Friday’s drag-queen parody of Christ at the Paris Olympics opening shows yet again that people who hate Jesus just can’t escape His art, archetypes, created realities, or authority.
The exhibition replaced Christ in the iconic Leonardo Da Vinci painting with a queer activist who describes herself as “a fat, Jewish, queer lesbian” and his disciples with cross-dressing sex performers. It immediately prompted an international backlash that can’t benefit queer acceptance. Neither can the performance, which portrayed queer people as creepy sex maniacs.
The show also backfired symbolically. In their attempts to slime what they see as their enemies, queer activists reinforced things they’re trying to destroy.
The Last Supper On Display
The most obvious demonstration of this is the derivative nature of the “art.” The best the queer Paris Olympics “artistic director” and sex performers could come up with is badly deforming others’ artistic triumphs. They didn’t think up their own world, symbols, and referents, they just sabotaged others’ then pretended what any three-year-old can do is brilliant. This doesn’t compete with or replace Christianity and its symbols, it reinforces them.
If one wanted an entire civilization to forget about Christ’s Last Supper, one would adopt the left’s usual strategy: the memoryhole. Indeed, that seems to be already happening for the Paris blasphemy show, with clips of this massive event oddly difficult to find online.
Today, few Westerners know almost anything about their artistic, religious, and cultural heritage. In earlier generations, varying-quality reproductions of the famous Last Supper painting graced numerous homes by the dinner table. This was a culturally well-understood archetypal invitation for Christ to join and bless every meal, a symbol of the eternal feast Christians enjoy in the Sacrament.
In the Last Supper, and all administrations of what Christians call the Sacrament (or Communion) thereafter, Christ Himself gives “us Christians to eat and to drink” the “true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under the bread and wine,” as clearly explained by “the holy Evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and St. Paul.” This act of obedience to God produces forgiveness of sins, faith, and eternal salvation. It is the high point of every Christian church service around which all other elements are arranged.
Even though Christianity is the world’s largest religion and the one that created Western civilization, most Westerners today know almost nothing about Christianity, including this central doctrine. The savvy thing for Christ-haters would have been to keep the Last Supper imagery in the cultural attic, with the dust bunnies, catechisms, and two-parent nuclear families. Instead following the sadistic urge to hate on their self-chosen enemies has millions searching “Last Supper” and learning about this keystone of faith.
A Dance for Enemies
The Last Supper blasphemy display was thematically and metaphorically interesting in many other ways. A Renaissance art expert noted to The New York Times that the sex performers made vogueing poses. Voguing is a dance that originated among queer people. It also, Vox says in a 2017 explainer, has a violent undertone: It’s “an extension of throwing shade. Instead of fighting, two people would settle their beef on the dance floor.”
These sex performers in Paris attacked a central Christian theme using a dance that to them connotes social war. It’s super interesting that in an era in which Christians and their institutions are tempted to accommodate what God calls sinful, queer activists regularly reinforce the Bible’s position that queer sex is an act of aggression against God. Even when trying to be anti-Christian, these activists reinforce Christianity’s messages.
Long History of LGBT Animus Against Christians
Anyone expressing shock that the Paris Olympics opening included a tableau of sex performers blaspheming Christianity hasn’t paid attention for the last half-century. As I document in my recent book, public homosexual activism has from the beginning been blatantly and deliberately blasphemous. While it’s Islamists who give death sentences to homosexuals, not Christians, Western queer activists still always make Christians their top target.
To give just one prominent example, the creator of the original Pride flag, Gilbert Baker, was part of the Christian-hating drag provocateur group The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. They’re known for publicly desecrating just about every Christian symbol possible, including nun habits, the Stations of the Cross, and the Crucifixion.
Baker expressed Christ hatred his entire life, including protesting at the 1990 International Lesbian and Gay Freedom Day Parade as “Pink Jesus.” There, I describe in my book: “He marched covered in pink paint, wearing pink high heels, and with an American flag loincloth tacked to a crucifix with a sign that read, ‘Martyrs for Art.’ Next to him marched a topless woman and a man in drag.”
So while the nationwide explosion in rainbow porn in the last decade may seem sudden, anti-Christian public “art” incidents like the Paris Olympics ceremony have always been part of queer activism. The fascinating thing is that their acts of hatred against Jesus Christ reinforce everything He teaches, including that his followers will be hated and persecuted, just like He is. Their very hatred fulfills Christ’s prophecies.
Worshipping Sex
The Paris display also put a figure of the ancient Greek “man-god” Dionysus on the table, in the place of the food. (Please don’t tell me I need to explain that symbolism.) He proceeded to sing about his genitals before what the Associated Press described as “the beginnings of a menage à trois.”
Dionysus is the god of, among other things, sex and wine. Replacing Christ’s body and blood on the Last Supper table with an overtly phallic figure is another very clear symbolic communication that queers worship and consume the phallus. I didn’t communicate that, they did.
Yet again, even that retrograde paganism can’t help but reinforce Christianity. In Greek legend, Dionysus also dies, is entombed, comes back to life again in the spring when the vines awaken, then feeds the people wine. The theologian and writer C.S. Lewis would call Dionysus a pagan “corn king”: a distorted precursor symbol of Christ. Myriad myths and legends concern gods who become men and the death and resurrection of a god. Lewis concluded these figures that occur in just about every culture show Christ is the fulfillment of all of humanity’s hopes and longings, the “myth become fact.”
Reversing that historical and archetypal trajectory from the imperfect and mythological Dionysus to the real perfection that is Christ is a push for repaganizing the West — a subject my colleague, John Davidson, discusses beautifully. Let’s just note here that it’s self-described progressives who want to go back to paganism, which as John notes always includes mass bloodshed and hatred for human life. In the name of “love and inclusion,” these figures ooze exclusion and hatred.
Anti-Christian queer bigotry is rooted in deep hatred of Christianity’s recognition that God made men and women as different halves of humanity, and two men naked together cannot perform the same acts as a man and a woman naked together. Different body parts are involved, because men and women have different sexual body parts.
Biology is not bigotry, but desecrating Christianity’s sacred symbols at every turn certainly is. God has the last laugh, though, because even when people blaspheme, they reinforce what God says. It’s another clear indicator that Christianity is true and Jesus is God. He has created the frame that we all live inside, and even those who hate it cannot escape.
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