Source of book: I own this
Harold Bloom was best known as a literary critic with a lot to say about Shakespeare. His style was a bit bombastic, and his conclusions sometimes disputable, but there is no doubt that he had real insight, and his ideas were always thought provoking.
I haven’t written about it on this blog, but his big Shakespeare book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is on my shelves, and I consult it from time to time regarding the Bard’s plays. I don’t always agree with everything in the book, but it always sheds an interesting light.
When I discovered that he had written about American religion, I knew I needed to read it.
Regular readers of this blog know that I was raised in the American religious tradition, and have a lot of issues with it. In this book, The American Religion, Bloom looks at why American religion is unique - it really isn’t like religion anywhere else, but is a syncretism of religious trappings and distinctly American beliefs.
Specifically, Bloom points out that American religion has very little to do with historical Christianity, but more closely resembles Gnosticism.
Because of this, the main branches of distinctly American religion have far more in common with each other than they do with historical Christianity, or Christianity as practiced elsewhere. The Mormons and the Southern Baptists may be convinced the other is destined for hell, but the two are very much alike. As are other American sects: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists, Christian Science, and more.
Some specific traits of American religion are a belief in individual experience as the core of religious experience, a soul-body duality where the soul exists prior to creation, a rejection of community and responsibility for others, a belief that God personally loves us more than other people, and a nationalist view of one’s sect as the new Chosen People™.
As with other Bloom works, I am not sure he completely and convincingly proves every element of his claims, but he definitely illuminates the specifically American traits of our religion pretty well.
His historical information is also excellent - he spent many hours researching each of the sects he writes about, and thus writes from a position of knowledge, not speculation. He admits he is an outsider, as a secular Jew, and doesn’t impose ideas on these religions - something my Evangelical upbringing did all the time.
He also writes this book as what he calls a “religious critic,” akin to a literary critic. Thus, his job isn’t to decide if religion is true, but to analyze it on its own terms. His antecedents in this role, he notes, are Emerson, and especially William James.
A quote here is illuminating:
There must be a similarly irreducible element when we study religion; our experience is prior to analysis, whether we call what we experience “the divine” or “the transcendental” or simply “the spiritual.”
Before I get into the meat of this essay, I want to say that a lot of my journey away from Evangelicalism has happened because of exactly what Bloom writes about here. While he mostly avoids politics until the end of the book, you really cannot talk about American religion without discussing Manifest Destiny, racism, and theocracy - and all the evil that stem from those three.
I very much agree with Bloom on his core claims. American religion, Evangelicalism very much included, has next to nothing to do with historical Christianity - it, like Mormonism and other “cults,” were invented in the 19th Century amid an explosion of religion. American religion, despite its claims to “recapture original faith” and “take the Bible literally” ends up based on neither an honest, reasonable reading of scripture nor on the way early Christianity was practiced. Rather, it is its own invention, its own ideology, and something so inseparable from American mythology as to rather be its most pure expression.
This is why when people like my mother threaten me with hell because I no longer follow American religion, I roll my eyes.
One final thought before I start quoting stuff: I bought this book used, and inside it is the original receipt. It was first purchased in 1997, from Golden Braid Books in Salt Lake City. Since Mormonism is featured prominently in the book, I wonder if it was bought by a Mormon or a “Gentile.”
It is fascinating what other books are on the receipt:
The Eagle and the Rose by Rosemary Altea
The Essene Gospel of Peace by Edmond Bordeaux Szekely
A Year to Live by Stephen Levine
Make of that list what you will…
The prior owner also made a lot of interlineations in the book, which I find irritating, but whatever. It’s a used book. You get what you get.
To try to tackle a book with this much in it is daunting, and although I took a lot of notes, I want to be clear that the book itself has a lot more than I quote. I recommend reading it yourself, and drawing your own conclusions.
So, with that, I will dive into what struck me from this book.
First is a bit from the introduction, which I think is a great insight.
I will venture, in this book, that while Judaism and traditional Christianity are not biblical religions (despite all their assertions), the American Religion indeed is biblical, though its Bible may be confined largely to Saint Paul (the Southern Baptists) or be an American set of replacement Scriptures (the Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, Christian Scientists, among others).
It is beyond the scope of this post to examine how a specific interpretation of the Bible became the chief deity of American Christianity, but I think this is correct. More about this later.
Mormons and Southern Baptists call themselves Christians, but like most Americans, they are closer to ancient Gnostics than to early Christians.
And the crux of the matter:
The “personal” modifies “experiences” and prepares for the American Christ of the twentieth century, who has become a personal experience for the American Christian, quite clearly for the Evangelicals. Less obviously, this is Christ for all who wish to call themselves Christians in the United States. Perhaps it is the Christ of all Americans, whether Mormons or Jews, Muslims or secularists, since the American Christ is more an American than he is Christ.
The individualism inherent in this comes at the expense of any sense of community or mutuality with those outside the tribe. There is a great extended discussion involving authors and books I won’t detail here - there are endnotes in the book with all the citations.
What Lee protests in American Protestantism is the exaltation of the elite self as against community, a protest pragmatically parallel to the feelings of Bellah and his associates that society is sacrificed in the individualism of American spiritual life…Urging the need for community upon American religionists is a vain enterprise; the experiential encounter with Jesus or God is too overwhelming for memories of community to abide, and the believer returns from the abyss of ecstasy with the self enhanced and otherness devalued…How are we to understand, and judge, an American spirituality which, to be authentic, seems always fated to make the believer, ultimately, a worse citizen, despite all the blatherings of our ideology?
Next up is this bit on the Gnostic core of the belief system. Most Evangelicals I know will violently dispute this analysis even while expressing the Gnostic belief system.
Americans always have had a tendency to quest for the unfindable primitive Christian Church. What they actually seek to restore is not the church of the first Christians, but the primal Abyss, named by the ancient Gnostics as both our foremother and forefather. Our national millenarianism, so pervasive in the nineteenth century and still tempestuous among Fundamentalists and Pentecostals, associates itself with the books of Daniel and of Revelation and leads to our crusading wars, and to unwholesome fantasies like George Bush’s New World Order. Only a Gnostic reading of the Bible can make us into the land of the Promise. The new irony of American history is that we fight now to make the world safe for Gnosticism, our sense of religion.
He continues:
I argue in this book that the American Religion, which is so prevalent among us, masks itself as Protestant Christianity yet has ceased to be Christian. It has kept the figure of Jesus, a very solitary and personal American Jesus, who is also the resurrected Jesus rather than the crucified Jesus or the Jesus who ascended again to the Father. I do not think that the Christian God has been retained by us, though he is invoked endlessly by our leaders, and by our flag-waving President in particular, with especial fervor in the context of war. But this invoked force appears to be the American destiny, the God of our national faith.
This was written about the first George Bush, but it can be applied easily to every Republican president since, including Trump, who is as anti-Christ as they come. There is nothing of Christ or historical Christianity in any of this.
Before I move on, I want to note that Bloom returns to this idea of the “early church” quite a bit, and for good reason.
One of the grand myths of the American Religion is the restoration of the Primitive Church, which probably never existed.
This is the religious equivalent of Make America Great Again (and the two are twins) - the belief in a mythological past that never actually existed except in sitcoms and the minds of Fundamentalists.
Bloom talks about the key characteristics of this American religion:
As a religious critic, I find two characteristics invariably present in every authentic version of the American Religion, whether it be Pentecostal or Southern Baptist or Mormon or whatever:
The American finds God in herself or himself, but only after finding the freedom to know God by experiencing a total inward solitude…
Salvation, for the American, cannot come through the community or the congregation, but is a one-on-one act of confrontation.
I would agree with this diagnosis. It is very individualistic, and abandons the original conception of Christianity as the Kingdom of God, existing in community and as a practice. Another excellent insight:
[T]he Southern Baptists and the Mormons, who violently oppose one another, betray remarkably parallel configurations in spiritual temperament and in what might be called the sensibility of belief. In my analysis, they are different varieties of the American Religion, and they actually share far more than they dispute in their Gnostic, Enthusiastic, and Orphic affinities.
Which is why they tend to vote the same way. Just saying. And the core of that political identity is a refusal of responsibility toward others.
A religion of the self burgeons, under many names, and seeks to know its own inwardness, in isolation. What the American self has found, since about 1800, is its own freedom - from the world, from time, from other selves. But this freedom is a very expensive torso, because of what it is obliged to leave out: society, temporality, the other. What remains, for it, is solitude and the abyss.
Which is why I completely agree with Bloom on this account:
There are indeed millions of Christians in the United States, but most Americans who think that they are Christians are truly 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 takes on Fundamentalism throughout the book. As I previously wrote about at length, Fundamentalism isn’t really a list of “core” doctrines, but a political approach to culture. Pretty much everything Bloom says about Fundamentalism in this book is excellent and perceptive. This next quote describes perfectly my experience in the subculture and in my birth family.
Where there is overwhelming religious desire, there must also be religious anxiety, for which the pragmatic name is Fundamentalism, the great curse of American religion, and of all religion in this American century. Fundamentalism, strictly considered, is an attempt to overcome the terror of death by a crude literalization of the Christian intimation of immortality.
That Fundamentalism and selfishness are inseparable should be obvious in our time, of course.
Kierkegaard’s emphasis upon the dialectical difficulties of becoming a Christian in an ostensibly Christian nation does not meet the American situation, where those truly driven towards faith are not moving towards anything that much resembles historical Christianity. And Nietzsche’s critique of asceticism scarcely touches the ardors of American spirituality, where next to nothing is surrendered for the self.
Fundamentalism is, after all, all about the sacrifice of other people to a psychopathic god.
Fundamentalism is the parodistic curse of the American Religion, and the political, social, moral, and even economic consequences of its anti-intellectualism are quite vicious.
Truth. Bloom also nails the political focus of the American Religion - the way that actual issues are avoided in favor of fabricated “issues” that require nothing of believers.
[T]he linked emblems of our national religion: the flag and the fetus, or Cross and our Divine Child. The flag and the fetus together symbolize the American Religion, the partly concealed but scarcely repressed national faith.
Neither the American nation, nor abortion, were ever mentioned by Christ, by the way. And abortion was widely practiced and discussed not only in ancient Rome, but in the Ancient Near East at the time the Hebrew scriptures were written. The fetus as the end-all of white evangelical morality is literally younger than I am - a creation of the Religious Right to distract from their actual platform of segregation.
Bloom also gets it right in seeing the Southern Baptist Convention as the modern “Know-Nothing” party. Both its anti-intellectualism and its vicious white supremacy.
[Edgar Young] Mullins prevailed in that judgment until the current takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention by Know-Nothings masking as Fundamentalists.
He continues:
Therefore they lust for theocracy, or the rule of the Saints, and in the interim are given to revivalism and ecstasy while they wait for Jesus, whose Second Coming is all but hourly expected.
And more:
Experiential faith, largely divorced from doctrine, would have left an emptiness in America but for something more vibrant that replaced doctrine, a timeless knowing that in itself saves….It is a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the-self, and the knowledge that leads to freedom, a dangerous and doom-eager freedom; from nature, time, history, community, other selves.
There is so much here that resonates for me about fundamentalism, and that also explains my parents and their generation of white evangelicals all too well. The aggressive anti-intellectualism is frustrating for me, but it also has dire societal consequences, as the Trump Era has made all too apparent. Here is a bit on why they cling to “creationism” - it isn’t really about the Bible, but about their own need to feel like gods.
“They are everywhere learning is too heavy a burden for mortal minds to carry” was Mencken’s observation on the Fundamentalists, and certainly their psychic violence against intellect and scholarship continues, but the issue remains a clash between different senses of knowledge. Fundamentalism, as I intimate throughout this book, is a parody of the American Religion, but its defensive anxieties and its wounded aggresivities stem nevertheless from what is most authentic in the American Gnosis. The true issue is by no means Biblical Inerrancy, because the Fundamentalists, as unwitting Gnostics, do not believe anyway that God made them. Their deepest knowledge is that they were no part of creation, but existed as spirits before it, and so are as old as God himself. To be told that they evolved from a common ancestor both of themselves and of apes is no better or worse for them than to be assured that they all descend from a single African woman. What wounds them unforgivingly is not the idea of evolution (in whatever version) but the demonstration that they were never God, or part of God. Their sense of their freedom depends ultimately upon being free not only of time and of nature but, more secretively, being free of the very Creationism they urge upon all the rest of us.
And the point of this is that, because we are not kin to other humans (not those people), we owe them nothing.
The religion of the spark or pneumatic self consistently leads to a denial of communal concern, and so perhaps to an exploitation of the helpless by the elite…What I have called American Orphism has led on to what is most distinctive in our cultural and aesthetic achievement, but it may have had a miserable fallout upon our political morality.
Bloom traces the origins of American Religion back to two sources. The first is the Cane Ridge revivals of the so-called “Second Great Awakening,” and to the “burnt-over district” in upstate New York, which gave rise to most of the plethora of American cults, from Millerism to Mormonism. I won’t get into all of those, but the book is full of history.
I have long been uncomfortable with the false narrative of the Awakenings, which seem to me to have been distractions at best from serious social issues like slavery, and at worst, a way of feeding hate and violence toward women and minorities. Here is a bit that really resonated for me:
Most simply, the American Jesus was born at Cane Ridge, and is with us still, in Nashville and Salt Lake City, in New Orleans and in East Harlem storefronts. He is a Jesus who barely was crucified, and whose forty days of Resurrection upon earth never have ended. Or if he ascended, he has come back and keeps coming back in the pouring out of the Spirit. He cannot be known in or through a church, but only one on one, and then indeed he is known, with far more immediacy evidently than even heightened sexual experience can provide, more even than frontier violence can provide.
Yep.
American revivalism, with its endless Great Awakenings, is as recurrent a phenomenon as American violence. We don’t have crime waves any more than we have Great Awakenings; violent crime and religious revivalism are constant throughout our history. Crime waves are journalistic fictions, Great Awakenings are scholarly fictions, and both conceal their near identity between the religion of violence and the violence of religion. Cane Ridge set the pattern of addiction in which Americans bear away the Kingdom of Heaven by violence.
If you want to know why Trump’s pogroms against immigrants and people of color are considered a “revival” by white evangelicals, this is why. I appreciate the way Bloom draws the line between the unbiblical view of “conversion” as an individual epiphany versus the path of Christ-following it actually is.
The conversion from death to life was purely emotional and individual; it seemed always to exclude a social dimension. One might almost say that Southern Jesus came to set the pattern for what is now the American Jesus: the resurrected friend, walking and talking one-on-one, with the repentant sinner. And this Jesus came to one, of his own free will, and not the sinner’s; he chose one…What is missing in all this quite private luminosity was simply most of historic Christianity.
If you aren’t familiar with William Miller, he was the OG of “Jesus is coming back on [X] date.” And of course, he was wrong every time, and equally true is that it didn’t cost him followers.
His palpable sincerity (and bad judgment) was manifested by the exactitude of his prophecy; if one goes into that business, clearly one should be as oracular and indefinite as possible.
Even if exact dates weren’t predicted, I grew up in an atmosphere of “Jesus will come back soon, very soon, and you may not grow up to be an adult before he does.”
Also good in this book is Bloom’s evisceration of Billy Graham, who thoroughly deserves it. Between his cowardice when it came to the Civil Rights Movement, and his mainstreaming of “cheap grace” as a substitute for true conversion, I am not a fan. But he certainly embodied the American Religion like few others have done. The one quote about him that stuck with me is in regards to his belief that American wealth was a sign of virtue, rather than questionable behavior toward the third world.
This comes from a peroration where Graham salutes America for its affluence, and reminds us that the Bible says it is all right to be rich. There is no point ever in disputing the Bible with a Fundamentalist, but…
I learned a lot from the multiple chapters on Mormonism. Over the last several years, I have come more and more to understand that Evangelicalism and Mormonism are close cousins, both essentially invented in the 19th century. Mormonism simply has the disadvantage that its holy books were written recently, and thus have known history. Here is a great observation:
There is also a bevy of Mormon theologians, who for more than a century have attempted to fill out the structure of their faith while reconciling what contradictions they could. The combined effect is startling; at first, it all seems contrived and arbitrary. But as one meditates upon it, two realizations grow. One is that Mormonism, a religion truly as different from Christianity as Islam is, exposes how contrived and arbitrary all theology is, indeed how strange and unexpected all religion evidently has to be. The other is that Tolstoy was accurate when he told Andrew Dickson White (the first president of Cornell University) that “the Mormon people teach the American Religion.”
The chapter on Christian Science is also fascinating. While hardly mainstream, it does indeed contain the essential elements of American Religion - and in many ways, Evangelicalism is adopting a lot of its more harmful beliefs about science and medicine.
Christian Science, however it wearies the patience of an empiricist, retains an irreducibly spiritual element. It is the religion of those who refuse to accept reality testing, who refuse the enlightened wisdom that culminates in Sigmund Freud’s reality-principle, which is our necessity for coming to terms with our own inevitable death.
This refusal to accept the idea of “reality-testing” - that is, evaluating whether beliefs match with observed reality - is at the root of a lot of my issues with my parents. And indeed, with Evangelicals generally. More ways in which Evangelicalism has come to resemble Christian Science:
Sexuality, humor, and the arts hardly were her [Mary Baker Eddy] concern, nor should they have been. Science and Health is the antithesis of humor or good writing, as it is the antithesis also of the erotic drive. More than any version of the American Religion since the Shakers, it achieves perfection by evading or negating the realities and values of the human body.
And there’s more:
What Mrs. Stetson understood, even better than Mrs. Eddy, was one of the central truths of the American Religion, the equation of poverty with error, and the belief that such error brought forth illness, sin, and death.
That is the core belief of American Religion - the “prosperity gospel” - that everything from poverty to illness is the result of an individual moral failure, not systemic injustice.
Bloom questions exactly why Christian Science, unlike other American cult groups, has struggled to expand beyond white English speakers.
Why should it be an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, unlike our other lasting indigenous faiths? This surely has little to do with any untranslatability of Mrs. Eddy’s Science and Health, which Mark Twain wanted translated into English. Nor can it be that Christian Science is somehow more American even than Mormonism, or than the Southern Baptists. It seems to be a class phenomenon; urban and rural masses do not become Christian Scientists. To deny the reality of matter and of the body you must be very clean, very well fed and housed and clothed, and easily able to afford medical care when benign animal magnetism falls short.
I’ll also mention the Seventh Day Adventists, who used to be a lot weirder than they are now. (My wife works for Adventist Health, so I have a bit of an insider look at that side of things.) Definitely less mainstream are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are pretty direct descendants of the Millerites. This is a pretty good summary of the core belief, which, again, has been embraced in practice by most white evangelicals.
The Jehovah of the Witnesses is a solitary majesty, rather than the first person of a Trinity; in contrast to him, Jesus is a god, but not God. And though Jehovah is the universal father, to us as to Jesus, he is not a particularly loving father. Power, not love, is his true attribute always. What this Jehovah seeks is supremacy, and a universal acknowledgement of his sway…. What this Jehovah most wishes is his ultimate victory at Armageddon, in order to establish his name forever. The mission of Christ is not so much to redeem mankind as it is to help celebrated and vindicate the power of Jehovah. The power of Jehovah is the obsessive concern of the Witnesses. So intense is this exultation of power in the Witnesses’ writings that I must categorize it as pathological.
Be honest: this pathological obsession with power is exactly what is driving white Christian nationalism today.
The Writings of Russell and of Rutherford offend anyone’s sense of human dignity, provided such a sense exists. They propose a theocratic Fascism that is not mitigated by assigning the dictatorship to a tyrant they call Jehovah.
Again, that is white Evangelicalism right now. The overlap is a circle.
Bloom contrasts all this with a line from Kafka (who was Jewish), which is worth quoting:
“The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.”
Here too, Bloom takes on the link between a belief in Inerrancy (which is really selective use of scripture as a weapon) and anti-intellectualism.
Anti-intellectualism among millenarians and Bible literalists is a recurrent phenomenon, but no other religious movement in America ever has been as programmatically set against its intellect as are Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Fundamentalist majority wing of the Southern Baptist Convention are devotees of pure reason compared to Jehovah’s Witnesses. Disdain for the intellect or for knowledge from the perspective of Bible inerrancy is very different from a hatred of mind, a hatred that surpasses even the Witnesses’ loathing for government, all other religion, and business. It may be that the most theocratic movement in America is bound to fear and hate intelligence.
Thus, as American Evangelicalism has degenerated into a racist and misogynist theocratic movement, so it has become increasingly opposed to all knowledge or intelligence.
And, of course, Bloom does mention the opposition to blood transfusions - an inherently anti-intellectual exercise, much like the anti-vaccination movement - that has resulted in the needless deaths of children.
If they did this in the name of some humanizing hope, some mitigation of the unkindness of our hearts, then we could see them as addled prophets, innocents of a literal reductionism. Alas, their critique of America is the weakest ever offered us. They would make us a nation of Jonadabs, of sanctified assassins cutting down the priests of Balla, for whom read Catholic priests, Protestant ministers, Jewish rabbis, and all sectarian teachers of spirituality. They are the good haters whom D. H. Lawrence feared, the lovers of Apocalypse for its own sake.
Yet again, I am struck by how much Evangelicalism resembles the JWs now.
Pentecostalism gets its own chapter. I wasn’t raised Pentecostal, but we did spend several years in a Charismatic church. I agree with Bloom that it is its own subspecies of the American Religion, but also very much an American phenomenon. Bloom traces the history from the Methodists to the present, via Cane Ridge.
Though Pentecostals insist upon being the heirs of a continuous tradition, from the initial Pentecost until now, they are an almost purely American phenomenon, whose true ancestry begins at Cane Ridge.
Bloom also notes that while the movement began as a multi-racial sect, co-founded by an African American, this integration didn’t last.
After a meeting in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in April 1914, the Pentecostals soon founded the Assemblies of God, the dominant white group in the rapidly segregating movement.
While multi-racial churches can be found, they are not the norm, and leadership in the main denominations remains mostly white to this day.
Bloom notes that, while Pentecostals are not the most extreme right wingers of the various groups he discusses, they too substitute religious experience, ecstasy, and personal salvation for any sense of social concern. He also notes this:
There is something stubborn as well as violent in Pentecostal ecstasy, and something profoundly withdrawn, gone out and away from neighbors and the sun. The phenomena involved are overdetermined instances of possession, or of the will-to-be-possessed. By what? The Holy Spirit is one name for what shamans evoke by their very varied techniques of ecstasy. Pentecostalism is American shamanism…The Pentecostal charismatics may or may not be sorcerers, but they share with shamans archaic and modern such stigmata as trances, spirit voices, healings through exorcism, manifestations of light or fire, and above all, visionary transport, or “prophesy” as the Assemblies of God phrase it. There are also clearly shamanistic elements in such Pentecostal activities as Jericho marching (while shouting out prayers and singing hymns), dancing in the Spirit (where the Spirit presumably takes over the body), and being “slain in the spirit” (where one falls, generally backwards, while the congregation prays over one.)
I never really got into the various charismatic manifestations when we were a part of that scene, although I did try. Part of it is that I am an introvert, and also, I wasn’t raised in that subculture, so it felt very foreign. A few times, I was shamed by others for not being more like that, but generally, I could silence all that as soon as I picked up my violin. I have been a good improviser since I was a kid, and “singing in the spirit” is impossible to distinguish from “skilled musicianship and fluid improvisation.” And yes, in my opinion, anyone willing to put in the practice to learn an instrument and build improvisational skills can do this. And also, learn to play blues. (Another uniquely American art form…)
Bloom spends a chapter on the New Age Movement, which was one of the bogeymen we were taught to fear in the Evangelical subculture. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that it too starts looking indistinguishable from the rest of American Religion: individualism, special knowledge, anti-intellectualism….it’s all there. But I suppose it does have the distinct feature of being even less intelligible than Mary Baker Eddy’s writing. Mark Twain would also have requested an English translation. (That is seriously the funniest line in the book.)
By recourse to Huxley, you can sometimes construe a New Age passage and hazard some guess as to more or less what some California sage hoped she or he might mean. Otherwise, the student of the New Age must be resigned to that proverbial picnic, to which the authors bring the words (or some of them, anyway) and the readers bring the meanings.
The Mormons are one of two groups who get multiple chapters in the book. The other is the Southern Baptists. I agree with Bloom that the two are the most American of the sects discussed - the ones that most exemplify American Religion.
The Southern Baptist Convention was born in 1845; a century and a half later, it might almost be called the Southern American Religion, even as Mormonism may yet be named as the Western American Religion. Far more than the Methodists or the Presbyterians, the Southern Baptists have become very nearly the Established Church of the old Confederacy.
Bloom mostly avoids talking about the reason the SBC was founded (to defend enslavement of black people), or its pernicious involvement in white supremacist politics to the present day. But he does view it as inseparable from the Confederacy, in both religious and political ways.
The crushing of the Confederacy by superior force led to a trauma in the Southern Baptist spirit, evidently a more severe aftershock than the other Southern denominations experienced. Precisely why this should have been so is rather a mystery, and I have found no persuasive explanation for it. But I would hazard again the suggestion that Baptists were unique in having no founder, no overwhelming visionary and leader in their past. The Southern Presbyterians had Calvin, the Southern Methodists had Wesley, but the Southern Baptists had found their heroic figures in the great generals of the Confederacy, in Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, neither of whom were Baptists but both of whom assumed a kind of angelic status. A vehement nostalgia was combined with a rejection of subsequent history, so that nearly every new idea of the last third of the nineteenth century came to be rejected by Southern Baptists, with the unhappy consequences that no other American denomination entered the twentieth century with so pervasive an investment in anti-intellectualism…The crusade of the Texas-led Fundamentalists has turned into a drive against thought itself, in a final revenge upon history for the refusal of God to give victory to the South.
I have said for years that Evangelicalism generally has been taken over by the Southern Baptists - there is little to distinguish the two now. And that includes the fury at the loss of the South and of the racial hierarchy that sustained that slave society. This is why Evangelicalism flocked to bow down to Trump as their new messiah. He promised to bring back the Confederacy.
In a later chapter, Bloom explores how salvation became an inward event in Southern Baptist practice. (And fill in “evangelical” wherever he says “Southern Baptist” - it remains every bit as true…)
The element in the Southern Baptist creedless creed that is most vital is wholly personal, subjective, experiential and finally quite nameless, or to be named only by everything it is not. Conversion, or “getting saved” or “being born again” is the frantic center of the spiritual life, and is wholly inward. It is this frightening inwardness that compels the Southern Baptist to hold on so hard to the Bible. Jesus and miracles alike are in the past; the Bible surges on in the present, and promises some control of the future. Without the Real Presence of the body of Christ in a communion service, the Baptist is alone with his Bible. To be more precise, since the Bible will not read or interpret itself (the astonishing Fundamentalist assumption), the Baptist is alone with an interpretation of the Bible, his own if he is a Moderate, or a lowest-common-denominator reduction if he is a Fundamentalist. Either way, only an interpretation substitutes itself for what Catholics hold to be a symbolic, yet real presence of Christ.
Having grown up in the Evangelical subculture, I can say yes to all of this. Particularly the “lowest-common-denominator” interpretation that “Inerrancy” requires. Another passage that resonated for me is Bloom’s takedown of the “Roman Road” - a masterpiece of misinterpretation and sophistry invented fairly recently.
No scholar has determined who first paved this Roman road, and it is not even certain that it is of Southern Baptist origin. But it has become the essence of the Southern Baptist faith, and presumably is meant to follow the model of Saint Paul’s own conversionary experience. As a reading of Romans it is very selective indeed, and is pretty well refuted by Krister Stendahl’s demonstration that Luther severely misread Paul, even as Augustine had.
As scholar Wayne Meeks put it, “Paul did not reduce the gospel to the forgiveness of sins, let alone to the assuaging of guilt feelings.” Let’s just say that I have never truly believed in the whole “evangelism” project, and this is one reason why. You can read my thoughts on that in my series on Making Converts.
Some of my favorite parts of the book deal with the problems inherent in a selective literalist approach to the Bible, which, combined with the belief in Inerrancy, reduces scripture to a weapon to be wielded against other people. And, despite what Inerrantists claim, there is no conflict between “subjective” and “objective” interpretations of the Bible.
Whatever else is to be said of this division, I think it important to note that it is not, despite appearances, a conflict between subjectivity and supposed objectivity. There is no authentic dialectic between what are necessarily two modes of deepest subjectivity, one an illumination streaming out from within the psyche, and other a complex, immensely difficult, vast anthology of ancient texts, to which a narrow, self-contradictory and clearly inadequate interpretation has been applied.
He goes on:
“Inerrancy” in the Bible is a starting point for the
Fundamentalist creed, and is a very difficult notion to grasp, since “Biblical
Inerrancy" does not mean that Southern Baptist Fundamentalist are
obsessive, sustained Bible readers. An examination of most published sermons by
them shows an astonishing biblical illiteracy.
Hell yes. This is absolutely true. I know my Bible far better than most – perhaps all – Fundamentalists I know. Many atheist friends I have also are far better versed in Scripture. But the text of the Bible is mostly irrelevant. In a quote by Ellen Rosenberg, you can start to see the real role the Bible plays in Fundamentalism.
“In the absence of a creed, or a set of interpretive rules by which new challenges might be evaluated, Southern Baptists can hold together only with a core belief structure of extraordinary generality and ambiguity. The Bible fills the need; it becomes a projective test, a protean Rorschach. As the code words have become “Biblical inerrancy,” the Bible itself is less read than preached, less interpreted than brandished…The Book has become a talisman.”
Yep. The Bible is something to waive around as a weapon, like my mother does when she threatens me with hell. Which is actually, as Bloom notes, more of an Islamic thing than historical Christian or Jewish interpretation.
The Koran gives us one voice only, the voice of God himself, who speaks the entire text aloud to his Messenger, Muhammed. Something of the rocky strength of the Southern Baptist Fundamentalism is interestingly similar to Islamic Fundamentalism. “Inerrancy” for both movements is an unconscious metaphor for the repression of all individuality.
And more:
The largest truth we can discover about the Fundamentalist war cry of “biblical inerrancy” is that it has almost nothing to do with anyone’s actual experience of reading the Bible. Reading is a skill or at least an activity, and few ventures are as disheartening as trying to get through books on the Bible by Southern Baptist Fundamentalists.
What Fundamentalists cannot understand is that their attempted literalization of Scripture is itself a giant metaphor: a conversion of the Bible into a statue or an icon. It is in itself a restrictive interpretation, with not the slightest relation to the Bible’s actual text.
And now we come to my very favorite passage in the book, one that I have posted by itself, because it gets to the heart of what is really going on: the Bible is used as a weapon to render impervious to thought or challenge, the existing political ideologies of Fundamentalists. (And, those ideologies are, for the most part, appallingly evil and violent.)
Even as Fundamentalists insist upon the inerrancy of the Bible, they give up all actual reading of the Bible, since in fact its language is too remote and difficult for them to begin to understand. What is left is the Bible as physical object, limp and leather, a final icon or magical talisman. To read Criswell or any other Fundamentalist clergyman on the Bible is almost a literal impossibility, at least for me, because they are not writing about the text, in any sense whatsoever of text, or of that text. They write about their own dogmatic social, political, cultural, moral, and even economic convictions, and biblical texts simply are quoted, with frenetic abandon, whether or not they in any way illustrate or even approach the areas where the convictions center. They are quoted also as though they interpreted themselves and were perfectly transparent in their meanings. [my emphasis]
Nowhere, of course, is this nowhere more apparent than in the Evangelical obsession with fetuses. (And flags.)
But seriously. If you want to know what an Evangelical believes, don’t go looking in the Bible. Check out what Faux News is saying. Ask what the Republican party platform says. And, to put a razor-sharp point on it, check out what the Ku Klux Klan’s political position is. That’s where you will find the real beliefs of Evangelicals. The Bible is just a weapon to render their pre-existing political beliefs impervious to challenge.
Bloom quotes James Barr to further explore this idea, that fundamentalism is about politics, not doctrine. And specifically, about the political exclusion of others.
“For the church and theology as a whole, fundamentalism constitutes an ecumenical problem rather than an intellectual problem. The ecumenical problem is constituted by the frightening alienation of fundamentalism from the main stream of church life and theology. The basis of this alienation is religious. The root of it is the fact that fundamentalists deal with the real difficulties of differences in faith and life by deeming non-Christian the bodies and the persons who do not agree with them. At the root of the problem there lies therefore a judgment that is more religious and existential than doctrinal or biblical: the problem is formed by the absolute and overweening certainty possessed by fundamentalists that their form of religion is absolutely and uniquely right.”
This really is the heart of the problem, and it is not limited to Southern Baptists. (Although there sure are a lot of Southern Baptists who believe only Southern Baptists can avoid hell - the other denominations are all wrong.)
My mom believes I am going to hell, not because of some doctrinal stance, but because I do not agree with her that her form of religion is absolutely and uniquely right.
This is why Bloom finds even “fundamentalism” to be an imperfect term - he prefers to use “Know-Nothings” both for the anti-intellectualism and the return to the virulent racist ideas of that xenophobic political movement. It is a form of fascism, with the goal of the removal from power of women and minorities. Full stop.
The tragedy of the Southern Baptist Convention is the result of a purely political and social conspiracy that still masquerades as a religious movement. Its reductive anti-intellectualism reminds one of the Spanish Fascism of Franco; the Know-Nothing Baptists are the heirs of Franco’s crusade against the mind, and not the legatees of Gresham Machen.
Again, this is the best way to understand why the SBC (and Evangelicals more broadly) flocked to Trump and MAGA - they were already fascists, and just needed a Dear Leader to rally around.
Bloom traces the history of the denomination prior to the Fundamentalist/Know-Nothing takeover of the 1970s to its roots, and notes that, theologically, it has wandered far from the past. It is in the political sense that it remains the SBC.
Since the Know-Nothings have inherited nothing from the tradition except for its triumphalism, their obduracy, racism, antifeminism, anti-intellectualism, and plutocratic politics will only increase, and will drive out many more moderates.
You can substitute in “Evangelicals” here, and you will know why I left organized religion 9 years ago, and have never returned. As I said, this part of the book just further illuminated for me the moral and intellectual cesspit that white American Religion is.
There is a chapter on the African American variety of American Religion, and I found it quite fascinating. While the politics are obviously quite different, and it isn’t quite as stereotypical of the traits of American Religion, the elements are still mostly there. The differences matter though, just as the similarities do.
One could speculate that the black freedom from infinitely postponed apocalyptic expectations has saved the Black Churches from the crippling controversies that rage on among white Baptists and other Protestants. The inability to sustain metaphor that makes for Fundamentalism is not an African-American affliction. Generations who have learned to interpret the Bible as a manual for survival are blessedly free from the nightmare of Inerrancy.
To be sure, there are issues within the Black Church - misogyny and anti-LGBTQ bigotry come to mind, along with the ubiquitous Prosperity Gospel in American Religion. But at least the ability to think in metaphors and interpret Scripture in light of liberation are good things.
There are a number of interesting quotes in the final chapter as well. It kind of ties things together, and predicts the future. I will say that Bloom was wrong about some predictions, and right about others.
For example, the Mormons have not in fact taken over as the primary religion of the western half of the US. While at the time the book was written, Mormonism was steadily growing, that growth, like that of all religion in the US, as plateaued and even started to decline slightly.
In fact, Bloom also failed to anticipate the rise of the “nones,” the secularization of younger generations, and the freak-out that this inspired among fundamentalists. It was an honest omission, as trends in the late 1980s were different than they are now.
What Bloom was correct about was that the trend of American Religion was toward fascist theocracy and toward anti-intellectualism in public life and politics. Sigh. Whether his prediction that we return to the era of wars of religion comes true remains to be seen.
Bloom didn’t anticipate Trump, who was able to unite the various strands of American Religion (except for the African American branch) around the worst of its instincts: the exclusionary and chauvinistic core of its practical theology, and its racist, misogynist, and xenophobic political roots. A few quotes about that:
No other Western nation, as I remarked earlier in this study, matches our obsession with religion. The vast majority of us believe in some version of God, and nearly all of that majority actually do believe that God loves her or him, on a personal and individual basis. Very few of us believe that death closes all, and perhaps no nation ever has rejected death with an intensity comparable to ours. Death, in literature, is the mother of beauty; death, in life, is the father of religion.
Bloom asks some hard questions about this.
When people frighten themselves into faith, as millions of Americans do, what ought religious criticism to do with that fright? Why is it that we have produced so few masterpieces of overtly religious literature? Devotional poetry or narrative or drama, of any aesthetic eminence, or of any profound spirituality, hardly exists among us. Fundamentalism, as I have shown, is viciously anti-intellectual, but so, alas, is most American religion, of whatever camp. Fear and mindlessness can engender parodies of religion, but what value is there in supposed faith that is essentially political? Few phrases are as ambiguous as “I believe in God” or “I love Jesus,” since all they generally mean is that “I cannot function because I dread dying” or “My neighbor won’t vote for me” or “If I don’t get a Temple Recommend, I’ll lose my job” (a Mormon anxiety).
Bloom’s assessment of the social value of American Religion is pretty bleak, and I have to concur.
The societal consequences of debasing the Gnostic self into selfishness, and the believer’s freedom from others into the bondage of others, are to be seen everywhere, in our inner cities and in our agrarian wastelands.
I’ll end with this assessment of where American Religion has taken us. It resonates even more in the Trump Era than it did when Bloom wrote it. If nothing else, it should serve as a warning of the evil of what passes for religion in our nation, and a call to do better and think better.
The American Religion in itself is not violence, but confusion frequently attends both, and certainly our knowing is more often than not a violent knowing. A religion of the self is not likely to be a religion of peace, since the American self tends to define itself through its war on otherness. If your knowing ultimately tells you that you are beyond nature, having long preceded it, then your natural acts cannot sully you. No wonder, then, that salvation, once attained, cannot fall away from the American Religionist, no matter what he or she does.
Overall, a thoughtful and thought-provoking book. I see so many of my own experiences in here, from a true outsider. As I become increasingly an outsider to that faith tradition, I feel the scales have fallen from my eyes, and what Bloom sees as a secular Jew, seems ever more apparent to me as well.
If I were to advocate for a better religion, it would be to discard this Religion of Self, that sees salvation and conversion as inner experiences, rather than a repentance of selfishness and an embrace of the love of neighbor.
In 2018, still reeling from the loss of my faith tradition and the growing realization that Trump wasn’t an aberration, but in fact the most perfect embodiment of the American Religion, I wrote what I see as an alternative to the Christ-free “christianity” of our nation. I think it holds up pretty well. While Fundamentalism continues its scorched-earth war on “otherness,” the call of Christ is still to love and care for the “other.” Salvation is found in community, in the Kingdom of God, which is among us, if we know where to look.
