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Nearer My God, to Me
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20676 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
4,744 Words |
| Author
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Kenneth R. Craycraft, Jr.
Kenneth R. Craycraft, Jr., is a doctorial candidate in the
study of politics and theology in the theology department at
Boston College. |
THE AMERICAN RELIGION
The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation
Harold Bloom
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992
288 pp., $22.00
America is a "dangerously religion--soaked, even religious mad, society," asserts Harold Bloom at the outset of his latest book, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. But, contrary to what most Americans would call themselves, and what the rest would say is the most prominent religion, Bloom thinks that there is very little Christianity in America. "Despite its insistence," he asserts, America "is scarcely Christian in any traditional way." The American Religion "masks itself as Protestant Christianity yet has ceased to be Christian"; "we think we are Christians, but we are not." This is not to say that there are no Christians in the United States, "but most Americans who think that they are Christians truly are something else, intensely religious, but devout in the American Religion."
Nor are those who profess to be Christians the only participants in this American Religion. It "comes in many guises and disguises," and hardly any one knows that he is a participant. "The American Religion is pervasive and overwhelming, however it is masked, and even out secularists, indeed even our professed atheists" adhere to it. The American Religion is an attempt to explain and account for this peculiar American creation. "An involuntary believer in the American Religion," explains Bloom, "I myself need to know better what envelops us all."
Creative Misreading Of Scripture
Lest there be any confusion at the outset, The American Religion is not principally about America or Christianity, or even religion. Rather, it is about Harold Bloom, and he never tires of reminding us of that. Bloom, Sterling Professor of English at New York University, is, if we are to believe jacket copy, "America's most distinguished literary critic." Certainly he is among the leading literary critics in America, having written many influential books, most recently the highly praised and highly condemned The Book of J [features in THE WORLD & I, February, 1991].
In the present volume, Bloom proclaims himself a "religious critic," analogous to his own peculiar definition of the literary critic. He explains that
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