THE AMERICAN RELIGION - HAROLD BLOOM

Always good to get some new insights from uncle Harold. I don’t agree with Bloom on much, but there is no denying that he’s a great writer who knows more poems than anyone who’s ever lived and he loves to take a big swing. What other critic is going to just call all slam poetry “the death of art” or complain early in the run, at the height of its cultural ubiquity, that Harry Potter was bad and stupid? This volume looked promising, Bloom tries to engage in some “religious criticism” which is when he treats a religion like a book and critiques and explains it, and tries to outline the American religion. This book seeks to be a total overview of American religion, he hops from Mormonism, to Fundamentalism, to Jehovah's Witness, Christian Science, New age and beyond. He’s at his strongest when he’s talking about Mormons and Baptists, as well as American religion as a whole. On this count, he is, uncharacteristically, too soft. He like to call American religion gnostic and orphic and enthusiastic, all of which is sort of true, though the main thing that characterizes American religion (or, to split hairs, American iterations and expressions of older traditions) is the individualized nature and the aggrandizement. It’s about you, alone with God; forgiven, and thus, righteous (regardless of your actual actions, those can always be forgiven and don’t really speak to the “true you”) and the ways and which relationships will make you prosperous. Bloom clocks these features but fails to call them what they actually are, which is Satanic. Are you worshiping the self and money/power/success? Call that whatever you want, but know that it is, ultimately, Satanic. If you’ve spent any time around American Christians, this conclusion is inevitable. There was some really interesting stuff about the Christan Scientists and Jehova’s witnesses (who Bloom has an almost RXKNephew-level disdain for) which are groups I was pretty unfamiliar with. The book was written in ‘91 so there are some interesting predictions. One being that Bush/Reagan are so tapped into the American Religion (he uses the phrase “Bushian Gnosticism” at one point) that there will never be another democratic president, which was technically wrong, though correct in the sense that every president since 1980 has been Reagan-in-spirit. He also thought that by 2020, 10% or more of the US would be Mormon, whereas the actual number now is around 1% and has been dropping in recent years. All interesting stuff, though the saddest bit of the book is what he misses. He has a chapter on New Age stuff and a chapter on the Black religious tradition, but both of these topics deserved a lot more. The New Age stuff is basically passed over because he hates the source material and he feels inadequate to talk at length about the Black religions of the US but, man, have these strains really proved to be important. New Age is basically everyone at this point, it shares Mormonism’s belief that one can spiritually improve one’s self to the point of godhood (also the basic premise of Scientology, which Bloom also dismisses in a sentence or two)  and Obama’s relationship with his black pastor was a major scandal for him. Plus, I would have loved him to go deeper on the Black Muslims and get into the Nations of Gods and Earth stuff so he could analyze Ghostface lyrics. Either way, very interesting and fun to read. It got me thinking about stuff I had not before and, being Bloom, it was quite well written and audacious. Wish he’d done more in this vein.