Madonna's crosses, Scorcese's temptations: why did so much art in the 80s talk about God?

Boston Globe

22-05-2025

It was a hinge year. The previous decades' protest and countercultural movements left fertile ground for creativity, as artists from Warhol's associate Basquiat and musicians from U2 to Madonna to Leonard Cohen to the Smiths began to produce a flood of what Elie terms 'crypto-religious' art.
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'Crypto-religious art, in my formulation, is work that uses [religious] imagery, motif, theme, and patterns but in a way that expresses something other than conventional religious belief,' Elie says. Encounters with this type of work tend to invite listeners and viewers and readers to question our own beliefs — particularly when the work also introduces tension between the spiritual and the sexual.
'The second Vatican council in the 1960s changed many things,' Elie says, 'and one was to empower ordinary Catholics to use their own consciences to make decisions,' especially about their own sexual lives. While the emerging freedom sought by the city's LGBTQ population was often at odds with religious establishments, regular lay Christians understood that when Prince sang 'I would die for U,' he was speaking as your lover
and
as your savior.
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Not surprisingly, this work attracted anger from institutional religious forces, and far too many churches saw the devastating AIDS crisis burning through New York's artistic community as validation for their fear and hatred. And yet, the art created in New York in the 1980s, in all its messy duality of saints and sinners, has endured over the past four decades.
Elie suggests that past is prologue. 'In the 80s you had a very worldly president making common cause with the religious right and exalting wide-open capitalism, and the media rushing to consecrate it as the age of Reagan,' he says. 'So now you have a very worldly president making common cause with a religious right, and a wide-open capitalism, and the media rushing to consecrate the age of Trump. But to speak of the variety and vigor and vitality and power of the work that was produced in those times is to know that it can happen now.'
Paul Elie will read at 7 p.m. on Thursday, May 29, at
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Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's Books pages.
Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at