Lately, everybody has been looking for the decade that did this to us—put the country in the appalling state of full-spectrum hatitude that we now permanently inhabit (a condition so many seem to enjoy). The ’80s for many reasons give off the strongest scent as the culprit. Paul Elie’s The Last Supper, a sprawling and many-peopled time machine of a book, does the necessary forensics and locates the roots of our endless culture wars in that decade—but his ’80s may not be the ’80s you lived through and/or remember and/or have read about and/or watched on replay.

From a distance of more than three decades (yikes), our collective memories of the ’80s skew heavily secular: the greed-is-good era of a surging stock market, hostile takeovers, and insider trading scandals; hip young investment bankers (a category of humans previously undreamt of) charged up on Bolivian marching powder and partying hearty into the night at downtown nightclubs; President Reagan sternly admonishing Gorbachev to tear down this wall and somehow, no one can quite say how for sure, bringing the cold war to an end with a soft landing. The usual hackneyed imagery of a CNN looking-back documentary.

Paul Elie remembers things differently and far more deeply. A cradle Catholic and still an observant one, he has over the years carved out an admirable niche for himself as the thinking believer and village explainer of those hard to fathom people for the readers of the Times, the New Yorker, and similar publications. (He had a first-rate take on Pope Leo’s papacy up on the latter’s website within a day of the new pontiff’s ascent.) The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Elie’s group biography of four prominent midcentury Catholic writers and intellectuals (Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, and Thomas Merton), is one of the best achieved examples of a tricky genre. He manages to make the fact of his faith very clear while remaining uninsistent about it—unlike, say, the profoundly annoying Ross Douthat, who can’t and won’t shut up about his conversion to Catholicism (as strongly as many of us wish he would). As a critic and historian Elie has clarity, depth, and range—qualities that serve him well as he navigates the stormy and turbid high/low waters of his chosen decade’s cultural output.

Elie is an unusual figure in the secular publications and the lists of the publishers he writes for because he takes religion and its manifestations as primary—not simply as an area of culture (film, music, lifestyle, and so on) treated as just another subject for investigation. His sincerity in these matters will be refreshing to some of us, but a bit puzzling to others who find the idea of religious belief odd, difficult to grasp, or threatening. In the ‘80s, Elie—a Columbia student and then a young editor—was, as he writes in The Last Supper, “a Catholic dangling man,” suspended, as so many Catholics of an intellectual bent are, between the dictates of their religion and the radically disjunct experience of urban—specifically New York—life.

I myself am a cradle Catholic raised at first in its hardshell pre–Vatican II version, and while I lost my faith, perversely enough, one weekend in March 1968 at the end of my high school’s senior retreat, I retain a distinct Catholic mindset, even as my conscious reasons to believe are nonexistent. So, on this score I cannot pretend to be entirely objective about The Last Supper, and on others as well. I was interviewed for the book and even have an entry in its index. I was a close observer and an eyewitness to some of the events Elie recounts—specifically the publication of The Satanic Verses and the plague of AIDS, which hit the publishing world with particular virulence. I published books by the poet and memoirist Jim Carroll, whose 1980 debut rock album Catholic Boy is one of Elie’s curtain raisers, and by the novelists Don DeLillo and William Kennedy, whose White Noise and Ironweed come in for close examination. Elie’s ’80s really were my ’80s.

Elie’s filter for sifting through the cultural record of the ’80s is a concept he borrows from Czesław Miłosz, the idea of the “crypto-religious.” A nonbeliever himself, Miłosz used the term specifically in the context of a Polish Catholicism struggling to accommodate itself to communist rule. Elie expands the term’s meaning and its reach considerably, writing that “crypto-religious art is work that incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief.” Thus Bach’s St. Mathew Passion is unambiguously religious, as are some of Messiaen’s compositions, while Leonard Bernstein’s eclectic Mass, say, is crypto-religious. It is at once a capacious and a slippery idea, a wide net with a fine mesh that draws in more artists and artifacts than some readers may feel comfortable with. One question that shadows the book is whether a concept forged in a deeply Catholic country under the yoke of Communism can easily be deployed to interpret the anything-goes culture of these United States.

Elie’s thesis, or organizing principle, is that in the ’80s, writers, musicians, photographers, painters, and filmmakers he examines were uniquely engaged with the intersection of matters of faith and of art in ways that were personal and profound and inevitably controversial. A new kind of crossroads then, in many ways as bloody (or at least as bloody-minded) as the famous earlier one where literature and politics met. His critical model is the Greil Marcus of Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces, putting his phenomena under pressure until they yield up “a kind of secret history” not previously acknowledged or understood. The right-wing media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart was probably far from Paul Elie’s mind as he composed The Last Supper, but I picked up more than a few lipstick traces of his famous observation that politics is downstream from culture in the book. There is little strictly political material in The Last Supper, but Elie’s sympathies and the broader implications of his handling of cultural material are hard to miss. He concurs with many other observers that since the ’80s, we’ve been living in a “post-secular age,” where the boundaries that used to demarcate religion from politics and from art have collapsed, leaving us to inhabit a world of chaos and endless controversy.

The leader of Elie’s crypto-religious Big Parade and its thematic and philosophical center of gravity is Andy Warhol, once fittingly dubbed the Pope of Pop. The famously reticent and deadpan Warhol, in his artworks and faux-naïve pronouncements alike, put the cryptic in crypto—what he meant and felt and intended at any one time was always open for interpretation. Warhol was raised in a primitively Catholic family in Pittsburgh, and even while orchestrating the activities of an infamously deviant and decadent circle largely comprising, in Jim Carroll’s nice phrase, “Catholics on hiatus,” was a regular attendant at Sunday mass and a weekly server at a church soup kitchen. (But did he go to confession on Saturdays? And if so, how did those encounters go?) Upon observing his prototypical Catholic behavior during a visit to the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City, Warhol’s friend Bob Colacello, also a Catholic, realized the depth of his devotion. Warhol’s silkscreened celebrity portraits have of course been conventionally interpreted as Pop updates of religious icons.

The series of artworks that give The Last Supper its title were undertaken by Warhol as a commission for money—no surprise—and repurposed imagery from a terra cotta knockoff of Leonardo’s painting, as well as from mass cards and similar detritus. In some cases, the images are blown up out almost out of all proportion to take up most of a gallery wall; in others, Warhol festoons images of Jesus with the logos of well-known consumer goods. The actual degrees of either irony or mockery or sincere belief are, of course, impossible to gauge, although Elie gives it an impressive try. For my money, and possibly his, Warhol’s true crypto-religious masterpiece was posthumous: his celebrity-packed high-low tabloid-extravaganza of a funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, an only-in-New-York-kids production that may have successfully opened the gates of heaven for him.

On and on rolls the crypto-religious cavalcade of The Last Supper, for the most part chronologically, much of it gripping in an I’d-forgotten-that fashion, some of it a bit wearying. Your engagement level will vary depending on your investment in one or another of the many artists discussed; the pages focusing on U2 and its savior-pseud Bono turned fastest for me. An extended examination of the life and work of the New Orleans musician Aaron Neville and his struggles with addiction is heartfelt and sympathetic, but it still feels, geographically and culturally, an awkward fit.

Elie’s strengths are more those of a gifted cultural critic than a narrative journalist, and there are few too many transitions of the “Meanwhile . . .” variety. His is a highly Catholic processional, full of hot schoolgirl types—Madonna, the presiding pop star of the decade and a Catholic girl who did not “start too late,” takes up much space and rightly so—and spoiled altar boys like Carroll, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, especially, Martin Scorsese, who briefly aspired toward priesthood in his youth and who may be the least crypto- of all the figures in the book. Scorsese’s commitment to religion runs just as deep as his fascination with male violence. His prolonged Garden-of-Gethsemane moment was his years-long struggle to get his Pasolini-inspired adaptation of the novel The Last Temptation of Christ made. The film released the kraken of the boycottmeister Donald Wildmon and his American Family Association, which tried to keep it from ever being seen. (I remember doing my cultural duty and viewing it on the Ziegfield’s big screen in Manhattan the day it opened; I left the theater thinking, “All that tsuris for a not very good movie.”) The occasional Protestant and Jew also come in for coverage, none more impressive than Leonard Cohen, a truly serious and somewhat pantheistic man who alone of Elie’s cast of characters ducked controversy.

The Last Supper really hits its stride and strikes thematic gold in its climactic crypto-religious coverage of two of the central agons of the decade: the AIDS crisis and the publication of The Satanic Verses and the resulting fatwa against Salman Rushdie. The Catholic Church managed to demonstrate its best and worst sides as the body count of the unnerving epidemic rose. St. Vincent’s, the Catholic hospital in the West Village, ministered heroically to the ill and the dying, most of them gay men, largely without prejudice or judgment. Hospices and other care facilities were established in other cities across the country by open-minded Catholic organizations; the spirit of Vatican II had not been extinguished. But the Church hierarchy, represented most visibly in the person of Cardinal O’Connor of New York, could not let go of its explicit disapproval of homosexuality and its opposition to condoms in the face of the so-called gay plague, and the tensions between the Church and an increasingly angry and activist gay community mounted.

This all came to a head on December 10, 1989 when ACT UP organized the famous “Die-In” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to disrupt the Mass being celebrated by Cardinal O’Connor, which climaxed when an activist receiving Communion broke the host in pieces and threw it on the ground, for Catholics a shocking act of desecration. Elie treats the Die-In almost as a work of performance art, a sacred space purposefully violated to a secular end, an action of a piece with the culture of the decade and the performative politics on all sides of the spectrum. Well maybe, but as a media event it was brilliant and indelible, making ACT UP truly a force to be reckoned with.

One of the posters at the event taunted the Cardinal as AYATOLLAH O’CONNOR, a reference to his earlier condemnation of The Satanic Verses from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s as “insulting and insensitive to the Moslem faith” without having read a word of it. I worked at its publisher, Viking Penguin, as the book was acquired and moved towards publication and had a close-up view of the whole debacle. Peter Mayer, the head of Penguin Books worldwide, bought world rights to the book for tons of money as a big-statement acquisition, but my sense was that few people in the company besides its editors on either side of the Atlantic took much interest in its contents. Elie rightly observes that the book was “hard even for the people who were publishing it to understand.” Certainly, in that highly secular and almost exclusively atheistic, Christian, or Jewish company, no one understood how the novel’s “playful” (heh) provocations and complex fictional interpretations of contested and sensitive Islamic texts would land with a billion actual Islamic believers, unschooled in postmodern literary strategies as they were. So the Ayatollah Khomenei’s fatwa—meaning, just so we are clear, a sentence of death on Rushdie—of course exploded like a nuclear device in the publishing industry and subjected Penguin employees to an unprecedented level of stress and danger.

For at least a year, the mailroom in Penguin’s New York headquarters utilized a bomb-sniffing dog—named, for some unknown reason, Yalta—to screen packages. On one especially unnerving Saturday the few employees in Penguin’s 23rd  Street office that day looked out their windows to see thousands of New York–area Muslims who’d arrived to protest the publication of The Satanic Verses bowing to Mecca in unison. The management of the company behaved with disgraceful cowardice. Mayer and then-president Marvin Brown decamped from their New York apartments to their weekend homes in Woodstock and the Jersey shore, respectively, leaving Rushdie’s editor and publicist to make decisions and statements without guidance from above in an atmosphere of supercharged anxiety. Which they did, I happen to know, brilliantly and heroically.

If you were a member of the literary community at that time, everything felt radically uncertain and threatening at the molecular level. The biggest threat we’d faced up to that point was the specter of chain bookstores. No one knew what the fact of the fatwa meant or how or if the crisis might end. It sometimes seemed that the wisest counsel was to put one’s head down and go to ground rather than speak out. So it felt like a comforting breakthrough to familiar territory when a group of prominent Catholic writers including William Kennedy, Maureen Howard, Don DeLillo, and Garry Wills signed a public letter of support for Rushdie and his novel and in protest of its condemnation by Cardinal O’Connor. Even more heartening was an event one evening at the Puck Building on the edge of SoHo that Elie calls “a blend of public reading, rite, and performance”: a group of megawatt New York literary celebrities, including DeLillo again, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Gay Talese, and E. L. Doctorow, and Rushdie’s close friend Christopher Hitchens, all speaking out from the stage to defend his book and his person and his freedom to deploy his religious material as he saw fit. My wife and I attended this event and left the venue uplifted, feeling that the storm had broken somehow. Of course it hadn’t.

Elie concludes his crypto-religious ’80s saga with a still-shocking coda from 1992 that reverberates in the collective memory: Sinéad O’Connor’s appearance on Saturday Night Live, plain-chanting Bob Marley’s song “War” and ending by tearing a photo of Pope John Paul into pieces, declaiming “Fight the real enemy.” A tragic figure with her Falconetti gaze, popular music’s Joan of Arc, O’Connor effectively destroyed her career by bringing a tidal wave of opprobrium upon herself. Even Madonna, who’d pushed her provocative use of religious imagery well beyond the boundaries of good taste, felt it incumbent upon her to disapprove.

Elie’s subject resists anything like a tidy conclusion, as history so often does. The fatwa against Rushdie segues into the attacks on the World Trade Center of 1993 and 2001. He concludes that “the liminal space between belief and disbelief has hardened,” and what was once a culture clash has devolved into actual violence against the unbelievers. He bravely, if not entirely convincingly, concludes that even in our post-secular age there remains a place in our culture for the crypto-religious work of art fitted for that liminal space.

I have some thoughts of my own. The word “blasphemy” is used sparingly, if at all, but it entered my mind repeatedly as I read about the acts of deliberate or unconscious provocation Elie summons up. When you consider such phenomena as Andre Serrano’s Piss Christ, and Robert Mapplethorpe’s deliberately provocative use of religious imagery and bodily violation, well, you’d have to be as oblivious as a museum curator not to understand why the controversies over the use of public funds to display them reached the boiling point. Certainly not all of Elie’s crypto-religious examples rise to the level of blasphemy, but these do, along with many of Madonna’s button-pushing songs and videos, which were all too obviously—and one must admit, brilliantly—calculated to give offense and sell her steamy brand. A considerable part of the advanced culture of the ’80s, in fact, crypto-religious or purely secular, depended upon epater le bourgeois shock tactics, often to diminishing returns and with unintended consequences. Blasphemy was in some ways the whole self-conscious literary strategy behind The Satanic Verses. Hundreds of millions of believing Muslims gave Salman Rushdie the backhanded compliment of taking him seriously in this respect.

The problems really arise when one group apprehends something as a symbol when another group believes it to be a real and tangible fact. I kept being reminded of Flannery O’Connor’s deathless crack at a dinner party: Mary McCarthy and Robert Lowell (a Catholic convert) were nattering on about the simply wonderful symbolism of the Holy Eucharist (as we were taught to refer to it), don’t you know, when O’Connor punctured their mildly nauseating hot air bubble with the tart riposte, “Well, if it’s only a symbol, I say the hell with it.” Refreshing! Paul Elie’s cadre of crypto-religionists could all mount vigorous defenses of the unfettered artistic imagination if asked to, but too few of them ever deployed that facility to imagine how a truly faithful reader might apprehend their work, and just how offended they would be to see their most profound beliefs, as they experience it, mocked and used to opaque and ignoble ends. Culture wars ignite when one side extends no sympathy or understanding to the other and the battle lines get drawn.

The Last Supper lingered in my mind for a long while after I finished it, and it made me think in particular about the question of faith—the bedrock reality of it in the lives of billions of people worldwide and tens of millions of them in this country. Don DeLillo’s White Noise, the central American novel of the ’80s, has as its penultimate episode a brilliant intellectual burlesque—dead serious, of course—on the same convulsive confrontation between belief and doubt, on which Elie’s crypto-religious project is based, and on which it ultimately founders. Jack Gladney ends up in the emergency room of a hospital staffed by old, forbidding, German-speaking nuns in full black-habited regalia. One of them, Sister Herman Marie, refuses to be charmed by Gladney’s wise-guy banter. She counters, “Someone must appear to believe . . . . As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe.” She concludes, “We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life.” The absurdity and inconsistency of her arguments is precisely the point.

If The Last Supper can at times feel overcrowded and unfocused, that does not diminish the ambition and, yes, the bravery that Paul Elie demonstrates in tackling eternal matters of faith and morals as manifested in a culture that began coming apart at the seams so spectacularly in his chosen decade. His journey among the believers and those who were trying, in their imperfect and individual ways, to accommodate and harness symbols of belief towards artistic ends, left this one-time believer engaged and troubled and in fresh perplexity in the best possible way. The ’80s I thought I remembered now feel very different to me.

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