The Paris Olympic Games Opening Ceremony and the Last Supper

Last Friday’s opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics wasn’t what I expected.

Instead of the normal celebration recognizing unique features of the host country’s culture—the opening of the 2008 Summer Olympics in China’s Beijing National Stadium filled with 2008 drummers being the most memorable example—the French took a more novel approach to Paris. Their vision was of a variety of tableaus along the famous river Seine that flows through the heart of the city.

It wasn’t a bad idea except for the cynical subtext beneath the river journey. The organizers of the ceremony chose to celebrate their city in part by mocking its Christian heritage in a parody of the Lord’s Supper. The resulting firestorm of protest shouldn’t have surprised them. In fact, that might have been their intent all along.

The scene that caused the controversy took place at a banquet near the river. A large woman wearing a halo-like crown was seated in the center of a table surrounded by a group of drag queens. A child was also seated at the table. The banquet was disrupted when a naked man painted blue appeared from beneath a dinner plate and began to sing. The drag queens danced to the blue man’s tune, one of them dancing with the child.

John Leicester gives what I think is the overall secular response to the ceremony:

That Paris put on the most flamboyant, diversity-celebrating, LGBTQ+-visible of opening ceremonies wasn’t a surprise. Anything less would have seemed a betrayal of the pride the French capital takes in being a home to humanity in all its richness. But still. Wow. Paris didn’t just push the envelope. It did away with it entirely as it hammered home a message that freedom must know no bounds.

A practically naked singer painted blue made thinly veiled references to his body parts. Blonde-bearded drag queen Piche crawled on all fours to the thumping beat of “Freed From Desire” by singer-songwriter Gala, who has long been a potent voice against homophobia. There were the beginnings of a menage à trois — the door was slammed on the camera before things got really steamy — and the tail end of an intimate embrace between two men who danced away, hugging and holding hands.

To be honest, I didn’t want to write about the ceremony. The gender-bending models were too offensive and the deviant sexuality too disturbing. I would have been happy to mark the whole thing down to the French habit of rebelling against whatever sexual or cultural norms are handy and move on to another topic.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t unsee what I had seen. I couldn’t ignore what so plainly was said through the ceremony. It was clear that there was something more at stake than artistic expression gone wild. Something that sought not to celebrate but to destroy, not to build up but to tear down. Something that turned the brightest truths of the Christian faith to darkness.

The two images at top, one of the opening ceremony and the other of da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper, were impossible to misunderstand. The feast around the table along the river Seine was plainly a mockery of the Last Supper.

Of course, the organizers of the ceremony claimed otherwise when they were called out by outraged Christians around the world. It wasn’t the Last Supper at all, they said, but a scene from Greek mythology of Dionysius, the Greek god of wine, as he hosted a banquet. Any resemblance to the Last Supper was just the overheated imagination of thin-skinned Christians.

Thomas Jolly, the show’s artistic director, said no disrespect to Christians was intended:

“In France, we have the right to love each other, as we want and with who we want. In France, we have the right to believe or to not believe. In France, we have a lot of rights. Voila… My wish isn’t to be subversive, nor to mock or to shock… I wanted to send a message of love, a message of inclusion and not at all to divide.”

Official spokesperson Anne Descamps also apologized to anyone offended by the scene.

"Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group. On the contrary, I think (with) Thomas Jolly, we really did try to celebrate community tolerance…we believe that this ambition was achieved. If people have taken any offense, we are, of course, really, really sorry.”

They’re gaslighting us, of course. Or they think we’re fools.

Christian artist and writer Jonathan Pageau points out the obvious truth of what the organizers were doing. For one thing, they titled the banquet scene as La cene sur la scene sur la seine, which in English is “The scene of the Last Supper on the Seine.” In other words, the scene from the beginning was intended to be a parody of the Last Supper, a fact that a few days later the organizers finally acknowledged:

“Thomas Jolly took inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting to create the setting…He is not the first artist to make a reference to what is a world-famous work of art. From Andy Warhol to ‘The Simpsons,’ many have done it before him.”

Another point that Paguau makes is that Barbara Butch, the lead figure at the banquet wearing the halo, posted a picture of the scene on her Instagram account immediately following the ceremony with the comment, “Oh yes! Oh yes! The new Gay Testament.” She has since deleted the post.

And then there’s the blue man, Dionysius. In the Greek myth, Dionysius isn’t some innocent party-goer, like a frat boy disguised as a Smurf. He instead embodies something deeper and more subversive. He’s in fact the god of drunkenness and ecstasy. He’s the impulse in the human spirit to cast off all restraint and follow one’s own desires and appetities to wherever they might lead.

The Dionysian myth also included the element of a sacred feast in which his worshipers consumed his body and blood. The presentation of the Dionysian figure as the main course of the banquet was as clear a mockery as can be conceived of the Eucharist, that central act of worship Jesus instituted at the Last Supper in which his followers were told to take bread and wine as his body and blood.

Catholic bishop Robert Barron got it right when he pointed to the real motivation beneath the Olympic Games opening ceremony’s parody of the Lord’s Supper. It’s the battle cry of the secular world against God and his Kingdom:

“This deeply secularist, post-modern society knows who its enemy is. They’re naming it. And we should believe them. They’re telling us who they are.”

I don’t have a particular call to action regarding the opening ceremonies, but I do have a have a few takeaways.

• The cultural opposition to the gospel is real and growing. What the organizers of the Olympic opening ceremony displayed in the banquet scene accurately describes where much of the culture now stands.

• Those well-meaning pastors and Christian leaders who say that we should be more concerned with using this moment as an opportunity for evangelism than for judging are, I think, missing the part of the scene where a drag queen dances with the little girl. In this situation, our main focus of evangelism should be our children and grandchildren who are exposed every day to a culture that ridicules Christian beliefs. If we lose our own children to this sordid world, we’ve lost everything.

• The mix of religion and sex is as potent as it is toxic. That’s always been the case. It’s what led ancient Israel into idolatry around the golden calf. It continually caused the Jews early in their history to abandon the worship of God for the gods of the nations surrounding it because those gods didn’t have moral scruples. It was a problem for the early Christians in their fascination with various splinter groups that claimed all that mattered to God was your soul and what you did with your body didn’t matter. That same toxic brew is at work today. God through his Word calls us to a strict code of conduct in our sexual behavior; and when we go outside his boundaries, our lives will be subject to every kind of chaos and pain.

• We’re in a very real spiritual battle, in our culture, our institutions, our homes, our own hearts. And Satan will seek to corrupt everything that is good and holy at every level to his own ends. He does so not so much by destroying institutions outright but by undermining and subverting them, by redefining them to his purposes. What should have been a celebration of French culture and an invitation into the joy of the Olympic games was twisted into images of corrupted sexuality and practices of corroded worship.

In one of the most memorable phrases in the history of the United States Supreme Court, Justice Potter Stewart resorted to the simplest and most obvious test of obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964). I can’t define it, he said, “but I know it when I see it.”

I felt the same way after the watching the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games. I may not be able to define “blasphemy” because it’s not a word that the modern church uses. But when I saw the sexualized figures around the table, the bizarre woman in the place of Jesus, the Dionysian figure with his fake Eucharist, the innocent child dancing with the drag queens, the replacement of the Apostles with drunken partiers; well, I may not be able to define blasphemy…

But I know it when I see it.