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Moreover, this Jesus is different from the historical Jesus or the Christ of the Creeds. Rather, American Religionists yearn for that gnostic spark—that part of their soul that is older than creation itself—to be utterly alone with and to know a less challenging figure than the Jesus of the Gospels: "the American God or the American Christ." In this radically personalized vision, certain distinctive Protestant impulses—a distrust of works-righteousness and anti-sacramentalism, for example—are assigned such weight that they warp and bend the historic Christian faith until it becomes something else.
Nor is this a late-20th-century development. Bloom traced the particles of our putative national faith back to borrowings from African religions imported along with the slaves—particularly the idea of the "little me" or "self within the self" which talks to God without the need of any mediation—and saw the first flowerings of it in the Cane Ridge revivals around the turn of the 19th century. It was this religion, argued Bloom, that led Joseph Smith to create the Mormons and the Southern Baptists to work out their creedless faith.
Claims like the last one seem preposterous, and Bloom did himself no favors by often substituting invective for argument. The conservative majority in the Southern Baptist Convention he called "Texas Know Nothings" only because people would misunderstand his designation of them as Fascists. Jehovah's Witnesses reminded him "of why very small children cannot be left alone with wounded and suffering household pets." I joined many other readers in blowing off The American Religion after first sampling it in 1997.
And yet, in the intervening years, I have not been alone in rethinking that dismissal. In a recent installment of his series on religion in America, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus seized on Bloom's book to argue that conservatives "should nurture a measure of skepticism" about the possible benefits of a massive religious revival. Though Bloom's portrait of the American Religion was "intended to be provocative … it should not be lightly dismissed." Much of what passes for Christianity today, argued Neuhaus, is indeed a kind of "sub-Christian gnosticism" incapable of "sustain[ing] a normative moral tradition."2
Lutheran theologian Carl E. Braaten has issued a more full-throated endorsement of The American Religion's analysis—although, unlike Bloom, he is horrified by it. In a recent book Braaten excoriated "this American neopagan religion that is becoming increasingly more dominant in the pulpits, pews, and bureaus of the Protestant denominations":
Gallup-style findings show that the American believers are religious in a general sense with scarcely no correlation to the specific beliefs of historic Christianity. They become church members without believing in the biblical sense. It is no wonder that every year as much human traffic goes out the back door as comes in through the front.3
Clearly some of Bloom's book is overwrought or just plain wrong. But if thinkers of the stature of Neuhaus and Braaten are suggesting that we ought not dismiss it outright—indeed, that we might learn something from it—we'd be well advised to pay attention. If gnosticism isn't as pervasive as Bloom proclaims, and if orthodox Christian faith is much healthier than he allows, nevertheless American Christians of every stripe, from the seminary to the Barbecue Bible Study, certainly flirt with this heresy often enough. For evangelicals in particular, the book should serve as cautionary tale and barbed warning.
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