The Last Supper, in the Christian scheme of things, is both an end and a beginning: the end of Jesus’ time with his disciples, and the beginning of the religion established with the breaking of bread and the pouring out of wine. The early eighties were both an end and a beginning, at least where the place of religion in American life is concerned. The “long sixties” were ending, and the unsettled relationships among beliefs, institutions, and society that define the present moment were beginning to make themselves felt. “The long sixties” is a term coined by Fredric Jameson in 1984. The historian Eric Hobsbawm had identified a “long nineteenth century” extending from the French Revolution in 1789 to World War I in 1914. Jameson, a literary critic, then proposed that “the long sixties” extended from the late 1950s to “the general area of 1972,” and the idea informed an emerging revisionist history of the decade. If you consider the idea with reference to religion in America, “the long sixties” are even longer. They begin with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, say, and end with the founding of the Moral Majority and the taking of hostages in Tehran in 1979.
Public life in the developed world in the 1960s is often seen as involving the breaking down of a traditional Judeo-Christian civic order through progressive social revolutions. There’s truth to that. But in the United States, committed Christians and Jews actually play powerful countercultural roles in those revolutions, through the civil-rights and antiwar movements. In the seventies, Christianity is considered a moderate center—epitomized by Jimmy Carter, a Democrat and a Baptist, who is elected president to heal the divisions over civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, and Roe v. Wade. The center doesn’t hold, though. By the end of the decade, religion and society are in a fresh alignment. The “mainline” Protestant churches are closer to the sideline, and the Protestant fundamentalists are agents of disruption. The Carter administration is seen as captive to the Washington status quo, such that James Baldwin, in The Nation, observes that “the ‘born again’ today have simply become members of the richest, most exclusive private club in the world.” When fundamentalists line up against Carter, a churchgoing, Bible-citing Christian from the Deep South, and behind Ronald Reagan, a Californian whose piety is real but indistinct, the long sixties come to an end.
In those years, meanwhile, the populace has been changing in crucial ways. Through immigration from the Americas, Spanish-speaking Christians become a robust presence in the United States—at once supplanting Irish, Italian, German, and Polish Catholics in the parishes and establishing storefront Protestant iglesias. Immigration from Asia puts claims about the United States’s Judeo-Christian character at odds with demographics and the life of the street; Muslims, Hindus, Confucians, and Buddhists are making the United States a multireligious nation. All this is taking place while the conventional wisdom is that the United States, like other developed countries, is growing inexorably more secular.
It isn’t, not in any simple sense. That it isn’t—not in any simple sense—is clear in retrospect. The taking of the hostages in Tehran by Islamic fundamentalists in 1979 is a reminder that the rest of the world isn’t becoming inexorably more secular. Neither is the United States. Like Britain and France, it is becoming religiously more diverse. The emergence of a new religious right is partly a reaction to this change, as the fresh multireligious character of the United States prompts fervid white Christians to try to take “their” country back.
This is the “postsecular” age—as José Casanova, Jürgen Habermas, and many others will call it. It is an age in which religious forces and secular ones, rather than vanquishing one another, coexist in a relationship defined by controversy and marked by border skirmishes over territory that remains embattled and chaotic. It’s an age “obsessed with religion as a question” in public life (as Casanova points out), and so one in which the forces of secularization can’t be taken for granted. It’s an age shot through with “religiously inflected disruption of secular constructions of the real” (John McClure observes); an age in which doctrine, speculation, and “lived religion” (Robert Anthony Orsi’s term) are pressed together in works of art that combine “the enactment and the discussion of belief” (as Amy Hungerford puts it). In this age many people who are avowedly unreligious feel the “secular homelessness” James Wood has described. With the collapse of the Soviet empire and of Cold War categories—democratic and communist; Christian and atheist—the character of the “postsecular” age will emerge: mobile, polyglot, multireligious, anti-institutional; in the United States, Jesus Christ will be one god among many, the established churches will enjoy no special rights, and Christians in politics will style themselves a persecuted minority even as they claim to represent the majority. At the beginning of the 1980s, the postsecular age is at hand.
It’s at hand in New York City, especially. Always a liminal space, irreverent in spirit, a laboratory for what’s new and what’s next, New York circa 1980 is becoming a place where it seems that nothing is sacred—just as the televangelists say. It is made so not by decadence or immorality, however, but through dramatic changes in how the sacred is recognized and reckoned with, which make the eighties there a prelude to the present.
The city is the most diverse place in the United States, the once and future portal to the next Americans, who now as ever are bringing their religions to their new country, often with greater fervor than in the country they left behind. There are Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Haitians, and other Caribbeans. There are immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, from China and Korea. There are more Irish-born people than anyplace outside Ireland, more Jews than anywhere but Israel, and vast numbers of people who pay religion no heed. There is a vibrant gay community. Large numbers of gay men and lesbians have settled in the city, taking lead roles in fashion, cuisine, and the arts.
And there is the Roman Catholic Church, which claims several million members in the New York metropolitan area. Postwar and through the sixties the chancery behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral is known as the Powerhouse, where statesmen, businessmen, and clergymen seek Cardinal Spellman’s favor. The Church’s influence is diminished in the seventies; but when Pope John Paul II visits the United States in 1979 his first stop is New York City.
Catholicism’s prominence in the early eighties conceals its vulnerability. The new religious diversity challenges the Church’s sense of itself as the Church, a lofty entity that deserves special treatment from the government, the law, and the press. A generation after Catholicism claimed a central role in political life (through the Kennedy family, especially), its leader, John Paul, is divisive as well as popular, and its U.S. bishops are entangled in a pervasive history of sexual abuse of young people by Catholic clergymen—a history, at the time still largely untold, that they are determined to suppress. In New York City the crises of American Catholicism and gay men’s health converge. As HIV spreads, the gay community is struck hard. The sense of an ending is strong. Men eating and drinking together, hugging and coupling, know that this could be the last time. But the still-hidden crisis of clerical sexual abuse will shape the bishops’ response to the crisis of HIV/AIDS. Led by a new archbishop of New York, they’ll rise to controversy, at once to claim the moral high ground and to change the subject. Catholicism, animated by conflicts both open and hidden, is suddenly a locus of strife.
Those conflicts arise in part due to the turn taken by John Paul—often called a counter-reformation to the reformation that was the Second Vatican Council. But they also are signs of the new age that is beginning, as the issues that convulsed American society in “the long sixties”—involving sexuality, the role of women, institutional authority, and war and peace—fully come to bear on the Catholic Church.
The conflicts are registered early and powerfully in the work of artists whose ties are to Catholicism. Andy Warhol’s silk-screen apostles, Martin Scorsese’s anguished Christ, the candlelit vignettes of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video, Andres Serrano’s radiant, excretion-immersed crucifix: these works deal with matters that at the time are rarely discussed openly, if discussed at all. They move questions of religion and sexuality from the unspoken to the topical. In the moment, they are genuinely shocking, and Catholic and Protestant leaders, historically at odds, draw together to denounce them.
For conservatives, this “disturbatory” work (the term is Arthur C. Danto’s) spells the end of the world as they know it; for progressives, the stifling of artistic expression amounts to the same thing. Soon the works themselves are occluded by debates about the responsibilities of artists, public funding of the arts, the role of religion in government, and the power of the media. These are early skirmishes in the culture wars.
A decade later, Eric Hobsbawm would characterize the time from World War I to the fall of the Berlin Wall as a “short twentieth century,” a.k.a. the Age of Extremes. Plenty of the extremes of the 1980s had a religious dimension. Irish Troubles…Islamist jet-hijackings…the pope and the ex-Nazi Austrian premier and the convent at Auschwitz…philandering televangelists…a priest-rapist in Louisiana: those years are full of religion-inflected controversies that have nothing to do with the arts. One line of the story set out in my book, The Last Supper, traces a shift from actual wars to culture wars, from conflicts involving religion to conflicts over how religion is represented.
The English word controversy comes from the Latin controversus, “turned against.” The etymology is telling. Controversy isn’t just the tumult and strife that arise around public acts. It’s a characteristic of certain works of art and of the people who make them. It’s a turning against received ideas; it’s a generative force, a source of creativity. And it’s a personal state as much as a social one, rooted, for many of us, in the recognition that we are controverts—people turned against ourselves. Prince catches this sense of things in “Controversy,” from 1981. He can’t believe “all the things people say,” he sings as the song begins, and goes on: “Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?” And then: “Do I believe in God? Do I believe in me?” Seven minutes, and it’s all there: the conflicts over race, sex, and religion that will become the stuff of society-shaking conflict, the chatter and calumny about the person caught up in it—and the struggle between conversion and self-acceptance that runs through the process.
Warhol, Morrissey, Madonna, and Salman Rushdie are controversialists—drawn to conflict, inviting it, needing it for their work to have its full effect. Martin Scorsese is pressed into controversy by events. Prince at once thrives on conflict and insists that he’d rather be left alone to make music. Leonard Cohen and U2, who yearn for unity, dramatize the divides of the self—trying to dig out “the trenches within our hearts,” as Bono put it in “Sunday Bloody Sunday.”
The press coverage of the culture wars at the time typically foregrounds the evangelists and politicians rather than the artists. Not so in the telling of the story offered in The Last Supper. Here the artists are the protagonists, and their work, controversial to its core, stirs public conflict because it deals with controverted issues that are just coming into view. In some instances public controversy brings attention to work that might have been overlooked, or points up the work’s religious motifs. But most of the work that figures into the story is seen, heard, read, discussed, and recognized when it comes out. It is popular. At the very moment when the neoconservative cleric Richard John Neuhaus is decrying a “naked public square”—public life stripped of religious points of reference—religious imagery is hiding in plain sight in popular culture and the arts.
What’s striking in retrospect isn’t just that artists are making reference to religion in their work. It is how seriously and personally they take the religious point of view. They aren’t set against religious authority, at least not at first. They aren’t antireligious or irreligious. They’re crypto-religious.
“Crypto-religious” is a term the poet Czesław Miłosz had used in an earlier era to define his outlook. While living in Paris (where he had defected from Communist Poland in 1951), Miłosz received a letter from Thomas Merton, who had read his account of ways Polish intellectuals accommodated themselves to the Soviets, The Captive Mind, and they began a correspondence in 1959. Miłosz 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 “crypto-religious” 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 story, “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 artwork 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 end up reflecting on your own beliefs.
For these artists, prayer, scripture, image, and ritual are material they claim as their own via the imagination and seek to complicate and deepen, not to do away with. They forthrightly cite their religious roots; they count themselves as believers and regard their work as the expression of convictions formed through intense self-scrutiny. Seen as “bad,” they see themselves and their approach to religion as more faithful to the core truths of faith than the clerics and televangelists, and they hope the public will agree.
Leonard Cohen, speaking to a journalist friend in 1988, observes:
A lot of the information in our religious systems has been discarded, and people find themselves in predicaments that have the potential of being addressed from a religious point of view; but they lack the religious vocabulary to address it. This is unfortunate because although the secular approach to personality and the destruction of the self is valuable, it’s one-sided. The fact is we do feel a real connection with the divine and sense the presence of a deep meaning that the mind cannot penetrate.
There, Cohen speaks for the group, in effect, and at once speaks to the moment and offers an augury of the future. For the crypto-religious, religion isn’t a structure of historic oppression or a bad influence to be opposed on principle. It is inheritance and legacy, underworld and promised land. It’s a fact on the ground and a stumbling block. It is what it has been for would-be believers all along: a means of making sense of the world and our place in it.
For no small number of people the controversy-heavy decade of the 1980s was formative, the way the civil-rights movement, Vatican II, and the antiwar movement were for a prior generation. That moment formed us as crypto-religious, controverted to the core, and the story of that moment is the story of our ongoing quandaries of believing and belonging.
A third of a century later, many of the conflicts that arose in that moment are unresolved—some stuck where they were arrested at the time, others long since left behind. But the crypto-religious work of the moment is still with us, much of it as vital now as it was then. The secret chord sounds down the decades, intermittent but distinct; set against the certainties of the pulpit, the poll data, the homepage, and the social feed, it calls us back to the undercurrents of the religion-burdened events from that moment up to the present.
Threescore and ten—seventy years—is the scriptural span of a human life. And it’s often the span of a cultural epoch: from Plessy v. Ferguson to the Voting Rights Act, from the Baltimore Catechism to Vatican II, from the Great War to the fall of the Berlin Wall—the span Hobsbawm called the Age of Extremes.
By such a measure the span of time we call the 1980s is now a half-life ago—back there with subway tokens and pay phones and smoky cash-only bars; back before Y2K and 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy and the pandemic; before gay marriage, trans rights, a Jesuit pope, and a Supreme Court stocked with Catholics of a certain kind.
In the half-life between that moment and the present, as the liminal space between belief and disbelief has hardened, the connection between religion and violence has been made straight and narrow as a gun barrel through acts of violence committed in God’s name. The American population has become less religious, and religiously more diverse; while our civic life is now ill at ease with religion, our political life is burdened with it. All these changes have taken place before our eyes, in the supposedly naked public square, with cameras running and a news crawl below.
Their cumulative effect has been to blunt the experience, familiar to many of us, that informed the crypto-religious work of the eighties—the experience of matters of belief as complex, agonized, uneasily resolved, but crucial to our sense of life’s significance—and to push it underground all over again.
