Paul Elie. The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025.

Lately, everybody has been looking for the decade that did this to us—put the country in the appalling state of full-spectrum hatitude that we now permanently inhabit (a condition so many seem to enjoy). The ’80s for many reasons give off the strongest scent as the culprit. Paul Elie’s The Last Supper , a sprawling and many-peopled time machine of a book, does the necessary forensics and locates the roots of our endless culture wars in that decade—but his ’80s may not be the ’80s you lived through and/or remember and/or have read about and/or watched on replay.

From a distance of more than three decades (yikes), our collective memories of the ’80s skew heavily secular: the greed-is-good era of a surging stock market, hostile takeovers, and insider trading scandals; hip young investment bankers (a category of humans previously undreamt of) charged up on Bolivian marching powder and partying hearty…