Anti-Christian Olympics Heralds The Rise Of A Neopagan West

As nearly everyone has seen by now, the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics featured an obscene tableau mocking Christianity with a paganized rendering of Leonardo DaVinci’s “The Last Supper” featuring hyper-sexualized transgender performers imitating Jesus and the apostles. As if to leave no doubt about their perversity, the scene even included a child.

Amid an international public outcry from Christians, the organizers tried to remove all video footage of the segment online, and a spokesman for the International Olympic Committee issued a weak non-apology over the weekend, saying “there was never any intention to show disrespect towards any religious group or belief,” that “their intention with the Opening Ceremony was always to celebrate community and tolerance,” and that “if anyone was offended by certain scenes, this was completely unintentional and they were sorry.” 

No intention to offend? The segment was titled “La Cène sur la scene sur la seine” (The Last Supper on the stage on the Seine). So it was obviously meant to be a sexualized mockery of the Last Supper, as anyone who witnessed the spectacle could easily see. As Bishop Robert Barron said in response to the statement, “Christians were offended because it was offensive, and it was intended to be offensive.” Quite right.

Even if you didn’t see the thing, the drag queens who participated were quite open about what they believed they were doing. Barbara Butch, the French LGBT activist who played the role of what she called “Olympic Jesus” in the revolting scene, also called it the “New Gay Testament” on her Instagram page.

In the ensuing scandal, Olympics officials disingenuously tried to say it wasn’t meant to be a depiction of the “The Last Supper” at all, but a depiction of the pagan Greek god Dionysus, who at one point appeared as a naked blue man on a platter before the transgender Last Supper. So far from quelling the outrage, the excuse just serves to underline their efforts to paganize, pervert, and mock the Christian faith.

What’s more, the attacks on Christianity weren’t limited to this one scene. Months ago, the Olympic Committee replaced the cross on the spire of Les Invalides in Paris for the official poster of the 2024 Olympic Games. The opening ceremony in Paris also included a scene of a threesome, a decapitated Marie Antoinette, and rather explicit symbols of the occult. The whole thing was Luciferian. 

Why did the organizers do this? Put bluntly, they did it because they hate Jesus Christ and Christianity, which they consider their most dangerous enemy. They are quite open about this now. The opening ceremony was a message, unmistakable and clear, from the European post-modern elite, that Christians are not welcome in the post-Christian, neopagan society they are creating. These elites are saying, in effect, that they have tolerance for every perversity imaginable but none for the Christian faith.

For a long time we called this elite “liberal,” but they are not really liberal because liberalism requires a degree of tolerance, even for beliefs and customs liberals find repugnant. Better to call them what they are, which is pagan or neopagan. Pagans, both ancient and modern, have no tolerance for Christianity. It is the greatest threat to them because it is real, and its reality exposes the falsity of their paganism, which can only ever be a perverse imitation of the true Christian faith.

Gavin Ashenden, the former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II, who resigned in 2017 and shortly thereafter converted to Catholicism, said Christians must raise their voices against these elites and in defense of their faith.

“We raise our voices in defense of the givenness of sexuality. We raise our voices against perversion of human sexuality,” he said in a YouTube video over the weekend. “For the transgender movement is above all things a specific repudiation of the givenness of human sexuality.” He called it “gender dysphoria laced with a particular kind of cyanide at the center of it: the sexualization of children by men pretending to be women.”

Ashenden is right. The European elite who control society, who are responsible for producing public semiotics and symbols, are deeply offended by Jesus Christ and His church. They preside over a post-Christian Europe. Catholic France was once called the “eldest daughter of the Church,” but is now rapidly de-Christianizing along with the rest of the West. The elites now feel they have enough power and dominance to come out openly against Christianity, which is what the opening ceremony of the Olympics was all about.

That means Christians will have to fight back. Commenting on this over the weekend, Elon Musk posted on X that, “Unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.” As Christians, we know that Christianity will never perish from the earth. But insofar as Musk meant that Christendom or Western civilization will perish unless Christians are brave enough to stand up for the faith that created the West, he has a point.

Christians of an earlier era knew how to deal with pagans who hated Jesus Christ. First, they bore witness to Christ’s conquest over death by becoming willing martyrs for the faith. Later, they defended the faith against Islam and pagan armies alike. They were willing to stand firm for Christ, whether it meant dying as a martyr or as a soldier on the battlefield.

In our time, Christians will have to rediscover that spirit and that courage. The days of being left alone by powerful elites who control society are over. Europe doesn’t just mock Christianity, it is also in the process of criminalizing the faith with laws and regulations designed to punish the faithful, like prohibiting silent prayer within a certain distance of abortion clinics, to give but one example among many.

The same sort of thing will eventually happen in America. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s putative nominee for president, went on record years ago as a U.S. senator to say any Catholic man who is a member of the Knights of Columbus is unfit for public office. What do you think she will do if she ever gains the power of the Oval Office?

Christians need to be prepared to speak out against the mockery of their faith by neopagan elites. They also need to be prepared to fight, suffer, and perhaps die for their faith.

In that, we Christians can take heart. We have a long history of fighting and dying for our faith—and what’s more, a faith that can overcome death. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.