‘France, the eldest daughter of the Church, are you faithful to the promises of your baptism?’

That’s the question put to France by Pope John Paul II in 1980. It comes to mind amid the brouhaha over the Olympics’ Last Supper. The famous painting by Leonardo Da Vinci depicts the last meal of Jesus with his apostles. The Olympics version is a homage to a repast with drag queens. It might have amused a foe of the Church like, say, Voltaire. It’s hard to imagine, though, that John Paul II would have seen it as anything but a mockery of religion.

What in the world was President Macron thinking? France has, after all, by and large heeded Voltaire’s demand — “Écrasez l’infâme” — when it comes to Christianity. The nation that built Notre-Dame has by and large fled faith. The great cathedrals and humble parish churches, while not empty, are rarely filled. Heresy, it seems, is no longer anything about which to write home. Secularism long ago won the day.

Or did it? The outcry at the mockery of “The Last Supper,” after all, was instant, impassioned, and global. Speaker Johnson called it “shocking and insulting.” France’s conference of bishops deplored the “scenes of derision and mockery of Christianity.” While jeering the Church “is usual and we are used to blasphemy in France,” a papal spokesman said, “in an event that brings together all or part of the population, I found this staging hurtful and out of place.”

While the ceremony’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, at first defended the display, noting that “in France, people are free to love how they please, are free to love who[m]ever they want, are free to believe or not believe,” he later walked back his comments. He claimed he was inspired by pagan celebrations and denied a “desire to mock and denigrate anyone.” An Olympics spokeswoman said “If people have taken any offense we are really sorry.”

That attempt at contrition suggests that the condemnation of the parody might have struck a nerve among the event’s organizers. One wouldn’t want to make too much of an event that also featured a singing Marie Antoinette, despite being beheaded. It’s hard, though, to avoid a sense that the affront to believers posed by the Last Supper mockery underscores the fraught relationship between religion and state in France — especially in contrast with America.

The difference between the two nations — both products of revolutions — might come down to a distinction between freedom of religion and freedom from religion. Our Framers forged a secular republic that respected faith and, in the First Amendment, forbade any “law respecting an establishment of religion.” This prohibited Congress not only from establishing a church but from disestablishing churches already in some states established by law. 

The French Revolution was hardly so sanguine. The Church was intertwined with the monarchy that was overthrown. Church lands were seized, the clergy’s privileges were removed, and they became state employees. The Declaration of Independence says all human rights emanate from God. France’s equivocates, saying, “in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being,” that “the principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation.”

As for religious freedom, the Declaration of the Rights of Man merely observes that “no one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views,” but only insofar as “their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.” Even though the French Revolution descended into terror and dictatorship, the church never recovered its position. In 1905 the Third Republic enshrined strict secularism, or laïcité.

Could it be that France’s stifling secularism is at the root of the crass display of irreligiosity at the Olympics, and the pushback to it? John Paul II’s successor, Francis, on a visit in 2015 to France lamented, partly in jest, that if “France is the eldest daughter of the Church,” then “she is a most unfaithful one.” He said this, one report observed, with une certaine “tristesse,” a certain sadness. Let us just say that it’s not hard to see why.