Borrowing the Table

​Borrowing the Table

Christian imagery has a curious afterlife in secular culture.

Even in settings far removed from ecclesial life, the symbols remain available—recognizable enough to carry emotional weight, detached enough to be repurposed at will. Megan Garber’s recent reflection on The Devil Wears Prada 2 in The Atlantic notices one such appropriation: Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper appearing as the backdrop for a climactic dinner scene among the self-appointed elites of fashion, media, and wealth.

Garber’s central question is sharp: What happens when a culture that no longer inhabits Christian belief still reaches for Christian symbols to dramatize its anxieties?

The answer may be more revealing than the filmmakers intended.

The Last Supper is not merely a familiar image. It depicts a particular kind of gathering: a meal overshadowed by betrayal, suffused with sacrifice, and transformed by Jesus’ strange self-giving. “This is my body, given for you” is not simply aesthetic atmosphere. It is a declaration that power will be redefined through surrender.

And yet the image persists in public imagination because it still communicates gravity.

This is hardly new. Andy Warhol famously reworked The Last Supper into pop art. Olympic opening ceremonies borrow religious visual language. Fashion editorials occasionally flirt with ecclesiastical imagery. Christian symbols remain useful because they continue to signify transcendence, moral seriousness, and civilizational memory—even for audiences with little direct connection to Christian practice.

But something is often lost in translation.

Garber suggests that the sequel reduces its conflict to a simplistic struggle between human creativity and technological domination, between artistry and algorithm. Perhaps. Yet the deeper irony lies elsewhere.

Technology is not alien to humanity. It is one of humanity’s expressions. Algorithms do not descend from another planet. They are built by people, funded by people, deployed by people, and increasingly trusted by people. To frame the conflict as “humanity versus technology” is to obscure a more uncomfortable truth: our technologies often magnify our existing desires rather than replacing them.

The Christian tradition would name some of those desires more directly.

Vanity. Ambition. Envy. Domination. The longing to be seen. The temptation to confuse beauty with goodness, wealth with blessing, influence with significance.

What makes Garber’s essay especially compelling is its final observation that the fictional critique collapses when placed beside real life. A film that casts tech wealth as villain arrives in tandem with the Met Gala, itself sustained by extraordinary concentrations of wealth and celebrity influence. The satire dissolves into complicity.

That, too, feels familiar.

Religious communities know something about the temptation to confuse patronage with mission, visibility with faithfulness, prestige with truth. The problem is not confined to fashion.

What is striking is that even in critique, our culture still borrows Christian symbolic architecture. When moral drama is needed, the old imagery is summoned.

But Christian symbols are not neutral props.

The Last Supper is not fundamentally about elite gatherings, curated aesthetics, or betrayal as narrative tension. It is about judgment and mercy meeting at a table. It is about a kingdom in which greatness is measured by service and power is disclosed through cruciform love.

One wonders whether the persistence of such imagery suggests something more than cultural habit. Perhaps even in a secular age, we continue to reach for these symbols because they name realities our flatter vocabularies cannot quite contain.

Or perhaps, having forgotten the story, we simply remember that it mattered.

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