The first fruit of Bloom’s brooding was his 1990 controversial best seller, “The Book of J,” which argued that the oldest parts of the Bible were written by a woman who invented an anthropomorphic God more like Shakespeare’s besieged King Lear than the transcendent deity of later Jews and Christians. Now comes The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (288 pages. Simon & Schuster. $22), a rigorous, eccentric yet absorbing effort to isolate what makes American religion American and not just a transplant of European forms of Christianity.
Purposely ignoring American Jews, Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and many evangelicals-about 70 percent of religious Americans-Bloom focuses on the Mormons, the Southern Baptists and other made-in-America sects to tease out what he calls the emergent “American Religion.” Here among religion’s exotic plants and trees, rather than in Christianity’s conventional forest, Bloom discovers a ripening revival of ancient Gnostic heresies. The new Gnostics seek personal knowledge, without the mediation of Bible, creed or moral code, of their own innate divinity-the experiential certainty that their real selves are uncreated sparks of God, beyond nature and history.
Bloom’s primary exhibit is Joseph Smith, the Mormons’ founding father, whom he aptly calls an “authentic religious genius” and, in imaginative power, fully the equal of his favorite 19th-century American poet, Walt Whitman. For Bloom, Smith’s central teaching that God was once a man of flesh and bone and that we are all called to “progress” into gods ourselves, is the most robust expression of a “religion-soaked” society that is preoccupied with the ultimate destiny of the individual–and sacred–self. It is also, he argues, a return by some alchemy of the religious imagination to the archaic religion of Yahweh, whose manic but not omnipotent jousts with humankind Bloom described in “The Book of J.” In this sense, Bloom insists, Smith’s vision is more “Biblical” than that of traditional Judaism and Christ transcendent God presides imperially over his Creation.
Southern Baptists, Bloom’s other major exhibit in the American Religion, will be surprised to learn that they are the Mormons’ rival Gnostics–at least those Baptists who are not also fundamentalists. As Bloom observes, moderate Southern Baptists are a proudly creedless folk. What they emphasize is individual salvation through an experiential knowledge of the resurrected Jesus. But who is this Jesus, and what esoteric knowledge does he impart? In Bloom’s analysis of the Southern Baptist imagination, he “is not a first-century Jew” but a contemporary American, “whose principal difference from other Americans is that he has already risen from the dead. Having mastered this knowledge, he teaches it to whom he will.” Crosses in Southern Baptist churches, Bloom adroitly observes, have no figure of the crucified Christ–and Mormon churches display no crosses at all. Bloom interprets this as further proof that the Jesus of the emergent American religion is not the historical figure who suffered and died but a mystical “resurrected friend, walking and talking one on one with the repentant sinner.”
Bloom finds that what makes American religion American is the Gnostic quest for the certain knowledge that the solitary self is or can be immune from death. This quest is what fires the religious imagination. If “death, in literature, is the mother of beauty,” Bloom concludes, “death, in life, is the father of religion.” Indeed, at the age of 61, Bloom says he has come to realize that his own sensibility is deeply religious, but of a despairing kind. “I am a Gnostic without hope, a Jew who cannot accept normative Judaism because I cannot accept a God who allows things like Auschwitz.”
Nonetheless, Bloom has brooded his way into the religious imagination of others in ways that demand attention. If nothing else, he has shown that religion, like literature, needs to be examined for its specific configurations of mind and spirit. The weakest parts of Bloom’s new book are his gratuitous criticisms of current political events, like the anti-abortion movement and the gulf war, which have nothing to do with his subject. What fascinates-and occasionally overwhelms-is his determination to find Gnostics under every religious bed. Not all religion in America is Gnostic, but the impulse is there. And if Bloom is right, it may eventually triumph, in both crude and refined forms, as the operative American faith.
