What to make of the strange incident which took place during and after the Olympic opening ceremony last week? ‘
As part of the grand, self-aggrandising spectacle on the banks of the Seine, a troupe of drag queens staged a re-enactment of Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated painting The Last Supper.
An ersatz, plump, drag Jesus stood behind a sound mixer in an ultramarine, sequined dress making a heart symbol with his/her/their hands.
A bizarrely blue Bacchus, already likened to a Smurf, emerged from a great silver platter decorated with rainbow flowers.
It made for an incongruous, ill-thought through silhouette that surely lacked the sophistication or execution to be considered effective satire.
Christian community upset
Diverse Christian groups have taken umbrage about all this over the past few days.
It was called “an insult”, “blasphemy”, “an abomination”. Some described it as “Satanic” or “pagan”. Others decried, “They wouldn’t do this to Islam!”
Olympic bosses have subsequently apologised, although the director, Thomas Jolly, remains defiant.
The outspokenness of the response from some Christian commentators has been predictable, but is also, in my view, dismaying.
For one thing, it distracts from reasonable and rather more damning criticism of the sheer tedium of the whole performance, which was less high art than it was bad taste.
As Gareth Roberts noted in a jaded review for Britain’s The Spectator, “has it finished yet?”
The whole thing probably worked better as a subversive send-up of the extremes of identitarian politics and discourse than it did of Christianity.
It was counterproductive, especially with the world watching. “A smug spectacle of wokeness”, as Spiked Online put it.
The Last Supper
We may well have arrived at a moment when the particular constellation of beliefs associated with such banal identity intersectionalism collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions, as well as the sheer conformism of those who seek to enforce its marginal agendas.
As a gay man, that worries me, because it risks undoing much of the progress for LGBTIQ+ rights around the world over the past six decades.
Nevertheless, that is not the point of this article.
What I argue here is that the speed with which certain elements of the Christian community are embracing politicised victimhood is an unwelcoming development for Christianity’s place in the public sphere in Western societies.
It represents a marked departure from the attitude that previous generations of Christian martyrs — real victims, if you will — glorified at a time Christianity truly was imperilled.
To put it bluntly: Christians should be more wary about joining the self-pity parade.
A short history of Christian victimhood
Christianity is a religion born of sanctifying the victim. Jesus became one when he died on the cross for our sins. Early Christian martyrs, too, revelled in their victim statuses.
Peter Brown famously argued that the cult of saints and their relics in Late Antiquity self-consciously inverted categories of triumph and defeat precisely in order to celebrate persecution.
Moreover, pagan Romans buried dead bodies only outside city walls so that their polluting miasma was kept away from the living. By contrast, Christians reclaimed and embraced death — especially ignominious death — as precious.
Martyr graves and sites of executions became Christianity’s “sacred sites” where shrines and churches were built.
By exalting humility and forbearance, the early Christians created the conditions for peaceable coexistence with outsiders, for mutual respect and understanding, and for developing a sense of proportion in difficult interactions.
This strand in Christian thinking has never been truly dominant within Christian societies — though it has acted as a powerful moderating influence on more dogmatic and utopian impulses in Christian societies’ political thought and moral teachings.
Christianity has rarely prospered when its adherents have strayed far from it.
The problem, however, is that such humbleness in the face of adversity is hard — the more so in an age of perpetual outrage. ‘
Some Christians observe how other minority groups, including the LGBTIQ+ community, gain advantage from taking offence.
It can seem only too rational to join them in order to reap the same rewards.
They do not see what is less visible: the unease, even resentment, that builds up in a wider population when intolerant groups demand blasphemy laws or other categories of special treatment.
“Do to others what you would have them do to you”, as Jesus put it. Is perpetual conflict with liberals what Christians really want?
Church versus state
Last year, I wrote about an apparently similar case when the comedian Reuben Kaye told an off-colour joke about Jesus live on The Project.
The parallel with that case and the Olympic controversy is the inept attempt at satire which fell flat because it lacked the requisite intellectual brio to sound fresh and relevant.
It is worth pointing out a major difference, however. Kaye’s joke was the work of one man — even his fellow participants in The Project seemed rather uncomfortable with it.
The “attack” on Christianity — or, more specifically, Catholicism — at the Olympics was, on the other hand, sanctioned by the French state.
This is entirely clear from the fact that it took place in the context of the Olympic opening ceremony.
Now, the French state has long had an uneasy relationship with Christianity. The 1789 Revolution notoriously confiscated vast quantities of church assets and martyred many clergy, including Pope Pius VI.
It also instigated the Deist Cult of the Supreme Being.
The violent Paris Commune of 1871 was no better, leading to the murder of the Archbishop Georges Darboy.
And France’s 1905 Law on the Separation of Church and State, which enforced laïcité (secularism) as a grounding principle of the French Third Republic, only led to a further generation of trouble, conflict, rancour and tensions.
French Catholics may well have reasonable cause to look at the way their governments have treated their faith over a long period. They might contrast it with privileges perceived to have been extended to other groups.
Of course, the historical context of the French church’s role in upholding the ancién régime needs to be factored into any such appraisal: secularists have always argued that this was simply too insidious to be allowed to go uncorrected.
And yet, the spectacle of one’s own state — the society which claims you as an inalienable member — crassly making fun of your most intimate and cherished beliefs about the meaning of your life would likely be difficult for many of us to countenance.
The incident last week affords the French government an opportunity to rethink how freedom of speech relates to freedom of religion, as well as to what enforcing laïcité actually means in a modern, pluralistic society.
If France can have some difficult conversations about what the state’s role is in protecting freedoms, then some good will have come of this situation.
Personally, I am not hopeful.
The French elite, beset with myriad other crises, lacks the bandwidth to achieve anything so felicitous there.
Nevertheless, the Australian state is better placed and it is a question we should also be asking, especially in the light of our own current conflicts around religious discrimination.
Who gets to decide where the boundary between free speech and religious freedom lies? Those who are not proactive about debating this issue — and reinforcing tolerance — risk letting others decide on their behalf.
How to be tolerant of criticism
A further point in defence of the (apparently) indefensible: you lose the moral high ground when you complain gratuitously and cynically or demand respect rather than seeking to win it from others by your example.
Invocations of blasphemy or the “inappropriateness” of such a spectacle taking place in front of children ignore a difficult point.
It cannot be for just one group in society — or one part of the global audience watching on television — to become self-appointed arbiters of limits to socially sanctioned sexual expression or of legitimate religious satire.
Christians ought to recognise that they will get as good as they have given.
Their religion has been pretty intolerant of LGBTIQ+ people for a thousand years (or longer) so they can scarcely be astonished when LGBTIQ+ activists attempt to hit back, however crassly.
Self-confident churches build bridges with their enemies and competitors, turning them into allies.
One of Pope Francis’s key achievements has arguably been his promulgation of carefully calibrated statements about different minority groups on the Catholic Church’s margins.
He tests opinion, stresses solidarity, and tries to identify points of consensus.
We all ought to be more wary of joining in races to be the most offended, for being able to bear suffering and public mockery earns more respect and is more consistent with living out worthwhile ideals.
What a pity if the sentiments, and approaches, which Pope Francis himself champions are crowded out by more sinister agendas — the domination of public discourse through coercion and the dismantling of pluralism.
Catholics, and other Christians, who advocate for these things are no better than their opponents on the other side of the divide.
- First published by ABC. Republished with author’s permission.
- Miles Pattenden is a medieval historian and researcher at Deakin University.