length, a slightly edgy statement of orthodox Christology. Like its subject, the film simply happens to have evaded the comprehension of some would-be religious authorities.

To be thus at war with itself is already also part of the story of any religion. It’s hard to see very far into the implications of any of our ideas. Perhaps Elie also feels some dissatisfaction with his initial definition, for in the very next sentence, he defines “crypto-religious” again, just a bit more expansively: “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.”

However you codify it, “crypto-religious art“ is an appealing concept, and one of wide and continuing application: What else do you call a film like Magnolia, with its Book of Exodus denouement, or the hell-haunted, starkly moralistic early work of Black Sabbath, or even that Lil Nas X song where he crushes on Satan? You could write a very similar book to Elie’s about the cultural legacy of aughts-era evangelicals: on the one hand, Patricia Lockwood and boygenius; on the other, most of President Trump’s cabinet. (You could call it Two Versions of Apostasy.)

Elie’s cast of characters is somewhat miscellaneous. It includes devout figures such as Daniel Berrigan and Aaron Neville, and artists whose tortured relationship to faith is so persistent and deep that it gradually becomes legible as just another way of being devout, such as Martin Scorsese, Sinéad O’Connor, Bono, Prince, and Patti Smith. It also includes artists who straightforwardly disbelieve — to the extent that disbelief, or for that matter belief, are ever straightforward: Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, Milosz, and Salman Rushdie. It includes artists for whom religion doesn’t seem that central but who simply find themselves drawn to using scriptural metaphors and iconography, such as Bruce Springsteen and Madonna. It includes artists who seem to have gone through a religious phase, one that left a mark on them, such as Toni Morrison, Andy Warhol, and Bob Dylan. This book is like a discount store in a midsize city: Wait long enough and it feels like everybody you ever knew eventually shows up.

On that level alone, The Last Supper is consistently enjoyable. Elie, renowned for earlier books on such figures as Flannery O’Connor and J.S. Bach, rarely encounters an artist about whom he cannot find something intelligent to say. I was gratified, for instance, by his treatment of Louise Erdrich, a transparently religious writer whose fluency in more than one religion seems to have caused some readers to think of her as outside the subject entirely. He hails her story “Saint Marie,” with its intermingling of Catholic and Native American religious elements, “now clashing, now intermingling,” as “a breakthrough, and a striking act of synchrony.” He also reads it as an anticipation of the clergy abuse crisis, a work of “cryptic augury.” In the same chapter, he offers lucid readings of novels by William Kennedy and Toni Morrison. And imagine my excitement, as a Tom Waits fan, when that hobo-genius saunters through for a few pages. Elie artfully limns the man’s ’70s career and his ’80s turn toward the avant-garde — this book is, if nothing else, an epic demonstration of the critic’s art of artfully limning. It turns out that Tom went through a church phase as a kid, but asked whether he still believes, tells an interviewer, “Not really.” Of course not. For anyone with ears, Tom Waits’s job is to be the object of religious devotion.

Appealing as it is, crypto-religion can be unsatisfying both as a subject of study and as an artistic strategy, and for similar reasons in both cases. Religious symbols and narratives are fun to play around with, rich in meaning and applicability. But even if we don’t want an artist to declare whether they believe something every time they use these elements, we still want them to be saying something. And the very polysemy of these symbols and narratives can trick artists into a kind of pointless and sterile riffing. At its worst, such art fits the philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s classic definition of bullshit: The artist seems to be making claims that touch on the most existentially resonant topics imaginable, and at the same time, the artist doesn’t care whether what they’re saying is true, or meaningful, or not.

It is perfectly normal not to be able to decide whether or not we believe in a religious doctrine. It is another to act as though their truth or untruth were a matter of indifference. It matters whether or not there is such a state as enlightenment, and whether or not dharma is the purpose of human existence, and whether or not there is one good of whom Muhammad is the prophet, and whether or not Jesus rose from the dead. Some crypto-religious art is deeply powerful because the artist cannot resolve to believe or not; but lots of it is, in the precise Frankfurtian sense, bullshit because the artist doesn’t really care. I would, for example, respect Andres Serrano — the photographer who famously immersed a crucifix in a jar of urine and found himself the victim of an old-fashioned right-wing witch hunt — far more than I do if he simply said that “Piss Christ” is an attempt to rile people up. The line that Elie takes here is that “Piss Christ” “stood on the threshold, in liminal space: inside and out, religious and not,” and he quotes Serrano, with seeming approval, as saying that the work expresses “something inside of me that had to come out.” What exactly does it express? That getting crucified is like getting peed on nonconsensually? That urine can be kind of pretty, depending on a person’s hydration levels and the mineral content of their diet, if you photograph it just right, and if you don’t tell people right away that it’s urine? I call bullshit, unless “something inside of me that had to come out” is simply Serrano joking about the urgency of one’s need to go.

Elie sometimes seems content to follow the example of the shallowest of his subjects in this way. Especially early in the book, he seems drawn to provocative analogies that on examination turn out to mean nothing, comparisons that obscure rather than reveal, because the religious language that suffuses the book is so charged that it can seem to make any statement meaningful or provocative. Crypto-religious art, and criticism that takes a crypto-religious approach, can substitute the appearance of a vast and indistinct meaningfulness for actual meaning. A hilarious instance of this occurs when, discussing Catholicism’s failure to embrace the new technologies of safe sex, Elie waxes rhapsodic about how we now have sex with the “intercession” of a condom. Saint Magnum pray for us, now and at the hour of our little death.

For these reasons, I spent a lot of the book enjoying myself but wondering whether there was a real place all of this was going, or whether it was just a series of little blips of apparent meaning that would ultimately end nowhere. At one point, I entertained the possibility that The Last Supper was best thought of as a kind of autofiction about living in New York City (as Elie did) during an artistically fruitful decade, a novel in which the protagonist is only glancingly present, made to enact a cameo role in his own story, like the disciple Mark making his famous little dash through those late verses in his own gospel.

But I ought to have had a little more faith in Elie. His last main chapter, “Hard Lines,” on the increasing ugliness of late-’80s culture war, makes plain both the book’s overall teleology and the reason why, early on, it’s a little more baggy and loose. The clue is right there in the subtitle: “in the 1980s.” Crypto-religious art maintains its “crypto” status by not declaring itself, and the culture wars of the late-Reagan-early-Bush years made that position untenable. You had to say which side you were on. You had to make clear whether you were with the people picketing Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ or the people waiting in line for tickets, whether you wanted to buy Salman Rushdie’s new novel or murder him. It was hard to say that “Piss Christ” was kind of a stupid photograph when other people were sending death threats to its creator, and using the work itself as a pretext to end all federal funding of the arts. In the Gospels, Christ at one point says, of a rival miracle-worker who is not part of his movement but who drops his name, that “whoever is not against us is for us.” Later, when his public ministry is further along and his opponents have started to ask more pointed questions, he says, “Whoever is not for us is against us.” He speaks to different moments in the intensification of a conflict.

ACT UP, the brave and startlingly effective anti-AIDS activist group whose methods combined dead-serious political action with elements of performance art, perhaps unintentionally embodied this truth of the cultural moment when members of the group desecrated the elements of communion during a famous 1989 protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in New York City. As a Christian, I can’t ever approve of desecrating what Catholics believe to be Christ’s body, and yet I also recognize in ACT UP’s whole deal a starkly Christlike pattern of healing the sick and lifting up the outcast. The St. Patrick’s action is such that I must pick a side, and also such that, whichever side I pick, I betray my religion. That’s the thing about culture wars: They force a kind of side-choosing that distorts reality far more than any lazy analogy or careless metaphor ever could. In this way, ACT UP’s protest seems, whether intentionally or not, a brilliant meta-statement on the falseness of the culture war itself.

The same dilemma arises with Sinéad O’Connor’s famous rending of a picture of the pope during a Saturday Night Live appearance in 1992. At the time, it caused a full-on moral panic. Even Madonna decided to land a few kicks on an already-down O’Connor. Now it is generally interpreted as an idiosyncratic but spiritually devout artist’s protest against institutional child abuse — another repeated concern of Elie’s book. Elie includes O’Connor’s own explanation of what she meant, which, as is often true of O’Connor’s self-interpretations, muddies everything beyond recognition. (God, I miss her.)

And with that, The Last Supper book closes, having attained the distinction of being an altogether admirable piece of crypto-religious culture in its own right. Even as I mentally argued with it, wondering how Elie separates “conventional” belief from other kinds, asking myself whether all of his subjects merit the attention he gives them, I finished the book with a renewed appreciation for the way belief itself is a complicated thing, enfolded upon itself. We are sometimes most pious in the ways we doubt our beliefs, and most blasphemous in the ways we defend them.