Olympics opening ceremony's unsubtle message: You have been conquered

To those who didn’t love the opening ceremony at the Olympics, it’s important to know who produced them and why.

The artistic director for the 2024 Olympics is French artist Thomas Jolly. While we know little about him, we know what he produced. Many of us wonder why.

Jolly has been widely quoted as saying he wanted “everyone to feel represented” in the show he created for the opening ceremony. So apparently his objectives focused on inclusion and unity.

Inclusion and unity are values that seem easy enough to defend here, given that the Olympic Games seek to bring the world together for a few days in pursuit of athletic excellence.

Paradoxically, for each individual competitor and team, the Olympics are all about competing — with the ultimate objective of winning. While winning is itself neither unifying nor inclusive — quite the opposite, in fact — the quest for excellence can be. That’s the whole point.

We must call this out for what it appears to be — an attempt to weaken, cheapen, and demean time-honored symbols of Jesus Christ.

Thomas Jolly certainly had the resources to communicate any message he wanted during the opening ceremony. He certainly could have found ways — as others have in Olympic Games spanning many decades — to harmonize unity and inclusion with competition and the quest for victory.

According to the New York Times, Jolly had access to “perks most directors could only dream of: a budget of nearly $150 million and more than 15,000 workers, including dancers and musicians. He can also expect a live audience of half a million and 1.5 billion spectators on television.”

He used those vast resources not to send a message of unity and inclusivity but to do precisely the opposite — insulting many of Jesus Christ’s estimated 2.6 billion living followers, along with many others (including Muslims) who see Jesus in a sacred light.

While I have never met Thomas Jolly and know little about him, I'm struck by the fact that he views the opening ceremony as conveying a message of unity and inclusivity. It makes me wonder whether, when Jolly has an ax to grind, one has to interpret his words to mean the opposite of their commonly accepted meaning.

Instead of unity, divisiveness.

In place of inclusivity, exclusion.

Instead of kindness, cruelty.

Instead of respect, mockery.

Someone said recently that the bells of Notre-Dame Cathedral rang during the opening ceremony for the first time since the tragic fire threatened and badly damaged that priceless landmark and place of worship.

Did it ever occur to Thomas Jolly that those bells — along with much of Paris’ most remarkable architecture — would never have existed without Christianity?

Did Jolly ever stop to consider that the works of Victor Hugo — complete with characters like Jean Valjean from “Les Misérables” — could never have become a global source of inspiration (reflecting favorably on France and its people) without Christianity?

While wrapping himself in the false flag of unity and inclusivity, did Jolly ever consider that he was actually sowing division and resentment?

Although I can't read anyone’s mind, especially someone I've never met and know little about, I recognize a familiar pattern in Jolly's production this week.

In European history, conquerors often commemorated and widely publicized their victories by replacing the sacred religious symbols of the conquered with their own.

In some cases, the conquerors obliterated the sacred landmarks and symbols, building new ones on top of those built and maintained by their predecessors.

In other cases, the conquerors would commandeer pre-existing religious symbols and structures, making significant modifications to reflect the values and goals of the conquering authority.

Imagine, for example, a cathedral built on the ruins of a mosque — one that had been built on the ruins of a synagogue, which had in turn been built on the ruins of a pagan temple. Each time something like this happens, the conquered are made to understand one message very clearly: “You have been conquered.”

While I don’t purport to speak for Thomas Jolly, I wonder whether this is what he had in mind.

Jolly is not building one physical structure on top of another, to be sure. But with his message in the opening ceremony, Jolly can fairly be said to be co-opting sacred symbols of Christianity, stripping them of their sacred import, and re-using them to send a very different message — one at odds with Christian teachings.

The message remains the same as that communicated to the conquered by conquering forces in antiquity, often by the destruction and abrupt replacement of physical, sacred structures and symbols: “You have been conquered.”

Obviously, Jolly controls no military force. But he does control an impressive brigade of messaging “soldiers” to help him communicate whatever it is he wanted to say.

Followers of Jesus can choose not to view ourselves as having been conquered, but unless we actively combat secular, anti-Christian efforts to commandeer our sacred symbols, we could lose much of their meaning and favorable impact. To do that, we must call this out for what it appears to be — an attempt to weaken, cheapen, and demean time-honored symbols of Jesus Christ.

In so doing, we can also call out the fact that, as much as anything else, this was a gigantic, costly lost opportunity for France to share its rich history and traditions with the world — in a way that would truly unite and include others in the celebration.

Instead of devoting his immense talents and vast resources to cutting down beliefs toward which he apparently has great hostility, he could have gone in a positive direction — something easy to do with a cultural tradition as rich as France’s.

Ultimately, the Olympics are about finding unity through a shared enthusiasm for athletic competition — based on an understanding that competition is the midwife of excellence and victory in almost any human endeavor.

Instead of excellence, Jolly produced mediocrity.

In place of victory, he delivered a loss.

A loss not just for France but for all who witnessed his tirade against the teachings of Jesus Christ.

The Olympic Games — and all who participate in and view them — deserved better.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally as a thread on X (formerly Twitter).