Olympics '24: One lingering Last Supper wars question

Sometimes journalists need to focus on global Christianity, not "white evangelicals"

Several times a week I read something in the mainstream press that leaves me thinking: Why are so many journalists obsessed with white evangelical Protestants?

Yes, I know. We are in an election year and everyone knows that the reason Orange Man Bad is a viable political candidate is that magic number — 81% of white evangelicals will vote for him no matter what. Many of them, of course, are Donald Trump true believers while others are convinced that they have no other choice, due to America’s two-party reality.

Stop and think about this. What are the swing states in which white evangelical voters will decide who wins those pivotal electoral-college votes? Now ask: What are the swing states in which Catholic voters (all four kinds) will decide who wins and who loses? Yes, I know these are questions that religion-beat patriarch Richard Ostling has been asking for a decade or so.

Here’s a related question: Who is pushing for clarity on “parental rights” issues? The answer is lots of folks, including traditional Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Eastern Orthodox Christians and others. Oh, and lots of evangelicals — of all races. Who gets the most ink?

OK, after that overture, let me switch to a completely different kind of issue — an important global news story from this past summer.

Remember the rites that opened the Olympics? Of course you do, because of the tsunami of coverage caused by a unique, to say the least, scene based on a image from sacred Christian art. Click here for my “On Religion” column (“Why did Dionysus invade the Lord’s Supper tableau?”) about that firestorm. Here is a byte:

In pre-Olympics coverage, the Sortir a Paris website noted that the opening ceremonies would include "a familiar scene re-enacted by drag queens … surrounding Barbara Butch at her turntables: a recreation of the Last Supper, another famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci, set against the backdrop of the Seine. As you may have guessed, this is a multiple pun in French."

That French pun, cited by the newspaper Le Soir, Sportskeeda.com and other sources, was "La Cène sur la scène sur la Seine," or in English (failing to capture the puns) "The Last Supper on a stage on the Seine."

So, there was that controversial section of the official opening ceremonies. That was one story.

Then there was were the stories and commentaries about negative reactions to the ceremony, with many progressive Christians making it clear on social media (#DUH) that they knew that art was art and that lots of evangelicals were making false claims of persecution.

Once again, the white evangelicals were the point on the media spear.