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

Bloom's interpretation of "the American Religion" as modern Gnosticism was very helpful in making sense of the American religious landscape, whether Mormon, Adventist, Christian Scientist, Baptist, or Pentecostal. The religious American (for Bloom) is one who knows God in solitude. The soul is co-primeval with God. It is uncreated, and only truly knows itself when it "walks alone in the garden with Jesus." The solitude at the heart of American religion has an analog in the solitude of the vast American wilderness. The disappearance of time when "walking with Jesus" has an analog in the historical newness of the United States. (Never mind that there was a lot of Native American history before the white people showed up. Europeans did not know or identify with this history. They thought they were confronting the primeval as they moved westward. America was a lonely space without history, and thus the perfect backdrop for the American religionist's timeless, "gnostic" aloneness with God.) I couldn't help but to compare Bloom's well-researched analysis of American religion with another assessment I recently read in Sam Harris's very popular _Letter to a Christian Nation_. Next to Bloom (who is not even a historian), Harris's ignorance of religious history is striking. The facile claim Harris makes about fundamentalism being the pure religion and everything "moderate" being a defection from pure Know-Nothingism (to use Bloom's terminology) is profoundly unhistorical. It is an extreme over-application of the relatively recent fundamentalist/moderate debate in the Southern Baptist Convention. Fundamentalism--like the word itself, which was coined in 1920--is a modern invention. In the larger scheme of things, religion has rarely been thoughtless. From the very beginning believers have tried to figure out and represent what they believe, which is the exact opposite of fundamentalism, where everything is already figured out and represented (and damn you if you think differently!). Furthermore, American fundamentalists (as Bloom argues rather persuasively) are NOT biblical literalists (as Harris claims), because they don't really read the Bible. Holy texts are NOT the sources of supreme evil in the world--those who stop putting any effort into understanding them are the real problem. Before the 20th century, as Bloom points out, no one ever treated the Bible like a dumb idol devoid of the problems of language. Harris is simply wrong about this. He is blithely unhistorical. Harris wants to fix fundamentalism by destroying religion altogether, but this is like fixing a leaky faucet by ripping out the whole kitchen. It betrays a crude (or perhaps just sensationalist and opportunistic) understanding of the situation. Reading Bloom is delightful. His arguments are littered with with brilliant little insights that produce a sense of astonishment. Not many writers can manage this. Brilliance comes at the cost of idiosyncrasy, but to harp on this point with Blo

To me this book is reminiscent of Hannah Arendt's -the Origins of Totalitarianism-. The reader could pick away at each of the meta-syntheses as they occur, but with both books I was left with the feeling from personal experiences that the overall premises pretty much hit the nail on the head. Have wondered why it took Bloom's book so long to come out in paperback. It seemed to me that while Bloom is a confessed gnostic, he has shown some regard for many of traditional Christianity's values when given the alternative of the way American gnosticism is manifesting itself. For anyone who likes to talk about and mull over the topics forbidden to polite company - sex, politics, and religion - this is a great book for ruminating on the kind of religion we seem to be experiencing in America today. Thought his observations about the polygamy coming back into vogue and becoming legal in the not so distant future may be right on target if one reads the newspapers carefully.

Joseph Smith's genius and prophetic revelations provided a complete explanation of Adam's fall, the teachings of Adam, teachings so old and accurate, as to parrallel ancient Kabbalistic Jewish thought shocking Bloom, which at the time were not a part of modern Judiasm; the Abrahamic pronoucement that the elements, truth, intelligence, and priesthood are eternal; Enoch's ascension, transcending to a divine God-like personage, sphere of intelligence, with the divine power to move and act - demonstrating a higher level of existence; Enoch's Zion a refuge and place of peace; Visions of civil war, race related rioting, symbols of John the Revelator, the manifest destiny of America, God's heavanly kingdom, the ancient hierarchy of patriachs, the sounding of seven trumiphets, the smashing down of the winepress, the restoration of the tribe of Levi, and the doctrine of celestial marriage allowing eternal increase. Joseph Smith's revelation of celestial marriage separate angels from Gods - expanding understanding of established doctrines taught by the Apostle Paul about degrees of glory and shed light on the prophecies of Malachi and Elijah. Joseph successfully connected the promises of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; built temples restoring the spirit and power of Elijah; received the keys of the Kingdom from Peter, James, and John; was ordained to the Aaonic priesthood by John the Baptist connecting a preparatory hierarchy; received the keys to the gather of Israel connecting the lost 10 tribes; Joseph Smith saw the final celestial state of the earth. The opportunity for Joseph Smith to read, study, and memorize the Book of Enoch seems deficient in strength, as a way, to plagerize the Book of Mose. Just what would have Joseph Smith read and what would he have taken? How could Joseph Smith take doctrines hated by both the Catholics and the Protestants and created a new literary work? Its impossible. Could Joseph Smith found refuge about the Gnostics? No, they didn't like the book either. What about the freethinkers? No, they could have use the Book of Enoch against the Christians exploiting any absurdities. Accessiblity is another issue. American Clergy did not have ready possession of the Book of Enoch. So what opportunity existed for Joseph Smith loan the book for an clergy? Who was Joseph source for the manuscript? Why would an American Clergy be willing to share an unpopular book with a common man?

For years historical studies of the LDS church were locked into stalemate, with apologists for the church and its antagonists determined to prove or disprove the truth claims made by the founder, Joseph Smith. Bloom, the well-known literary critic, broke the stalemate in the long section on Mormonism in this book by setting aside questions of advocacy and looking at the Mormon gospel as a cultural artifact. There he found some amazing things. Somehow Smith had revived ancient doctrines of Jewish mysticism and Christian hermeticism that had been lost for years. Bloom also explains how Mormonism comes as close as possible to a religious distillation of the American ethos: *the* American religion, as Tolstoy once said. Bloom described Smith as "a religious genius." This is quite a compliment from a self-described Jewish atheist, of course. Bloom helped open a whole new interest in Mormons by the larger culture, as indicated by such things as Tony Kushner's play, "Angels in America."

I read this book as one which described Bloom's gnostic heritage, hence interest in the subject, but thought I detected some apprehensions on Bloom's part about the direction of all of this in the American experience. Of particular interest was the notion that men, and an occasional women shall become gods - since man were created before gods how could it be otherwise? - The "sexy" part about this was that he prophesied that within the first quarter of the 21st Century this would be manifested in the re-establishment of harems, i.e. polygamy, in the U.S., so it was of particular interest that there was a newspaper article recently about the Governor of Utah proposing that bigamy be made a misdemeanor.