Book Report

Title: The American Religion
Author: Harold Bloom (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Book of J)
Written: 1991

The author sez: The true American religion is not Christianity but is a variation of Gnosticism, and this is American religion's peculiar genius. Seen among other places in the Cane Ridge revivals of 1801, Transcendentalism, New Age, and African-American religion, the most unique permutations of the American Religion are Mormonism and Southern Baptism. The true American originals were Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, and E.W. Mullins, Southern Baptist and articulator of the concept of "soul competency," which says that the soul is competent, without any mediation, to deal with God on a one-to-one basis.

Quotable:
What is the American Religion?

"Freedom, in the context of the American Religion, means being alone with God or with Jesus, the American God or the American Christ. In social reality, this translates as solitude, at least in the inmost sense. The soul stands apart, and something deeper than the soul, the Real Me or self or spark, thus is made free to be utterly alone with a God who is also quite separate and solitary, that is, a free God or God of freedom. What makes it possible for the self and God to commune so freely is that the self already is of God..." (p. 15)

What's behind Mormonism?

"Mormonism is a wonderful strong misprision, or creative misreading, of the early history of the Jews. So strong was this act of reading that it broke thorough all the orthodoxies - Protestant, Catholic, Judaic - and fopund its way back to elements that Smith rightly intuited had been censored out of the stories of the archaic Jewish religion. Smith's radical sense of theomorphic patriarchs and anthropomorphic gods is an authentic return to J, or the Yahwist, the Bible's first author." (p. 84)

On Jimmy Swaggart, of whom Bloom considers himself "a fan":

"Visiting a prostitute was [Jimmy] Swaggart's equivalent of the Holy Ghost cultist passing a lighted blowtorch over hands or face. We are in the pattern that Gershom scholem, meditating upon such Kabbalistic figures as Nathan of Gaza and Jacob Frank, named "Redemption through Sin." Swaggart's genius was to convert his falling forward on his face, as it were, into being slain in the Spirit, thus falling back into the arms of the congregation, his television viewers." (p. 179)

And here Bloom visits California, and puts a self-proclaimed religious geniusin his place:

"The Californian God differs in that he is a kind of public orange grove, where you can pick as and when you want, particularly since he is an orange grove within. His perpetual and universal immanence makes it difficult for a newager to distinguish between God and any experience whatsoever, but then why should such a distinctinon occur to a California Orphic? Matthew Fox, ostensibly a Catholic priest, has formulated a curious doctrine of 'panentheism' to avoid this collapse into pantheism, but Fox is one of my defeats. Several attempts on my part to read through The Coming of the Cosmic Christ have failed, as no prose I have ever encountered can match Fox's in a blissful vacuity, where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea." (p. 186)

On the Baptist experience (and "In the Garden" is alluded to several times):

"The Baptist experience of knowing Jesus, in a solitary and renewable encounter, takes priority over public worship, doctrine, or acts of charity. And since what can know Jesus, in some way already is akin to Jesus, then the saved Baptist participates now in the Resurrection and the Life...If one's undying spirit accepts the love of Jesus, walks with the resurrected Jesus, knows what it is to love Jesus in reurn, alone with jesus in the only permanent and perfect communion that ever will be, then tehre can be no churchly authority over one. As for the authority of Scripture, even it must yield to the direct encounter with the resurrected Jesus." (pages 205-206)

My response: A wonderfully illuminating book. Now I know why we Lutherans hate "In the Garden" so much. Makes me appreciate the catholicity of our Lutheranism that much more. Does our Presiding Bishop understand that this is why Lutheranism cannot compete, on a large scale, in the American religious marketplace? The spiritual experience that most Americans seek, and which the Baptists and Mormons excel at, does not come easily to Lutheranism, if at all, and we have an innate distrust of the same. (Although, Chip, look at Africa - lots of Lutherans in Africa!)

The most disquieting part of this book is how much Bloom sympathizes with those he describes, like Smith, Swaggart, etc. He sees them as heroes of the religious imagination, authors like the ones he describes. What I think he fails to see is how hurtful the Gnostic-like religions can be, trampling on the poor, the uneducated, those who are unable to make the high standards of knowledge or achievement these faiths demand.