Paul Elie on Culture Wars in Music and Art

The Russell Moore Show

Christianity Today, Russell Moore

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.8 • 914 Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What do Andy Warhol, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Flannery O’Connor, and Bono all have in common? According to writer and cultural historian Paul Elie, they’re “cryptoreligious.” Their art isn’t about affirming doctrine—it’s about invoking mystery, longing, and spiritual disquiet. In a culture where religious belief is often either rigidly defined or entirely dismissed, these artists dwell in the in between. They don’t preach—but they provoke. Their work invites us into important questions, questions to which the artists themselves often don’t have answers. This week, Russell Moore talks with Paul Elie, author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage—Russell’s favorite biography—and the new book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Together they explore how religion haunts the work of artists like Dylan (especially his “Christian era”), Cohen (“Hallelujah”), singer Sinéad O’Connor (her unforgettable Saturday Night Live moment), and even Andy Warhol’s more-than-15 minutes of fame. If you’ve ever felt as if a song lyric or a painting was almost a prayer—or wondered why some of our greatest artists can’t seem to stop brushing up against the divine—this conversation is for you. Resources mentioned in this episode or recommended by the guest include: The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s by Paul Elie The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie Special offer for listeners of The Russell Moore Show: Click here for 25% off a subscription to CT magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	What if you could see firsthand how God's moving across the globe right now?
0:06.5	Christianity Today's global initiative shares powerful untold stories of faith from Latin America and Africa, Asia, Europe, and elsewhere.
0:15.8	Discover a fuller view of God's kingdom at one kingdom.cristianitytoday.com.
0:23.6	What is crypto-religious work? It's work that uses quite clearly religious imagery,
0:29.7	but from a position other than that of conventional belief. And in the act of asking yourself
0:34.7	what they believe, whether they believe it, you wind up reflecting on your own beliefs.
0:41.0	Hello, this is Russell Moore, and this is the Russell Moore Show, brought to you by Christianity Today.
0:46.5	Here, we look for signposts in a strange time by standing fast to what really matters.
0:53.3	Kingdom over culture wars, truth over tribalism,
0:56.4	pilgrimage over partisanship, sanity over cynicism, witness over winning, and Christ over everything.
1:03.5	Today we have a conversation to do just that.
1:16.4	Often when people ask me book recommendations, they say,
1:20.6	give me the best in this category or the other.
1:25.7	And when people ask for my favorite biography, for years now, I have said that my favorite biography of all time, I think, in terms of
1:31.1	enjoyment while reading it and then rereading it and rereading it again and referring to it
1:37.3	many times is the life you save may be your own, an American pilgrimage by Paul Eli.
1:43.5	And I think for a number of reasons.
1:46.1	One is because this isn't a biography of one person but of four,
1:50.0	and their lives intersect.
1:52.3	There are four people who have had profound influence on my own life and thought,
1:57.5	Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Burton, and Dorothy Day, but also the way that
2:02.9	they converge and combine. So when I heard that Paul Eli has a new book out, I immediately
	...

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