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

The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation
By Harold Bloom
New York, Simon & Schuster, 1992. 228 pp. $22.00.

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. Long a discerning critic of gnostic tendencies in literature and a brilliant expositor of a line of American poets extending from Emerson through Whitman to Wallace Stevens, he has here turned his hand to what he calls "religious criticism," and specifically to a range of home-grown American religious formations nominally Christian but bearing an uncertain relationship to Christian orthodoxy (whatever that may be). Bloom's main argument-that Americans are drawn unawares and whatever their self-descriptions to a pervasively gnostic point of view-is not perhaps as revolutionary as he sometimes makes it sound. He himself acknowledges, for instance, among other predecessors, Philip J. Lee (Against the Protestant Gnostics). But Bloom's feel for the sensibility that animates this gnostic tendency and his zest for its zanier manifestations give this book energy, appeal, and flashes of acumen unmatched in other more "responsible" accounts. Indeed, Bloom is probably closer to the pulse of many American men and women and to their endless attempts at religious revision and self-creation, than many a more conventional seminarian, academic sociologist, or literary critic writing today.

Bloom proceeds by means of a sympathetic reading and witty characterization of the founding texts of a number of American sects and religions, from the Book of Mormon to the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, supplemented by a glance, at least, at the best recent scholarship on the religions to which these have given rise. He reviews this material with a unique blend of charm and insight, though in a casual and sometimes repetitive style that may suggest more carelessness than is actually there. Bloom is serious about the Mormons, funny about the Christian Scientists, acute about the Pentecostals, scathing about the Jehovah's Witnesses, and touching, even elegaic, about the best of the Southern Baptists. When it comes to African American religion, in a sense the climax of his book, Bloom is, or tries to be, downright visionary. It is no accident that he quotes fine passages from two African American poets in its praise, a literary luxury he elsewhere denies himself. He is also weirdly ambivalent about Jimmy Swaggart and wonderfully Laodicean about Billy Graham, who richly deserves and rarely gets the damnation-with-faint-praise to which he is subject

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

here. Limited to some extent by an armchair view of these religions and religious leaders, Bloom nevertheless makes his years of literary training count, helping us to hear the tones and undertones of the religious language in which many Americans speak and think.

Bloom is able to hear these tones in part, as he himself says, because of his own profound attraction to a gnostic sensibility. He does not share in whatever hope may be generated by gnostic schemes for salvation, but, like many gnostics and quasi-gnostics, he does resist easy answers to the problem of evil and easy referrals of that problem to the rationalizations of established hierarchies. He finds intractable, for instance, the callous injustice of a God who permits, as he remarks, both childhood schizophrenia and the Holocaust. Such a God is for him unworthy of the praise and prayer offered in churches, synagogues, and mosques across the land, unless that God is either radically reinterpreted in ways that take us well beyond orthodox tradition or regarded as a mere figure of speech for a deeper spiritual principle inherent in each individual soul. Such reinterpretation, however, if it is to be successful, requires, for Bloom, both a high, indeed an Olympian, vantage point from which to distinguish the many alternative manifestations of that spirit and a profoundly Emersonian self-reliance on one's own "soul competency" (to borrow a phrase from the Southern Baptists Bloom loves) to discern among them.

It is his willingness to undertake this work of distinction and discernment, together with the unusual nature of his qualifications for doing so, that makes Bloom's book both attractive and problematic. Among its positive features are his sensitivity to the quality of what he calls the religious imagination in these religions and their documents. Bloom insists that some such quality of imagination is an irreducible aspect of any religion and that attention to it-attention, that is, to the audacity, scope, dignity, and aesthetic appeal of a religion's embodiment in language-must form a part of our evaluation of its worth and appeal. His point here is a valid and often overlooked one, and he is uniquely qualified both by disciplinary training and by what I can only call native literary-critical genius for making it.

More problematic is Bloom's claim to be approaching, even if only in a preliminary way, an estimation of the irreducible spiritual quality of the religious formations he examines. Bloom's insistence on the presence of some such quality, and his desire to defend it, as he has always defended high art, against the literal reductions and ideological impositions of the self-appointed "guardians of the law," is admirable. The task has risks as well as advantages, however, not only politically, as Bloom himself fully sees, but ethically as well. In the first place, spiritual depth may not be as unilaterally linked to powerful aesthetic expression as he assumes. Secondly, Olympian detachment and Emersonian self-reliance may not always be the best stances from which to measure either one. Indeed, these may, and often do, falter before precisely the overwhelming forces of spirit and imagination

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

they exist to summon and discern. Nevertheless, here, in what he calls our Evening Land, where new revelations abound and where each generates ceaseless anxiety about its correlation with ancient truths, Bloom is among the rare spirits able to see and willing to rise to a full analysis of the problem posed for Christianity by a pervasive American ethos.

Cleo McNelly Kearns
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Newark, NJ