{"id":944,"date":"2026-07-16T10:36:41","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T10:36:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=944"},"modified":"2026-07-16T10:36:41","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T10:36:41","slug":"how-piss-christ-became-a-culture-war-bomb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=944","title":{"rendered":"How \u201cPiss Christ\u201d Became a Culture-War Bomb"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cPiss Christ\u201d is a photograph of a crucifix immersed in a container of urine. Why would anyone make such a thing? The customary answer is that it\u2019s social criticism\u2014a commentary on the cheapening of the Christian faith\u2014or a prank, like Marcel Duchamp\u2019s urinal, meant to shock and subvert.<\/p>\n

Read more Christopher Nolan\u2019s \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d Leaves the Gods in the Outtakes<\/a><\/p>\n

But Andres Serrano, the man who made \u201cPiss Christ,\u201d seems to have had none of this in mind. He was doing what Jackson Pollock did when he threw paint on a canvas on the floor, or what Andy Warhol did when he copied the labels of thirty-two Campbell\u2019s soup cans. Pollock wasn\u2019t offering a thesis on the death of easel painting, and Warhol wasn\u2019t satirizing consumer culture. They were just trying to create art.<\/p>\n

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As an artist, Serrano is largely self-made. Born in 1950 and reared in Williamsburg by a mother who didn\u2019t speak English and was hospitalized with psychotic episodes, he grew up Catholic. A school trip to the Met hooked him; by thirteen, he was visiting the museum on his own. He entered the Brooklyn Museum Art School at seventeen but left after two years and became a drug dealer and an addict in the East Village.<\/p>\n

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After a decade, he realized that if he didn\u2019t reform he\u2019d never create art, and appears to have willed himself clean. He married the artist Julie Ault, a co-founder of Group Material, a Lower East Side collective producing politically progressive art about subjects such as American intervention in Central America. Artists associated with the group, including Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Richard Prince, later became stars. Serrano took up art-making again, exhibiting in small galleries and artist-run spaces like the 4th Street Photo Gallery, a Bowery-area storefront that welcomed minority photographers. He was a downtown artist, and in 1979 downtown artists didn\u2019t make art to make money.<\/p>\n

Convinced he had little talent as a painter or a sculptor, Serrano borrowed a friend\u2019s camera and began taking pictures. He insists he isn\u2019t a photographer, and he doesn\u2019t develop his own prints. He thinks of himself as an artist who uses a camera. His early work was Surrealist-inflected tableaux; the sliced eyeball in Luis Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s \u201cUn Chien Andalou\u201d has the same mix of coolness and unpleasantness found in a Serrano photograph. He used Cibachrome, a process that yields waxy, saturated color and an illusion of depth. His contemporaries Nan Goldin and Jeff Wall used it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Religious iconography was on Serrano\u2019s palette from the start. He collects religious artifacts and uses church pews as living-room couches. Like many nonobservant Catholics, he appears to be anticlerical but not anti-Christian. He isn\u2019t trying to make religious art. He\u2019s trying to make art using religious materials. He treats Christ, the cross, and the Madonna the way Monet treated haystacks: not for or against, just alert to their aesthetic potential.<\/p>\n

In 1985, Serrano was approached by William Olander, a curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, which had been founded as a venue for cutting-edge, issue-based art. Olander was planning a group show called \u201cFAKE: A Meditation on Authenticity.\u201d This was a standard topic of postmodernist interrogation. \u201cIn a global economy increasingly dominated by high technology capable of reproducing copies more \u2018real\u2019 than the real thing,\u201d the catalogue explains, \u201cfor a fake to operate as a fake, it must pass as an original, circulating freely in our system of late capitalism.\u201d That kind of thing.<\/p>\n

That kind of thing was not Serrano\u2019s kind of thing. He isn\u2019t a postmodernist. He makes art for traditional reasons\u2014interesting materials, striking images. But the project gave him an idea: \u201cfake paintings,\u201d or photographs that look like paintings and gesture at famous ones. Among the earliest, made in 1986, was a photograph of two Plexiglas containers side by side, one filled with animal blood, the other with milk; he\u2019d later also use breast milk, menstrual blood, and his own semen. The point was to make bodily fluids read as paint. The result, \u201cMilk, Blood,\u201d was meant to recall Mondrian. He then made monochromes: \u201cPiss,\u201d a container of urine echoing Yves Klein\u2019s International Klein Blue paintings, and \u201cBlut und Boden (Blood and Soil),\u201d alluding to Anselm Kiefer. All these pieces are abstract, and at some point Serrano decided to reintroduce representation into his art. The first such work, made in 1987, was \u201cPiss Christ.\u201d<\/p>\n

Serrano seems to have picked the crucifix as something whose significance would be somewhat ambiguous. (A 1988 companion piece, \u201cPiss Discus,\u201d is boring by comparison\u2014it lacks that ambiguity.) \u201cPiss Christ\u201d may also nod to Gauguin\u2019s \u201cThe Yellow Christ.\u201d Serrano first tried his wife\u2019s urine, then switched to his own, judging it yellower. He built a two-gallon Plexiglas container himself; the crucifix inside is thirteen inches long, but the photograph is sixty by forty\u2014large enough to function, on a wall, like an altarpiece.<\/p>\n

As many have noted, without the title no one would object to the image. The urine is transfigured: reddish gold, faintly effervescent, almost tearlike. The critic Wendy Steiner called Serrano\u2019s work \u201csome of the holiest images in contemporary art\u201d\u2014which certainly seems to be on the spectrum of legitimate responses to it. \u201cPiss Christ\u201d isn\u2019t the most sophisticated art work ever made. But it was made by an artist, for artistic reasons.<\/p>\n

The photograph was first shown, in 1987, as part of an exhibition at the Stux Gallery, on Spring Street, which drew no notice and sold poorly. A year later, the director of the New Museum nominated Serrano for a fellowship administered by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (secca<\/em>), in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was one of ten winners and received fifteen thousand dollars. What happened next is the subject of Isaac Butler\u2019s entertaining new book, \u201cThe Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America\u2019s Culture Wars\u201d (Bloomsbury), for \u201cPiss Christ\u201d turned out to be the bomb that set off those culture wars.<\/p>\n

The term \u201cculture war\u201d derives from the German Kulturkampf<\/em>, coined in the time of Bismarck for the conflict between the Catholic Church and the Prussian state. It seems to have entered the American vocabulary largely through the sociologist James Davison Hunter\u2019s 1991 book, \u201cCulture Wars: The Struggle to Define America,\u201d and historians have been refining the story ever since: Daniel\u00a0T. Rodgers\u2019s \u201cAge of Fracture\u201d (2011) takes a wider view, tracing the breakup of older ideas about class, society, history, and collective purpose, while Andrew Hartman\u2019s \u201cA War for the Soul of America\u201d (2015) covers ground closer to Butler\u2019s, framing the culture wars of the eighties as a backlash against the sixties\u2014notably the women\u2019s, civil-rights, and gay-liberation movements. Butler trains his own lens mainly on a few years, from 1989 to 1992, when the National Endowment for the Arts was chaired by John Frohnmayer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Frohnmayer was brought in by the Bush Administration to keep what was still a small brush fire from reaching the White House. A lawyer from Oregon who\u2019d chaired the state arts commission and taken First Amendment cases in private practice, he turned out to be too noble for the job. Although he was a Republican\u2014his brother David was Oregon\u2019s attorney general\u2014he\u2019d nonetheless voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988, because, he said, he couldn\u2019t support a ticket with Dan Quayle on it. Which was a pretty good sign he wasn\u2019t ready for the big rodeo. As he wrote in his memoir, from 1993, he believed he \u201ccould negotiate anything if people of good will simply got together, discussed the issues, and decided on the course that would most benefit the country.\u201d That might work in Oregon. It does not work on Capitol Hill. Once in office, Frohnmayer got rolled from every direction\u2014congressional enemies of the N.E.A., congressional friends of the N.E.A., the Administration, the art world, even his own staff. He admitted, in his book, that he felt like throwing up every morning before work.<\/p>\n

Frohnmayer\u2019s dilemma was that he believed in artistic freedom and didn\u2019t think Congress should dictate what the N.E.A. funded, but he also felt obliged, as a political appointee, to avoid funding work that Congress and the President found offensive. The result was flip-flopping\u2014defending a grant one day, rescinding it the next\u2014with no cover from an Administration he later described as \u201ccommitted to almost nothing other than continuing to occupy the real estate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.\u201d He knew that, when trouble came, he\u2019d be the first under the bus.<\/p>\n

Amid the Tiananmen Square protests, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the invasion of Kuwait, Congress was debating whether to defund an agency that consumes less than 0.02 per cent of the federal budget. In retrospect, the culture wars were mostly a distraction.<\/p>\n

But, as distractions go, they were highly distracting. The ten SECCA<\/em> award winners got a travelling exhibition, which arrived, as its final stop, at the state-owned Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond. In March, 1989, the Richmond Times-Dispatch<\/em> ran a letter citing \u201cPiss Christ\u201d and asking whether Christianity had \u201cbecome fair game in our society for any kind of blasphemy and slander.\u201d<\/p>\n

The letter reached Donald Wildmon, the founder of the American Family Association and a longtime decency crusader, and that\u2019s how \u201cPiss Christ\u201d hit the national media. A former Methodist pastor in Mississippi, Wildmon commanded a mailing list of hundreds of thousands of conservative Christians, many of them politicized by fights over school prayer and sex education. Their favored weapon was the boycott. Wildmon had campaigned against the TV show \u201cThree\u2019s Company,\u201d which he considered indecent, and in 1978 he and his followers pressured Sears to stop advertising on \u201cCharlie\u2019s Angels,\u201d which he considered \u201csmut.\u201d In the mid-eighties, he led a two-year boycott that forced 7-Eleven to stop selling Playboy<\/em> and Penthouse<\/em>. A photograph by an unknown artist in a regional museum wasn\u2019t obviously configured for collective action; Wildmon\u2019s followers weren\u2019t museumgoers anyway. Then he learned that five thousand dollars of Serrano\u2019s fellowship had come from the N.E.A.\u2014taxpayer money. That changed everything.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Wildmon sent materials to the senators and representatives who oversaw the N.E.A., demanding that whoever had chosen Serrano be fired. (In fact, no one there had picked him; grants went through peer-review panels precisely to insulate the agency from political pressure.) Congress couldn\u2019t touch the Virginia museum, but the N.E.A. was its creature. It confirmed the N.E.A.\u2019s chair, held reauthorization hearings, and set its budget.<\/p>\n

On May 18th, Senator Alfonse D\u2019Amato took the floor and called \u201cPiss Christ\u201d a \u201cdeplorable, despicable display of vulgarity,\u201d tearing the offending page from the show\u2019s catalogue and throwing it on the floor. Jesse Helms\u2014a longtime\u00a0N.E.A. antagonist who\u2019d gone after the agency back in 1975 for funding Erica Jong\u2019s novel \u201cFear of Flying\u201d\u2014rose to agree. Serrano \u201cis not an artist,\u201d Helms said. \u201cHe is a jerk.\u201d Four days later, Pat Buchanan cited the work in a Washington Times<\/em> column titled \u201cLosing the War for America\u2019s Culture?\u201d On May 31st, Senator Slade Gorton made the inventive claim that \u201cPiss Christ\u201d amounted to the sort of \u201creligious argument\u201d the First Amendment barred Congress from funding, and he called for the N.E.A. to cut off SECCA<\/em> for five years.<\/p>\n

Butler says that SECCA<\/em>\u2019s director, alarmed by the controversy, asked Serrano whether he could tell reporters the piece was \u201ca protest against the commercialization of religious values.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not language that I would use,\u201d Serrano replied, \u201cbut you could use it.\u201d Since a work\u2019s best defense against critics is that it expresses an idea, this improvised gloss became attached to \u201cPiss Christ\u201d as its get-out-of-jail-free card. Serrano later offered similar explanations. It\u2019s also why the crucifix inside the container is so often said to be made of plastic, a detail implying cheapness and fakery. In fact, Butler tells us, it was made of wood and metal: a real crucifix, owned by a collector who treated religious artifacts as art objects, and not a gift-shop trinket.<\/p>\n

One more shoe had to drop for \u201cPiss Christ\u201d to become more than a political soapbox, and on June 13th it did: the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., announced that it was cancelling \u201cThe Perfect Moment,\u201d a retrospective of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. Unlike Serrano, Mapplethorpe was an established art-world figure\u2014he\u2019d had a major Whitney retrospective\u2014though by then he had died, of AIDS<\/em>. The show included photographs of gay B.D.S.M. poses (fisting, bondage, water sports) and of partially unclothed prepubescent children. These would be hard to defend as \u201cexpressing an idea.\u201d The Corcoran received government money and didn\u2019t want to get pulled into the fight. \u201cWith considerable regret,\u201d it announced, the board had voted unanimously to withdraw from hosting the show.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The museum thought it was dodging a bullet; it had only painted a target on its back. Artists and arts organizations accused it of censorship. Nine hundred protesters gathered outside the gallery and projected Mapplethorpe\u2019s images onto the fa\u00e7ade. The Washington Project for the Arts, an alternative arts organization, picked up \u201cThe Perfect Moment,\u201d and it ran there in July and August to record crowds. The Corcoran tried, too late, to get some of the toothpaste back into the tube by asking Group Material to organize a show on censorship which would include works by both Serrano and Mapplethorpe; Group Material refused.<\/p>\n

Read more Spain\u2019s Beautiful Balance<\/a><\/p>\n

The art world was not incensed out of love for Robert Mapplethorpe. It was incensed because cancelling the exhibition put every arts organization receiving even indirect government funding on notice. Particularly vulnerable were regional and alternative spaces, which, unlike the Met or MOMA<\/em>, couldn\u2019t survive without it. As modest as the N.E.A. budget was (it was a hundred and seventy million in 1989 and is two hundred and seven million today), without government money, many smaller parts of the cultural ecosystem would wither and die. The too-big-to-fail museums like MOMA<\/em> and the Met sailed through the culture wars untouched; from the perspective of the struggling artist, it was not their finest hour.<\/p>\n

The message of the Corcoran cancellation was that crossing some undefined line of decency gave the government license to come after you. And it did. After \u201cThe Perfect Moment\u201d reached Cincinnati\u2019s Contemporary Arts Center, the museum and its director were put on trial for pandering obscenity and using a minor in nudity-oriented material.<\/p>\n

Mapplethorpe\u2019s work falls into a few categories: celebrity portraits and self-portraits, flowers, sexual imagery, photographs of the bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, and photographs of the musician Patti Smith. Mapplethorpe met Smith in 1967, when he was twenty, and they were together until 1972\u2014the years she chronicles in her memoir \u201cJust Kids\u201d (2010). He later became part of the gay B.D.S.M. scene he photographed. Smith found that scene off-putting, but the two stayed friends. Some consider the Smith photographs his best work, precisely because they\u2019re the least staged\u2014the cover of her album \u201cHorses\u201d is one of them. His other work can feel formal, even academic. Where Serrano\u2019s figures look waxen, Mapplethorpe\u2019s look like marble. \u201cThey are alive but have no life force,\u201d in Butler\u2019s\u00a0judgment.<\/p>\n

The sex pictures of the so-called \u201cX Portfolio\u201d aren\u2019t candids; they\u2019re meticulously composed photographs of men in deliberate sexual poses. For most viewers, they carry a certain sliced-eyeball shock, and Helms toted a black binder of them around the Senate for years, in his campaign against the N.E.A., asking women to leave the room before showing the images to his male colleagues. But Mapplethorpe, a student of photographic history, wasn\u2019t conferring dignity on a taboo subculture; he was after great photographs, although he understood that one of the things that can make a photograph great is the charge of the forbidden. What unified his work, across subjects, was what the French call le glacis de la lumi\u00e8re<\/em>\u2014a polished, technically exacting finish. (Given that it was the lighting and contrasts that critics admired in his photographs, it\u2019s notable that he didn\u2019t develop his own prints, either.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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That technical emphasis became central to the legal strategy at the Cincinnati trial, where the defense argued that subject matter was beside the point and the art lay entirely in composition. An expert witness described one image of a man urinating into another\u2019s mouth as \u201ca figure study,\u201d and a photograph of finger penetration as \u201ca very ordered, classical composition.\u201d And so on. It worked. The jury acquitted in under two hours.<\/p>\n

Butler\u2019s book tells many more art-war stories, some involving artists once notorious, like Annie Sprinkle, David Wojnarowicz, and Karen Finley. Finley became known as the performance artist who spread chocolate syrup on her body. But that was the least of it. She simulated defecation and smeared canned yams on her ass while reciting:<\/p>\n

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Let me tell you how I take the yams!
I stick it up my granny\u2019s ass!
She\u2019s a real, real nice granny!
And I\u2019d never touch her snatch, \u2019cause she\u2019s my granny!
Oh and I love her ass, ooh I will take those Belgian waffles, and smear it up her crack.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In 1990, Frohnmayer vetoed grants to Finley and three other artists\u2014Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, and John Fleck\u2014and they sued the N.E.A. for viewpoint discrimination.<\/p>\n

Other culture-war skirmishes formed a backdrop to the N.E.A.\u2019s struggles: the removal of Richard Serra\u2019s \u201cTilted Arc\u201d from Foley Federal Plaza (March, 1989), the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling in Texas v. Johnson that protected flag burning (June, 1989), and the Ayatollah Khomeini\u2019s fatwa against Salman Rushdie for publishing \u201cThe Satanic Verses\u201d (February, 1989).<\/p>\n

What were the culture wars about? Their overlap with the Cold War\u2019s end invites the idea that they were a kind of Cold War redux, with the enemy now internal. That was part of the rhetoric, actually, but it wasn\u2019t as if people were thinking, What are we going to do now that the Cold War is over? Hartman\u2019s thesis that they were a post-sixties backlash is hard to dispute, though it doesn\u2019t quite get us to \u201cPiss Christ.\u201d As Butler suggests at points, the N.E.A. fight was a battle less for America\u2019s soul than for the Republican Party\u2019s soul. Attacking the N.E.A. in 1989 meant attacking an agency that Republican Presidents had controlled for seventeen of the previous twenty-one years. Many conservatives who had supported George H. W. Bush when he ran, in 1988, to succeed Ronald Reagan thought that, as President, he had betrayed their cause.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Buchanan led that backlash. When he challenged Bush in the 1992 New Hampshire primary, he campaigned, in part, on N.E.A. funding, specifically for \u201cTongues Untied,\u201d a documentary about the gay Black experience, directed by Marlon Riggs. (As it happened, it was funded during the Reagan Administration, in which Buchanan had served.) Buchanan stunned everyone, including himself, by taking 37.5 per cent of the vote. Two days later, Frohnmayer was fired.<\/p>\n

Bush was renominated, but Buchanan was awarded a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention, in August. He delivered a sermon. \u201cThere is a religious war going on in this country,\u201d he cried. \u201cIt is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself.\u201d Yet the speech was a bridge too far (or maybe just a bridge too soon). In November, Bill Clinton was elected, defeating Bush by almost six million votes, and the temperature around the arts dropped. The fight was now about gays in the military and the Defense of Marriage Act\u2014just as heated, but more consequential.<\/p>\n

In 1994, the N.E.A. largely ended grants to individual artists and sharply restricted sub-granting, the mechanism that had let SECCA<\/em> pass money to Serrano. In 1998, the Supreme Court, in National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, upheld a congressional requirement that N.E.A. grants weigh \u201cgeneral standards of decency\u201d alongside \u201cartistic excellence and artistic merit.\u201d Justice David Souter was the lone dissenter. He argued that indecency is itself a viewpoint, the viewpoint of people who reject society\u2019s definition of decency, and thus protected speech.<\/p>\n

One thing that\u2019s odd in this story is that Frohnmayer never emulated his counterpart at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, who routinely vetoed grants she disliked and faced no reauthorization fights or lawsuits. (Being married to the Secretary of Defense probably didn\u2019t hurt.) As an agency head, Frohnmayer could have done the same; his decisions, like hers, would have been effectively unreviewable. Instead, he boxed himself in. He made enemies of artists without satisfying anyone else, though pleasing artists was never the job.<\/p>\n

Should the government have funded individual artists at all? When the two endowments were created, in 1965, the arts were still largely understood in formalist, apolitical terms. \u201cArtistic excellence\u201d made sense as a standard independent of content. By 1975, that consensus was gone. When the culture wars broke out, contemporary art was already politicized, as it remains. In some places, \u201cexcellence\u201d was considered an ideologically loaded concept.<\/p>\n

Serrano and Mapplethorpe were, by the standards of the moment, fairly aesthetically motivated, but their work could be given, and was given, political interpretations. The critical animus was heightened in the late eighties by the AIDS<\/em> crisis, when many in the art world felt that the Reagan Administration had turned its back on what was happening. Artists thus found themselves in the position of complaining that they were being censored by a government they were attacking.<\/p>\n

Butler\u2019s book is fair but not disinterested, as the author makes clear. He casts himself as a champion of creative freedom, opposed to any content restrictions that Congress might impose on the N.E.A. He is on the side of Andres Serrano and Karen Finley: if their work was recommended by a peer-review process, no matter how offensive it might be to some, it should have been funded. He gives no quarter to Donald Wildmon, Pat Buchanan, or even George H.\u00a0W. Bush. He is sympathetic to Frohnmayer, but only when Frohnmayer is standing up to the White House.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The war within the Republican Party was not principally an ideological war, though. It was a class war. A patrician like Bush was educated to accept that advanced art and literature could be offensive. Being offensive was its social role, harmless as long as the art was safely ensconced in a museum. If you didn\u2019t like the art, you didn\u2019t go to the museum. At one point, as things were going off the rails at the N.E.A., Bush wrote a note to Frohnmayer: \u201cI do support you\u2014difficult job. But Barbara and I are bothered about the raunchy stuff\u2014urine\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. fist up rectum.\u201d That\u2019s a conversation I would love to have overheard.<\/p>\n

But for Wildmon and Buchanan, in-your-face avant-garde art was an insult to the average person, certainly the average American Christian. Those people did not want to pay for it, and it was their right to object, as one might object to one\u2019s taxes being used to build a triumphal arch or to government funding of white-supremacist speech. In America, it is O.K. to object. If we stopped having these \u201cwars,\u201d we would be less of a democracy.<\/p>\n

What is slightly absurd about the N.E.A. culture wars is the amount of ammunition expended over a tiny amount of money and a tiny amount of art work. Individual grants were always a sliver of N.E.A. spending. Most of the agency\u2019s money supports local and state cultural infrastructure. Butler tells us that, in the agency\u2019s first thirty-five years, between 1965 and 2000, the number of local arts councils grew from four hundred to four thousand, nonprofit theatres from fifty-six to three hundred and forty, symphony orchestras from nine hundred and eighty to eighteen hundred, and dance companies eighteenfold. At roughly two hundred million dollars a year, that\u2019s a modest price to pay for spreading the arts beyond the coasts, and a lot to give up over a few photographs. The German government spends 2.57 billion euros a year on the\u00a0arts.<\/p>\n

Today, does anyone really care about \u201craunchy stuff\u201d in art museums? Or anywhere? If you want raunch, you just open your browser or turn on HBO. A screaming match over a photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine seems almost quaint.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Graham Platner\u2019s Very Online Undoing<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Louis Menand reviews \u201cThe Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America\u2019s Culture Wars,\u201d by Isaac Butler.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"\nHow \u201cPiss Christ\u201d Became a Culture-War Bomb - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=944\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How \u201cPiss Christ\u201d Became a Culture-War Bomb - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Louis Menand reviews \u201cThe Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America\u2019s Culture Wars,\u201d by Isaac Butler.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=944\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-16T10:36:41+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/698119ed6a56722b07c239d6\/1:1\/w_200%2Cc_limit\/bestbooks2026_headermobile_animation_callout1.gif\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"21 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=944#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=944\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"How \u201cPiss Christ\u201d Became a Culture-War Bomb\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-16T10:36:41+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=944\"},\"wordCount\":4172,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=944#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/47fc1f4452a7f68ea9ef6c04c973dc01.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Books\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=944#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=944\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=944\",\"name\":\"How \u201cPiss Christ\u201d Became a Culture-War Bomb - 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