THE LAST SUPPER

An analysis of popular culture’s incorporation of religious elements.

In 1979, when Bob Dylan released the album Slow Train Coming, fans felt betrayed that an “un-cooptable” rebel had become a born-again Christian, “marking his conversion with a set of songs dealing with spiritual warfare and holy submission.” He performed selections on Saturday Night Live, 13 years before Sinéad O’Connor sang Bob Marley’s “War” on SNL and infamously ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II. Those two performances bracketed a moment in which “figures in what we call popular culture engaged questions of faith and art and the ways they fit together with an intensity seldom seen before or since.” In this all-encompassing book, Elie documents the achievements of a range of artists from popular music, cinema, literature, and more whose work during that period, primarily the 1980s, was “crypto-religious,” a term coined by Czeslaw Milosz that Elie uses to mean “work that incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief.” Among the artists he cites are Andy Warhol, whose work, Elie argues, “put him squarely in a line of twentieth-century writers and artists with Christian preoccupations”; U2, the Irish band whose “mix of devotion and desire came together in The Unforgettable Fire,” their 1984 album; Madonna, who “made old-school Catholicism suddenly, inexplicably sexy”; and filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who devoted 15 years to making 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ, with its depiction of a fallible Jesus, which provoked a backlash from religious conservatives. The writing can be dry, but there’s enough entertaining material to keep readers interested, as when Elie notes that Universal Studios was so concerned about protestors when they showed Last Temptation to clergymen in New York that, before the screening, they “had the cinema inspected by men with walkie-talkies crawling down the aisles, looking for explosives under the seats.”

A thought-provoking evaluation of religious-themed art of the 1980s.