Finished reading Harold Bloom’s The American Religion.
It is a very interesting (and little known) work of his. He argues that American Christianity–as opposed to European or Middle Eastern Christianities (Roman Catholic, traditional Euro. Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox)–is fundamentally a Gnostic non-Christian religion. Under the guise of Christianity.
While I don’t think that thesis works, Bloom is onto something very important. Namely that American Christianity–he cites Southern Baptists, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Evangelical Camp Revivals, Shakers, and Pentecostals–are built around non-doctrinalism (sometimes anti-doctrinalism), non-denominationalism, inner light, and most importantly Revivalism
Rather than go back to the Puritans (e.g. Jonathan Edwards), Bloom dates the birth of American Christianity from the Cane Ridge Religious Revivals in KY 1803. That revival was the forerunner of Billy Graham’s Crusades and tent revivals America (and now the world) over. It is also interesting the real founding of the ecumenical Christian movement.
What Bloom shows–through using the work of the great Norman O. Hatch–is that there is no real sense in saying that there have been different Great Awakenings in American history (1st: pre-revolution 2nd–1803-1860s, 3rd currently?). It is more accurate to say that the US is always in religious awakening. Has been since 1800. Perpetual revivalism and apocalypticism.
The Gnostic element comes through belief in one’s own experience (via Emerson’s Self-Reliance and the Great Eyeball). Bloom unfortunately labels all such mystical Christianity as Gnostic. It is the belief that there is, in the words of the Black Christian tradition, a “Big Me” and a “Little Me.” The Little Me in this case, perhaps at first counter-intuitively, is the Soul. Not the Big Me.
Bloom’s analysis would do to understand the four great states of mysticism (Nature, Deity, Formless, and Nondual), instead of vaguely labeling any and all such experiences of the Soul-Witness as “Gnostic.” But that lack of careful analysis is itself emblematic of the American Christian Religion. Unlike in the Eastern traditions, these inner states are not well disciplined and practiced long term. They are more spasmodic.
And because those states are not trained, the temporary (and powerful) experiences of being awash in the Divine Mercy-Love (common of the Soul’s experience, being embraced by the Deity Form) are interpreted through the lens of the “Big Me”, i.e. the ego. Which leads to the American experience of narcissism, spiritual or otherwise. Where 80-90%+ of respondents say that God loves them uniquely. A mystical experience that the ego identifies with and comes to own, makes the ego harder, more self-deluded. Not less so.
Along with Robert Bellah’s work on the civil American religion, this might be the best book on the subject (though more in the way of opening a door not walking through it and describing the scene well).
I’ll have to do some more searching in terms of Prothero’s American Jesus and Meacham’s Faiths of the Founders.
I have been saying that Christianity, at least in it’s current Evangelical guise, is pretty much Gnostic. Bloom makes the case a hell of a lot more eloquently than I ever could!
[...] to his view of American Christianity as really a non-Christian religion (Gnostic). While the book is fantastic imo, his view of Gnosticism however is too vague to be helpful. He combines Emerson, Black [...]