Christians are rightfully upset about the mockery of Jesus’ Last Supper during the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Paris Olympics, where anti-Christian contempt was on full display.

The spectacle, which included hyper-sexualized drag queens – and one young boy – strutting and slithering on a runway, was condemned by many.

The performance featured the Greek god Dionysus, god of drunkenness, sexuality and insanity, served up on a platter, portrayed by a mostly-naked blue man, albeit strategically draped with fruit.

But the debacle got me thinking – about transgressive art, C.S. Lewis, and how such sneering disdain from cultural elites actually points toward truth.

The New York Times describes the sleazy scene this way:

In the performance broadcast during the ceremony, a woman wearing a silver, halo-like headdress stood at the center of a long table, with drag queens posing on either side of her. Later, at the same table, a giant cloche lifted, revealing a man, nearly naked and painted blue, on a dinner plate surrounded by fruit. He broke into a song as, behind him, the drag queens danced.

The Times points out that the performance drew “criticism from church leaders and conservative politicians for a perceived likeness to Leonardo da Vinci’s depiction of a biblical scene in ‘The Last Supper,’ with some calling it a ‘mockery’ of Christianity.”

The news outlet, being what it is, felt it had to quote some “very fine people on both sides” of the debate, noting that Thomas Jolly, the artistic director, said he had “not been inspired by da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper.’”

Right.

In an article titled “Anti-Christian Olympic Opening Ceremony Heralds The Rise Of A Neopagan West,” The Federalist points out:

The segment was titled “La Cène sur la scene sur la seine” (The Last Supper on the stage on the Seine). So it was obviously meant to be a sexualized mockery of the Last Supper, as anyone who witnessed the spectacle could easily see.

The rotund haloed woman at the center of the spectacle – in Jesus’ position in da Vinci’s masterpiece – is a self-described lesbian “love activist” who goes by the name Barbara Butch. While claiming to promote “love and inclusivity,” she stated she was posing as “Olympic Jesus” and touted the depiction as a “Gay New Testament.”

And the mostly-naked blue man? He describes himself as “a bit of an exhibitionist” who wanted to highlight the fact that the original Olympic athletes performed naked, saying, “Nudity is really the very origin of the Games.”

And you thought the Games were about sports and athleticism. Faster, higher, stronger and all that.

The blasphemous depiction of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples got me thinking about “transgressive art.” This movement traces its roots back to the Decadent movement in France and England in the 1800’s, where the goal was to shock middle-class sensibilities, morals and culture.

Transgressive art became a movement in modern and contemporary art throughout the 1900s and into this century. While most people simply ignored the attention-seeking individuals who worked to subvert virtue, religion, sexuality and family, transgressive art broke into the mainstream world in the 80s and 90s with individuals who created works that denigrated Christ on the cross and His mother Mary.

While grossly offensive, such “art” demonstrates “intellectual laziness and lack of imagination,” as Carl Trueman writes over at World Opinions. After all, if you’re always trying to shock by attacking and vilifying the sacred, destroying the good, the beautiful and the true, then you’re not really creating, are you? It’s not art, it’s destruction and chaos.

Trueman writes:

The culture from which [the Olympic performance] emerged is largely parasitic, dependent for its existence on the denial or the mockery of what it once considered true. It has nothing positive to say, glorying only in the defilement and destruction of things that earlier cultures saw as holy. Under its tasteless wrappings, it’s an anti-culture of nothingness.

He also notes that a society which glories in such performances is ultimately degraded and dehumanized, delighting “in desecration – of God and thus of those made in His image.”

Such works are offensive and sacrilegious – and certainly not for children to watch. But after a while, they’re also banal and uninteresting. Like a child throwing a tantrum, the artists are annoying, but also pitiful. The opening ceremonies were a sad, weak, misguided protest against a transcendent, lovely, powerful and good God.

Which got me thinking about C.S. Lewis. In his strange science fiction novel, That Hideous Strength, the character Mark Studdock undergoes a desensitizing process designed to bring him to a state of “objectivity,” free from emotions, ethics, aesthetics, logic and moral judgments.

Mark is placed in a room where everything is slightly off-kilter, devised to set him free from a desire for order and beauty. The pictures in the room are transgressive – an attack on human sensibilities.

But as Mark experiences the skewed ugliness of the room, an unexpected thought comes to him. Lewis writes of Studdock:

The built and painted perversity of this room had the effect of making him aware, as he had never been aware before, of this room’s opposite. As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight.

Mark’s experience of the abnormal makes him long for “the Normal”: relationships, his wife, good food, sunlight and nature.

Such ugliness as portrayed in the Paris opening ceremony is a desecration of beauty – pointing to the truth that real beauty exists.

Scoffers and mockers don’t desecrate what’s evil and false – they rail against the true, the good and the beautiful. They launch pitiful assaults against God and life and faith and humanity.

Jesus’ Last Supper was a poignant, beautiful, real event: The Son of God initiated a new covenant with His beloved disciples – and with us, His followers. He pointed toward His sacrifice as the Lamb of God, and He looked with hope toward the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and a future reunion with His bride in glory.

May those who perpetrate these desecrations – and those who see these travesties – begin to question and consider what is being criticized and why. May the distorted and perverse give them a thirst for the true and the good.

Related articles and resources:

Did Christians Really Ban the Olympics Before Inspiring the Modern Games?

Half of the Women’s Cycling Competitors Are Not Even Women

Ignorant or Intentional? Either Way, the Opening Ceremonies Were Unacceptable

Image from Getty.