Harold Bloom's The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation

...The persistence of mass religious movements is the surest sign that the Enlightenment view of progress has lost its power to serve as the standard of our schemes for social betterment...

...For the latter claim he has been mistakenly identified with deconstruction, a movement he loathes...

...This turn is, paradoxically, the sign of the book's weakness and the source of its interest...

...And he also values "strong" readings, which often take place even when a charismatic leader has not read a certain book but comes to a previously articulated insight...

...The American religion, on this account, is thus postChristian, but not post-biblical (because Judaism and Christianity are in Bloom's mind not truly biblical religions...

...These tenets are that the souls of individuals existed before Creation and are no part of that "fall" into materiality, that what makes the individual soul free is knowledge (especially knowledge that it is a part of God), and that each soul is at its spiritual best when it is most alone with God (this solitude having aesthetic analogues with America's sublime space and belated entry onto the world scene...

...What often happens in the book is that when Bloom's interest in the religious content diminishes, he turns to political and social—even psychological— explanations of his subject...

...Bloom wants to show us to ourselves, not as pollsters and statisticians outline and detail the masses of citizens but as our prophetic visionaries claim to know us in our heart of hearts...

...Though Bloom strains mightily, I think his failures are significant...

...The short answer is that Bloom needs to read religion as he reads literature...

...Merely to retell religious beliefs is much too tame for Bloom, and he must engage the spiritual power (as he feels it) of each belief he encounters...

...In a sense, the severe contradictions of the book stem from his predilection to treat religion as if it were a great lyric poem, a personal claim that relies on its own vivid emotion to demonstrate its truth...

...For what Bloom does in the end is offer one more version of America's national character...

...At worst he is an intellectual bully, denigrating most academics, pillorying George Bush's abortion views, deriding "political correctness," smirking at Jimmy Swaggart —but always without any sustained argument and often without a decent exposition of his reasons...

...There is another way to read the book, however, and this is to see it as a drama of the self in desperate search for justification...

...Pentecostalism "had" to begin in America because "its extreme supernaturalism had to be a reaction against . . . a society where power was enshrined in an abundant materialism...

...In doing this he claims to examine the texts of religious writers, especially religious leaders and visionaries, in exclusively spiritual terms, without regard to their truth value in any secular context...

...Without any recourse to sociology or political theory, Bloom proceeds to pass his own analytic and spiritual judgment on a number of sects and movements, and to present his own narrative of how our religion developed...

...So intense is the exaltation of power in the Jehovah's Witnesses that Bloom "must" call it pathological...

...Can Bloom treat this mighty and mysterious subject of religion in his own terms, using only his intelligence and experience as guides...

...He finds, for example, the Mormon leader Joseph Smith to be a great and marvelous visionary, while he can barely contain his disgust at the Jehovah's Witnesses...

...He never quotes a secondary source without calling it excellent (and then often proceeding to modify it), and he never discusses a religious leader's life without stating whether it was successful or not...

...Indeed, by arguing that America has become a post-Christian nation while remaining in thrall to biblical models of authority, Bloom relies on a belief in the uniqueness of the American experience—its claim to be an exceptional, even a redeemer nation—that is itself nothing short of religious...

...Time and again, Bloom invokes a logic based on extratheological, chiefly social and political, evidence, and throws into high relief his shaky claim to be dealing only with the religious truth in his subject...

...Will we wake up eight years from now in a rerun of the thirteenth century...

...It is a book animated by the belief that spirituality remains absolutely necessary and at no time more than the present, and that Americans—in the best and worst sense—have gotten the religious experience they deserve...

...From Weber's study of the decline of sacralized societies to postmodern theories of the flattening of all value and affect, the modern is regarded as insistently this-worldly, to be measured only by standards of its own devising...

...His book is a highly personal overview of two hundred years of American religion (chiefly Protestant sects) and through this overview it attempts a reading of the national character...

...Something in Bloom vibrates resonantly with the rhetorical power of religious leaders, as he appears drawn to the outrageous for its own sake...

...However weak may be its claims to rational or universal truth, the American experience of religion has a strong grip on our imaginative lives...

...How to account for this...

...Bloom, for example, compares some of the New Age writings to science fiction...

...In books of literary theory such as The Anxiety of Influence and Agon: Towards a Theory of Revision, he argued that poets are "strong" only as they vanquish the dread of being overshadowed by other poets, and that one always "misreads" because any text can (and should) be put to any use by anyone who has the power to "usurp" its context or "normal" sense...

...And in the face of the New World Order, we are slowly but painfully becoming aware of how little useful understanding there is on that subject...

...The almost bitter paradox of this book is that it both uses and refuses national identity as a ground of explanation...

...Will some larger cycle in human history be revealed only as we again embrace other-worldly, sacred modes of thought, and social SPRING • 1993 • 265 Books organization is realigned with nonrational schemes...

...His measure of a religious message's worth appears contradictory, being sometimes almost pragmatic 266 • DISSENT Books (how many followers does it inspire...

...What gives Bloom his strength, however, is not so much his inconsistency and lack of a modern truth test as his willingness to define his own religious position—he sees himself as a nonbelieving Gnostic Jew—and to proceed to discuss spiritual experience as if it constituted its own frame of reference...

...We are free to conjure up the ghosts of skeptics past, such as H.L...

...q SPRING • 1993 • 267...

...Bloom defines his expository task as a critical reading of a composite creed, which he has himself cobbled together and calls "the American religion...

...the fundamentalist wing of the Southern Baptists is rather scary, but the early leader of what became the moderate wing, E.Y...

...The debasing of the Gnostic sense of self into selfishness accounts for the decay in "our inner cities and in our agrarian wastelands...

...Bloom, an expert on Romantic literature, puts great stock in originality, especially in America, which he refers to as the "Evening Land...

...To me this is the core of the book...

...Mullins, has made valuable and original contributions to American theology...

...Whether or not he succeeds is another matter...

...There remains "enough wildness" in the Mormon sect, as opposed to the "murky drabness" of Ellen White (of the Seventh Day Adventists), to make it more authentically an American shamanism...

...Can he speak of religious visions without himself becoming either a vapid prophet or a mere annotator of the power of others...

...Bloom talks in the self-assured tones of a believer, but also the leader of a sect of one...

...By this procedure, Bloom concludes that the American religion is best represented by three "sects" —the Mormons, the Southern Baptists, and the Afro-American tradition of prophecy—because these express most purely the main tenets of American religious thought...

...The challenge in writing religious criticism, I believe, is that one is tempted to become a prophet rather than a commentator...

...In The American Religion Bloom raises a number of questions about the precise relation between modernity and religion even as he adroitly refuses to answer them...

...Most accounts of modernity treat the advent of secularism as a central force in our world...

...and sometimes rhetorical (how convincing does one find its sense of spiritual power...

...Furthermore, though our indigenous American preachers never read the ancient and occult texts, they have imbued their teachings with the spirit of Gnosticism, a "heresy" that flourished in writings in the second century of the Christian era...

...At best he imitates his subject: he dramatizes the ability to imagine (or reimagine) one's place in the cosmos by creating a sense of self that is both unbounded and beyond self-centeredness...

...Some claim this task would best be pursued by sociology, or by "cultural studies," but for Bloom these are nothing but methods corrupted by academicism, positivism, or "political correctness...

...Not only secular modernists find many of the claims of America's religious sects nonsensically, even stupidly, offensive...

...But perhaps someone will interpret "our" religion as more than an elaborate and occluded version of the American Dream, in short, our national experience and aspirations, our obsessive love-hate relationship with individualism and materialism...

...These beliefs are never set out in any single creedal exposition, and are best adumbrated in such literary figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman...

...But the struggle for a writer like Bloom is to take a nonskeptical, nonsecular look at religion and yet come up with some modern relevance...

...However, without some consistent reference to a more shareable framework of explanation (and Gnosticism does not, I'm afraid, fill the bill), the rest of us will never know why religion persists, or even what its patent nonsense is "really" saying...

...He has written what he calls a book of "religious criticism," modeled on literary criticism...

...Harold Bloom vaguely but darkly hints at the end of his new book that the next century may even see a return to religious wars...

...Does it invalidate all theories of modernization...

...Bloom seems impressed with the growth potential of the Mormons, and occasionally prophesies that some sects are bound to die out...

...The ruin of the Southern Baptist Convention in the last twenty years is a "perfect microcosm" of America during the Reagan-Bush era...

...His book invites comparison with Robert Bellah et al.'s Habits of the Heart and with Garry Wills's Under God, but Bloom is after a hidden truth that these more sober writers tend to leave undisclosed...

...Yet the religious sensibility, with its longing for some transcendent source of value, persists and, in some of its fundamentalist manifestations, even seems to be on the rise...

...What Bloom's religious criticism amounts to is something like an aesthetic reading of various religions in terms of the vitality of their leaders, their imagery, and their narratives...

...Mencken, Friedrich Nietzsche, or Mark Twain, and settle for a dismissive laugh...

...All of this is daring, much of it is entertaining (though Bloom assiduously disclaims any satire or disrespect for even the looniest beliefs), and most of it is so subjective and questionable that one wonders why the project was conceived in the first place...