The Problems and Possibilities of Crypto-religious Art

Paul Elie. The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025. 486pp. $33.00 hdbk.

Paul Elie has blessed us with a dizzyingly diverse survey of the most contentious cultural moments and personalities of the 1980s, with special attention to Catholic artists—practicing, lapsed, or in between. The Last Supper examines what Elie calls “crypto-religious art” (a term he borrows from Czesław Miłosz), which is, as Elie explains on the Commonweal podcast, art that

openly makes use of religious metaphors, imagery, themes, language, motifs—but from a point of view that seems something other than conventional belief. So when you encounter this…you’re seeing this religious aspect to it and you’re wondering, ‘What does the person who made this really believe?’

Crypto-religious art is a re-presentation of moments of a perennial tradition in the present context. Ultimately, such work throws the reader, listener, or viewer back upon themselves, forcing them to ask the question, “So—what, then, do I believe?”

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How did the 80s come about as they did, though? Why was it this decade that produced such crypto-religious art?

The cover of Elie’s The Last Supper (2025)

Elie opens his account with a profound event of the 1960s: the Second Vatican Council. “Through Vatican II, the Catholic Church had recognized that ‘[God’s] presence is everywhere’ and that the ordinary is the site of the extraordinary.” Elie also notes, though, that creation had been sanctified the moment Christ transformed and consecrated bread and wine at the Last Supper. For the Church, then, creation has always been holy—but after the Council of Trent, and until Vatican II, the Church had (largely) taken a reactionary “approach rooted in contemptus mundi: contempt for the world.” Opposition to Modernism in the nineteenth century further entrenched the Church “over against [the] world.”

The way many interpreted Vatican II’s emphasis on the holiness of the mundane had an interesting effect: “in the 1970s American Catholicism became thoroughly ordinary, the old works and pomps yielding to trapezoidal churches, felt banners, leisure suits, and strummed guitars.” The “lives of American Catholics” became similarly “this-worldly,” with “women going to work, men no longer cowed by priests, couples having sex with the intercession of a condom,” etc. When the Church becomes “ordinary” in these ways—when it is no longer seen as a locus of the mysterious and the sacred—the desire for the transcendent does not simply disappear from man’s heart. It finds expression elsewhere.

The 80s showed that the U.S. was not—against the data and common thought—becoming more secular. Rather, this supposedly “postsecular age” was, as John McLure put it, “shot through with religiously inflected disruption of secular constructions of the real.” The question of God—and man’s relation to him—is still very much hanging around. It is simply being engaged in an extra-institutional and highly aesthetically charged and cryptic manner. The wide array of crypto-Catholic artists Elie surveys indicates this. 

The quintessential example is Warhol. Just as Vatican II helped many rediscover holiness in the ordinary, so too did Warhol’s Pop Art find glimmers of transcendental splendor in the mundanity of (post)modern consumer culture. Traces of this supernatural desire peek out in unexpected places. Warhol’s Be Somebody with a BODY! affirmed the sacredness of the human form and exhorted its viewers to an incarnational life. Corita Kent, like Warhol, demonstrated a sacramental artistic vision: That They Might Have Life sees a loaf of “Enriched Bread” as a potential vessel of the Eucharist; for eleanor claims that the “The Big ‘G’” of the General Mills logo “Stands for Goodness.” “Pop Art,” notes Elie, “is often presented as a wised-up refutation of Abstract Expressionism’s claim to sublimity,” much like Romanticism’s emotionalism was a reaction against the Enlightenment’s rationalism. “But that way of putting things—the sublime overtaken by the slick—misses the key to Warhol’s early work: that he, too, in his own way, laid claim to sublimity.” Warhol believed his paintings were, as Hopkins might have put it, “charged with … presence.” As Christ becomes present in bread and wine, so might grace pervade artistic expression. By juxtaposing modern brand logos and the Eucharist in his The Last Supper, Warhol seems to suggest that even corporate America is open to the indwelling of the divine. Through its ambiguous appropriation of Christian imagery and doctrine, Warhol’s work is a prime example of crypto-religious art. It played with the boundaries between the sacred and the profane to challenge both believers and nonbelievers: it suggests to the believer that the profane is, perhaps, more sacred than usually thought—and to the nonbeliever that perhaps the sacredness of ordinary things bespeaks a greater presence that underlies the created world. 

"The Last Supper by Andy Warhol at The MoMA." Photo by Nan Palmero. Creative Commons 2.0.

While Warhol’s art was almost always religiously ambiguous—an attempt to critically reflect upon religion’s place in a post-secular cultural landscape—other artists presented crypto-religious art that seemed to many like mere sacrilege, more disrespectful than thought-provoking. Examples include Sinéad O’Connor tearing up a picture of John Paul II on SNL, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, Salmon Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, and much more. These cultural products were, Elie believes, meant to stimulate and reframe thought about the role of religiosity in the (post)modern world. And indeed, art that goes beyond the realm of strict orthodoxy—even if transgressive or offensive—can do so in orthodoxy’s service to reinscribe and even refine—rather than contradict or undercut—it. But while some received theologically explorative works like Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ in an open and reflective spirit—and benefitted from them—they mostly served to harden the divide between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, between conservatives and progressives, between right and left. While crypto-religious art had its moment in the 80s, the firestorm of debate that it sparked—and the strong reactionary movements on both the right and the left—led to its eradication as well as to the politically and religiously polarized culture we live in today.

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Elie notes that crypto-religious art aims to blur the usually thick and clearly articulated boundaries between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Crypto-religious art “reminds us that the questions at the core of the human situation can’t be settled through fact or doctrine, which means they must be approached imaginatively.” This is certainly true: the Book of Job’s response to the problem of pain comes in the form of a poem. Sometimes, though, when we encounter an ambiguous piece of art, our initial reaction is to try to figure out whether and how a particular piece—even as it appropriates religious imagery and themes—reveres or blasphemes our preconceived beliefs. More often than not, it’s a mix of both—and this is kind of the point. This knee-jerk reaction is, for Elie, ultimately misplaced. Whether it is ordered to the good or not, crypto-religious art has the capacity to catalyze a crisis within the hearts and minds of believers and unbelievers alike: it troubles both blind religious faith and staunch atheism.

The danger to me seems that, even as we rightly recognize and emphasize the sacredness of the ordinary—its sacramentality—we might blur the line between the ordinary and extraordinary—between the profane and the sacred—entirely, and collapse the latter into the former. It is not that creation itself cannot bear the “weight of glory”—the Incarnation and Eucharist demonstrate that creation may receive and be an instrument of divine grace. Indeed, the divine presence pervades all things as it sustains them in their being. It may happen, though—enchanted as we are by the trace of the transcendent we find in ordinary things—that we forget that creation is magical because it is a vessel of the transcendent and is not the transcendent itself. Placing too much emphasis on the ordinary risks an overly materialistic, even pantheistic worldview that claims the ordinary as transcendent in and of itself—when, in fact, it is the God who undergirds creation who is transcendent.

Characterized as our postmodern milieu is its rejection of truth—ontological, moral, aesthetic—Christian art would do well to learn from crypto-religious artists. Elie’s The Last Supper pushes us—if we have the eyes, ears, and heart for it—to reconsider and expand our idea of what counts as religious and/or sacred art, but we should be careful not to collapse the transcendent sphere into the natural world.