Carl Trueman: France’s delight in desecration

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, July 30th, 2024. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. The Summer Olympics opened in Paris last week…but France’s cultural displays weren’t all fun and games. WORLD Opinions Commentator Carl Trueman with what one disgusting performance says about France’s cultural decline

CARL TRUEMAN, COMMENTATOR: The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics will be remembered as an eloquent testimony to the tilt of contemporary Western culture. The drag queen parody of the Last Supper and the appearance of the severed head of Marie Antoinette performing karaoke said it all: a culture that has given the world the plays of Racine, the novels of Hugo, the paintings of the Impressionists, and the music of Fauré, served the world a dish of blasphemous kitsch and gaudy perversion.

Of course, those responsible denied any intention to offend Christians: In a statement to the Telegraph organizers said, “On the contrary, each of the tableaux in the Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony were intended to celebrate community and tolerance.” [End quote] According to the Telegraph, ‘Organizers further noted that pop culture, from “The Simpsons” to “The Sopranos,” has parodied “The Last Supper” for decades, if not centuries.’

Certainly such parodies are not new is true, confirming the organizers’ intellectual laziness and lack of imagination. But The Simpsons and The Sopranos are nothing more than examples of trivial entertainment, not public rituals intended to have national, even international, cultural significance. If queers mocking the Lord’s Supper and a decapitated singing head are the things that France – or at least her officer class – consider to represent her, then things have surely taken a most dark turn. ‘This is France’ tweeted President Macron. I hope he was exaggerating.

As we reflect on this moment, Christians should note that this action indicates at least three things about our current cultural climate. First, the culture from which it emerged is largely parasitic, dependent for its existence on the denial or the mockery of that 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.

Second, despite the outrage, the performance is oddly appropriate. Yes, France has produced many great cultural figures, as noted above. But on display in the opening ceremony is that other strand of French cultural life, the one that has come to dominate, the one that represents the anarchic and ecstatic destruction of every notion of truth, beauty and goodness. It is that stream of thinking that runs from the perverted sexual fantasies of the Marquis De Sade through the weird obsessions of a man like Georges Bataille to the amoral philosophy of Michel Foucault, perhaps the most cited author in the humanities in the West today. Yes, France has produced great beauty. But the French thinkers who dominate Western intellectual approaches to culture today are those who exulted in ugliness and evil.

Third, this again points to the real problem of the West. It is not merely that science has reduced man in his own eyes to being just one amoral animal among others. It is not merely that post-industrial, bureaucratic society has turned persons into things, subjects into objects. It is not even that our culture’s obsession with sex has unleashed all manner of anarchy upon the human race. It is that we now delight in desecration – of God and thus of those made in his image.

And that brings out the real horror of this ‘queering’ of the Last Supper. In desecrating God’s grace, it denies the real solution to humanity’s problem. We need to be consecrated. And that comes only through the means of grace, the Word and the sacraments. The spittle dripped on the latter by the organizers of France’s Olympics is destructive not simply of culture but, more importantly, of souls. May God have mercy on us all, for we need it.

I’m Carl Trueman.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.