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The release in 1992 of celebrity literary critic Harold Bloom's The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation was less than the smashing success that both the author and Simon & Schuster were hoping for. Published on the coattails of the Yale professor's idiosyncratic but widely noticed foray into source criticism, The Book of J, and suffering from Bloom's usual vices—arrogance and melodramatic exaggeration—not to mention a tin ear to some aspects of the faith, the book was mostly dismissed or ignored by the religious and quickly forgotten by the secular.
In a review of a later Bloom book, Omens of Millennium, Boston University Professor John J. Reilly spoke for the consensus when he judged the earlier work's conclusions to be "a trifle eccentric" to those "familiar with the professed theologies of America's major denominations."1 Particularly baffling to many was Bloom's contention that Mormons stand well within the mainstream of a uniquely American mode of faith.
The American Religion's thesis was stated repetitively, even tediously, throughout. The religion that most Americans adhere to "masks itself as Protestant Christianity yet has ceased to be Christian." Bloom elaborated:
There are indeed millions of Christians in the United States, but most Americans who think they are Christians truly are something else, intensely religious but devout in the American Religion, a faith that is old among us and that comes in many guises and disguises, and that overdetermines much of our national life.
Bloom argued that this faith is a slippery devil that "needs to be tracked by particles rather than by principles." Nevertheless, he contended, a set of basic assumptions run through America's "indigenous religions"—Mormonism, Southern Baptism (in Bloom's peculiar schema, an American original), Seventh-day Adventism, Christian Science, and the like—and rub off on transplanted sects, Christian and otherwise. In his "Invocation" (as the introduction is waggishly styled), Bloom cogitated on the fact that nearly nine out of ten Americans believe that God loves them personally—
To live in a country where the vast majority so enjoys God's affection is deeply moving and perhaps an entire society can sustain being the object of so sublime a regard, which after all was granted only to King David in the whole of the Hebrew Bible.
—and set down his explanation for why this is so. That is, whatever trappings of faith most Americans claim to possess, they are actually practicing a new form of the Christian heresy called gnosticism.
In its ancient, more élite, form, gnosticism held that (a) the world and almost everything in it was created by an evil demiurge—often associated with the evil "Jewish god"; (b) Christ's crucifixion, therefore, was both illusory and beside the point, the body being evil; (c) there is a part of all of us—a divine spark—which antedates the demiurgical creation; (d) the sum total of these sparks is really a fragmented god; (e) through a gift of knowledge—basically code words—a mass of believers can ascend the various levels of heaven, and eventually reunite the sparks to re-form this shattered god, who will then destroy the evil demiurge and his counterfeit creation.
At first glance, the connections between this ancient heresy and Willow Creek or the Southern Baptist Convention, say, seem pretty tenuous. Not so, according to Bloom. The essence of the American Religion is "experiential." Few concessions are made to ancient ecclesial authority or tradition, and then only grudgingly. Such structures, in the minds of American believers, can only serve as impediments to the real point of religious experience, to wit, "being alone with God or with Jesus."
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