The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation

Harold Bloom – 1992

In the 1980s, the great Yale professor Harold Bloom gradually turned his attention from literary to religious criticism.  In The American Religion, Bloom argues that although there is no official religion in the United States, there is nevertheless a distinctly American brand of Protestantism that is bound up with our national character.  He considers it Gnostic more than purely Christian in the historical sense, meaning that it is centered around the idea that God knows and loves us personally and individually, a doctrine that was not a feature – if it existed at all – in older incarnations of the Christian church.  Bloom elucidates how a variety of homegrown faiths – all outgrowths of the Pentecostal Cane Ridge gathering in 1801 – carved out a spiritual identity apart from European traditions, and he specifically cites the Southern Baptists and the Mormons as the most emblematic and successful of self-generated American religions; their respective creators, Edgar Young Mullins and Joseph Smith, bearing powerful visionary imaginations.  Just as the Southern Baptist Convention is called the Catholic Church of the South, Bloom expects the proselyting Mormon Church to become the dominant faith of the American West.  He sees even more power and validity in African-American religion too, but since it lacks organization, it isn’t as likely to become a recognizable social force like the aforementioned faiths, both of whose well-known racial insensitivity and right-wing politics tend to leave blacks out in the cold.  Like the evangelists he critiques, Bloom gets into a little trouble trying to prophesy himself.  Writing in 1991, for example, and troubled by the clout of the religious right, he finds it unthinkable that a Democrat could occupy the White House any time in the forthcoming generation, yet of course there have been two 8-year Democratic administrations since then.  The strongest parts of the book, to me, involve Bloom’s humanistic warning against the anti-intellectual tendency in fundamentalism, specifically pointing to the expulsion of the moderate faction of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 70s, which has had direct and significant impacts on national politics.  With sadness and bemusement, he points out the irony in the fact that the Christian fundamentalists now belligerently shut out any information that isn’t the Bible and yet are less familiar with the contents of the book they wave about than probably any denomination in the last two centuries; not only less knowledgeable but barely even competent to read their own literature, let alone comprehend its meaning and origin.  Bloom is not anti-religion in this or any of his other books; in fact, he frequently mentions how moved he is by the majestic vision and optimism of the successful faiths he analyzes; especially the pre-70s Southern Baptists and the Mormons.  In contrast, he recoils at the head-in-the-sand misanthropy of Jehovah’s Witnesses and other doomsday, anti-nature, anti-science fundamentalists.  Unlike trendy atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, who look down their noses at people of faith, Bloom has done his homework and actually read as much of the key literature of each religion as he can, and – being a literary scholar by trade – sees poetic mysticism as the true power behind certain churches' achievements in reaching the hearts of millions.