I had a revelation while watching the Olympics opening ceremony. It was during the infamous section that I (and almost everyone else) understood to be a reference to Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’. A large woman in a halo-like headdress was flanked by various avant-garde performance artists, including three drag queens. These, presumably, were the disciples. The table then turned into a catwalk and we were treated to a fashion show featuring representatives of the LGBT community, culminating in a naked man covered in sparkly blue paint. Sacré bleu!
‘This is France,’ tweeted Emmanuel Macron afterwards, apparently satisfied that this performance, like the rest of the opening ceremony, had epitomised everything worth celebrating about La Belle France.
Hyper-liberalism is the new state religion, not just of France, but of the West in general
Not surprisingly, the tableau has been widely denounced as a grave insult to the Christian religion. The French Bishops’ Conference described it as ‘mockery and derision of Christianity’; the leader of Britain’s Evangelical Alliance called it ‘utterly insensitive, unnecessary and offensive’; Elon Musk condemned it as ‘extremely disrespectful to Christians’. Amid the growing backlash, the organising committee of Paris 2024 removed the video of the opening ceremony from its website and issued an apology, although – as is the way with these things – it was lambasted for not being grovelling enough.
But what was really going on in this scene? The clue to understanding it, I think, was provided by Thomas Jolly, the gay, 42-year-old actor and artistic director responsible for the whole shebang. He strongly denied any intention to mock Christianity and said he’d wanted to create a show that celebrated ‘inclusion’ in which ‘everyone can feel represented’. He admitted the controversial section was supposed to be a ‘feast’, but a Dionysian not a Christian one, with the capering blue man as the god of wine. ‘The idea was to depict a big pagan celebration, linked to the gods of Olympus and thus the Olympics,’ he said.
I think we should give Jolly the benefit of the doubt and accept that he didn’t mean to insult the 2.4 billion followers of the world’s largest religion in a ceremony supposed to be about representing people of all faiths and none. Rather, the parallels between the scene he directed and ‘The Last Supper’ were subconscious. For him, the ‘inclusive’ values embedded in the tableau – particularly the veneration of trans people – are sacred, and therefore it felt natural to place them in this religious frame, even if he didn’t quite realise why. His hyper-liberalism is, after all, the new state religion, not just of France, but of the West in general. It is the successor to Christianity, so it was fitting it should have borrowed New Testament iconography. Not so much an insult as an unintentional homage.
And I think Macron meant it when he said: ‘This is France.’ The political philosophy of the centrist parties that govern the EU and still hold sway in most member states – and now the UK – is a fusion of managerialism and radical progressive ideology. It’s an unlikely coalition of bankers, bureaucrats, climate scientists, academic panjandrums and drag queens. The legitimacy of this ruling class rests not just on their much touted ‘expertise’, but also on their moral superiority. They’re the only ones who can be trusted to pilot us through the perilous waters of economic and geopolitical uncertainty and, at the same time, protect sacralised identity groups, such as trans people and women of colour, from ‘cishet’ white men intent on their suppression. They’re technocrats, yes, but also cardinals in the church of social justice.
This, then, was the revelation that struck me during the opening ceremony – that France is a postmodern, secular version of Iran and most western countries are no longer liberal democracies but technocratic theocracies. Or rather, one big, global theocracy, since the constituent parts are no longer sovereign states, but outposts of the same empire governed by the same clerics. That was clear when I attended the beach volleyball in the Stade Tour Eiffel on Tuesday, where the crowd waved their flags and chanted their countries’ names in a kind of cosplay of nationalism. In fact, they were citizens of the new theocracy in which genuine expressions of nationalism are demonised as ‘far right’.
How long will this regime last? It’s hard to tell, but as I gazed at the pink-haired spectators in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, many of them emblazoned with piercings and tattoos, I got a strong last-days-of-Rome vibe. Any political philosophy that makes Papa Smurf its standard-bearer surely isn’t much longer for this Earth.
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