The American Religion

...Bloom is especially alarmed by what he perceives as a "curious, at least tacit alliance" between the Mormons and the Southern Baptist Fundamentalists...

...Fundamentalism is "the great curse of all American religion, and of all religion in this American century," announces Bloom...

...The "viciousness" of American fundamentalism "makes it shockingly similar to Iranian Shiite Fundamentalism or the worst excesses of the Neturei Karta in Israel...

...For example, in speculating about J, the author of key portions of the Pentateuch, Bloom posited that such an intelligent and gifted writer must have been an "immensely sophisticated" and "ironic" unbeliever—just like Bloom...

...We get a better look at De Gaulle the man—largely because most of the people close to him in the later period were still alive to be interviewed by Lacouture...

...Factor in President Bush's obsession with "the flag and the fetus" and the Department of Justice's support of "the Operation Rescue mob," and the conspiracy theory is complete: We are on the verge of being governed by a nationally established religion, an ultimate parody of the American Religion sketched in this book...

...But for Bloom this statement is truly damning...

...Neither of these would acknowledge the alliance," he adds conspiratorially, "but itis at the center of the loose but dangerously strong coalition of American Religionists that now guarantee the continued ascendancy of the Reagan-Bush dynasty...

...Bloom finds Joseph Smith, its founder, a paragon of "religion-making genius...

...audacity and humor were no part of her...

...Religious leaders have been arguing for years that intolerance toward religious believers is the last acceptable form of bigotry in this country...

...They simply take the Bible at face value...

...t is a curious fact that Bloom finds...

...We are "religiously mad" and "dangerously religion-soaked...

...Whatever the American Religion is, Bloom is not happy with it...

...In case we've missed the point, our religious sentiments are "fierce," "raging," "violent...

...In Bloom's nightmare, the Religious Right takes over America...

...as a religious critic I judge Smith to be greater and more interesting than the current faith of the people that he created...

...But fundamentalists are a different kettle of fish...

...In an effort to trace this national obsession, Bloom takes us on a tour of some indigenous religious groups, including the Mormons, Christian Scientists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Southern Baptists...

...Bloom concludes: "She lacked the religion-making imagination of Joseph Smith...

...To consider Jehovah's Witnesses in the here-and-now necessarily has to be a somewhat painful intellectual experience...

...He reminds us that Billy Graham has been cozy with a number of Presidents and suggests that it was no accident that Assembly of God member James Watt served in a high-level position in the Reagan Administration...

...As for his purpose in depicting J in this manner, Bloom commented: "I do not think that appreciating J will help us love God or arrive at the spiritual or historical truth of whatever Bible...

...Obsessed" with religion he may be, but he is clearly repulsed by the thought of conTHE AMERICAN RELIGION: THE EMERGENCE OF THE POST-CHRISTIAN NATION Harold Bloom Simon & Schuster/288 pages/$22 reviewed by ELIZABETH KRISTOL 56 The American Spectator August 1992 fronting, up close, the ways in which Americans actually manifest their beliefs...

...Fundamentalists claim to read the Bible, says Bloom, but its "language is too remote and difficult for them to begin to understand...

...Fundamentalist Baptists never even seem to realize that the Bible is in the first place language...

...Perhaps more important, in Bloom's view, he showed himself to be a skilled literary critic: "Smith's insight could have come only from a remarkably apt reading of the Bible, and there I would locate the secret of his religious genius...

...Bloom offers what he believes is a telling example: "If you listen to an audio tape by the venerable Criswell in which he purports to interpret a biblical text, you hear, not an exegete, but someone who has not yet realized that the Bible is written in words...

...The Established Church of the South and SouthF rench journalist-historian Jean La-couture needed 500-odd pages to tell the story of Charles De Gaulle's life up ,to 1944 in De Gaulle: The Rebel...

...the English now has a more graceful, mid-Atlantic feel to it, and footnotes clear up some of the obscurer French references...

...It is a "lurid and inhumane work," and was "very poorly composed in the original...

...And in this volume the author has managed to establish some distance from his subject: the prose is less adoring, less supine...

...B ut the bulk of Bloom's wrath is reserved for what he calls the fundamentalist wing of the Southern Baptist Convention...

...Bloom could show some small (if distorted) respect for religions that have founders, authors, and texts...

...His revulsion toward those who choose to believe in the Bible (not to mention toward Southerners and, one suspects, members of any socioeconomic class other than his own) is so socially acceptable as to go unremarked in the press...

...In keeping with his notion of religious criticism, Bloom lavishes his favor on those who create, rather than follow, religions: 4...

...We are, he tells us again and again, a "nation obsessed with religion...

...Thus Bloom can make sweeping references to "Know-Nothings," to the "functional illiteracy" of fundamentalist ministers, and to the "obscure, perhaps permanent, fear and dislike of language in so many working-class Southern Baptists...

...Bloom insists that he will "seek the religious in religion" and not judge spiritual matters by literary standards...

...Bloom observes that Mormons have already infiltrated "the FBI, CIA, and allied organizations...

...At that, the two volumes in English are merely a condensation of a much longer biography in French...

...In another burst of multiculturalism, he adds that it reminds him of the "Spanish Fascism of Franco...

...He blasts fundamentalists—or "Know-Nothings," as he repeatedly calls them—for their "almost lunatic resentment of mind," their "drive against thought itself," their "contempt for all ideas...

...himself imperiled by Bible-toting fanatics, especially since religious believers are convinced that they are the ones who are imperiled—by a dominant secular culture represented by the likes of Harold Bloom...

...The list goes on...

...Bloom complains, "This founder of a persistent American sect badly needed education in religious writing...

...Not an exegete...

...One suspects that there is more than religion at stake for Bloom...

...What is left is the Bible as physical object, limp and leather, a final icon or magical talisman...

...Some of his biases might have been overcome had he at least made an effort to travel around the country, getting to know actual churchgoers, attending a variety of services, studying liturgies, listening to church music, or immersing himself in the dynamics of parish life...

...Bloom concludes that the Jehovah's Witnesses movement is "intellectually weak" and "spiritually empty...

...They fail to appreciate that "theology depends upon analogies, arguments, metaphors, all of which enforce the difference between words and the realities they represent...

...But his prejudices make him incapable of assessing religion on its own terms...

...Mormonism takes the award in nearly every category...

...Eddy," there is little to relieve her "murky drabness...

...The publisher has switched translators...

...Not only did he have the boldness of vision to create a major religion, but he authored the vastly influential Book of Mormon...

...they have just one text, the Bible, and—as Bloom sees it—no one even bothers to interpret it...

...I want the varnish off because it conceals a writer of the eminence of Shakespeare or Dante, and such a writer is worth more than many creeds, many churches, many scholarly certainties...

...Someone as clever as J could not possible have believed in a God, but could only have created one...

...This "anti-intellectualism" drives Bloom ballistic...

...reading Bloom on the subject of religion is like reading a restaurant critic who only evaluates menus...

...Seventh-Day Adventism fares even worse...

...The Ruler is superior to its predecessor...

...The influence of Revelation," declares Bloom, "always has been out of all proportion to its literary strength or spiritual value...

...Joseph Smith had a powerful religion-making imagination, whereas Mary Baker Eddy had close to no imagination at all...

...Christian Science receives a lower score from Bloom, largely because its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, was not as clever or charismatic as Smith...

...n the face of so much alien behavior Bloom falls back on what he knows best: literary criticism...

...He regards the growing power of fundamentalists—i.e., those who take the Bible literally—as a menace to all forms of social, political, and intellectual life...

...So truncated is his secular, professorial worldview that he genuinely convinces himself that a religious faith is the sum of its writings...

...Not everyone who ever Mark Falcoff is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...But Bloom inhabits a world of words and ideas...

...Jehovah's Witnesses come in for still harsher criticism...

...In both his 1990 bestseller The Book of J and The American Religion, it emerges that Bloom sees the role of the religious critic as one who leads the reader away from God, toward literature...

...if they do, President Bush can presumably number gnosticism among his political liabilities in November...

...Convincing readers by intellectual argument is one thing...

...Anti-intellectualism among millenarians and Bible literalists is a recurrent phenomenon, but no other religious movement in America ever has been as programatically set against its intellect as are Jehovah's Witnesses...

...They do not realize that "reading is a skill," and that "the Bible is the most difficult of all difficult books...

...This reverse-missionary zeal continues in The American The American Spectator August 1992 57 Religion, as Bloom repeatedly chastises preachers for focusing on the message of the Bible rather than its metaphors...

...Bloom explains that the dominance of low-brow culture in America today has made the Bible "almost impossible to read for all except an elite...

...He notes that Catholics, Jews, and Mainline Protestants also follow The American Religion, but he is more intrigued by the uniquely American variations...

...And sure enough, The American Religion closes with an apocalyptic political vision as impassioned as any put forth by the Jehovah's Witnesses...

...the prejudice Bloom so freely displays is quite another...

...the tone less hushed...

...In fact, The American Religion rapidly devolves into an almost comical ranking of different faiths based on Bloom's idiosyncratic aesthetic criteria...

...As a shocked Bloom puts it, fundamentalists "insist that the Bible reads itself (as it were), requires no interpretation, declares its literal and unerring truth in every verse...

...What particularly disgusts Bloom—Bloom the literary critic, Bloom the creative "misreader"—is the docility with which fundamentalists approach the written word...

...Bloom is also appalled that the Jehovah's Witnesses chose as their "preferred text" the Book of Revelation...

...While its founder, Ellen White, "is more readable than Mrs...

...Hollywood routinely churns out make-fun-of-nuns movies, and intellectuals have even fewer inhibitions against mocking people who take faith seriously...

...Indeed, he boasts that he has "read and reread everything that remotely could be considered to be an American religious text...

...Indeed, he believes that "one of the uses of religious criticism is that it is the appropriate instrument for dissecting, understanding, and perhaps someday destroying Fundamentalism...

...Even though she was given to trances and ecstatic states, "her diction remained faith-ful to a Maine lawyer's office...

...And the religious text she authored, Science and Health, "is the antithesis of humor or good writing...

...In De Gaulle: The Ruler, he needs nearly 700 more to complete the tale, which includes two presidencies and two periods of enforced political retirement...

...He reviewed the first volume of Lacouture's biography in the July 1991 TAS . west, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the burgeoning, soon-to-be Established Church of the West, the Mormons, are only two components of a multiform alliance that will transform our nation by the year 2000, under the leadership of a Republican Party that since 1979 has become the barely secular version of the American Religion...

...Ouch...

...He was anything but a great writer, but he was a great reader, or creative misreader, of the Bible...