The Last Supper
Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s
by Paul Elie
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Pub Date May 27 2025 | Archive Date Jun 27 2025
Description
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 “cryptoreligious.” 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.
A Note From the Publisher
Advance Praise
“Paul Elie’s exhilarating and provocative meditation, The Last Supper, gathers together a disparate set of characters from the radical left to the radical right: politicians, philosophers, poets, filmmakers, visual artists, authors, but mostly musicians. What binds them in his telling is not simply a decade—the 1980s—or their work, notoriety, and genius; it is religion. Elie’s revelation concerning the role of religion in modern life is as important as it is novel. Important because in an age of confusion, it provides answers. Novel because he introduces us to the corners of pop culture where God exists hidden in plain sight.” —Mary Gabriel, author of Madonna: A Rebel Life
“Paul Elie has put together a creative jigsaw of the 1980s. Witten with clarity and grace and style, the pieces of this cultural history interlock masterfully. If you began listening and learning and loving in the 80s, this is the book for you. Forget about grandeur, Elie reveals to us that the world is, in fact, charged with the grungeur of God.” —Colum McCann, author of Let The Great World Spin and Twist
“Only Paul Elie could give us this groundbreaking recounting of the hidden Catholic impulses that animated some of the most popular and influential artists in the early 1980s—everyone from Madonna to Andy Warhol to Martin Scorsese. Elie’s argument that many artists of that era were, in a sense, 'crypto-Catholics' is successfully borne out through a careful (and fascinating) analysis of their work and a thoroughgoing (and enjoyable) immersion in that era of volcanic creativity and change. Beautifully written, artfully presented, carefully researched, always surprising—and frequently brilliant.” —James Martin, SJ, author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything
“The Last Supper is a brilliant and daring work of history, one that shows how sex, art, and faith merged to produce not just the crazy 1980s but also the crazy world we inhabit today. Paul Elie follows an unforgettable cast of characters—from Warhol to Madonna to Toni Morrison—out to shake up the world, in a book that’s equally smart and entertaining.” —Jonathan Eig, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for King: A Life
“Madonna, Dylan, Scorsese, Bono, Warhol, and Prince walk into the 1980s, and what follows is not a bad joke but the best cultural history yet of that tectonic decade. In these Popes of Pop, cocksure televangelists and Reagan revolutionaries saw only heresy and AIDS-inducing decadence. Elie sees faith and art struggling to be born amid an explosive fusion of sex and spirituality. ‘Crypto-religion,’ he calls it, in this secret history of the only kind of faith worth celebrating.” —Stephen Prothero, C. Allyn and Elizabeth V. Russell Professor of Religion Emeritus at Boston University and author of Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780374272920 |
| PRICE | $33.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 496 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Hannah K, Reviewer
This is a particular angle I've always wanted to see on popular and art history forthe 80s (specifically the growing rebellion against religion, especially Christianity, as the dominant force in peoples' lives, and various examples of major figures of the times own personal believes and some of the art that was made during this time. Hell of a read, in the best kind of way.
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