The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation was published by Simon & Schuster in 1992 and is Bloom’s most original work of cultural criticism — an argument that American religious experience, despite its ostensibly Christian vocabulary, is actually a form of Gnosticism: an ancient heresy that locates the divine not in church, scripture, or community but in the individual soul’s direct experience of God.
Bloom examines the major American religious movements — Mormonism, Southern Baptist faith, Pentecostalism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and various New Age spiritualities — and finds in each the same underlying pattern: a belief that the true self is divine, that it existed before the creation of the world, that it can have unmediated access to God without the intercession of clergy or creed, and that it is essentially solitary. This, Bloom argues, is the real American religion — not the content of any particular church’s doctrine but the shared assumption beneath all of them: that the individual self is God’s primary concern.
The book is brilliantly argued and deeply controversial: conservative Christians objected to being called Gnostics; liberal academics objected to the sympathetic treatment of Joseph Smith (Bloom considers him a genuine religious genius); everyone objected to something. But the thesis has proven remarkably durable: the idea that American religion is fundamentally about individual experience rather than communal belief has become a commonplace of religious studies, largely because Bloom articulated it so compellingly.
Collecting The American Religion
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Without jacket: $5–$15