National Faith

“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. The most Gnostic element in the American Religion is an astonishing reversal of ancient Gnosticism: we worship the Demiurge as God, more often than not under the name of manifest Necessity. As for the alien God of the Gnostics, he has vanished, except for his fragments or sparks scattered among our few elitists of the spirit, or for his shadow in the solitary figure of the American Jesus…

We think we are Christian, but we are not. The issue is not religion in America but rather what I call the American Religion. We can speak of religion in Western Europe, but hardly of the European Religion. They are Christians, or they are not. There are indeed millions of 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, a faith that is old among us, and that comes in many guises and disguises, and that overdetermines much of our national life…

Religious criticism and prophecy are two names for the same activity of the spirit. If one is an American and has a religious temperament, however eccentric or even esoteric, then one necessarily has some relation to the American Religion. The central argument of this book is that we all of us are affected by the consequences of our national faith, and that one variety or another of it frequently is the actual substance of what we confront in what at first seem secular phenomena in the United States. The central fact about American life, is that our religiosity is everywhere…

Where there is overwhelming religious desire, there must also be religious anxiety, for which the pragmatic name is Fundamentalism, the great curse of all 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. One of the uses of religious criticism is that it is the appropriate instrument for dissecting, understanding, and perhaps someday destroying Fundamentalism, which is the shadow side of what is most spiritual and valuable in the American Religion.

One of the great insights made available by parallel elements in literary criticism and in religious criticism is that creative desire and religious desire have more in common with one another than either has with Eros. The poetic character, as I understand it, begins in a rebellion against death, and so in a conviction that its origins are not natural, that they go back to an abyss preceding the coming into being of the world. Something very like this is the origin of the American religious character. Even if one accepted Schopenhauer’s morose myth of the relation between sexual desire and the Will to Live, one would be a very long way from both poetry and prophecy, since neither finds the object of desire in mere nature.

American religion, like American imaginative literature, is a severely internalized quest romance, in which some version of immortality serves as the object of desire. Compare the Roman Catholic crucifix with the cross of all Baptist churches, as well as of most other American Protestant denominations. The Catholics worship Christ crucified, but the Baptists salute the empty cross, from which Jesus already has risen. Resurrection is the entire concern of the American Religion, which gets Christ off the cross as quickly as Milton removed him, in just a line and a half of Paradise Lost. 

One of the grand myths of the American Religion is the restoration of the Primitive Church, which probably never existed. The Southern Baptists in some sense take as their paradigm an interval about which the New Testament tells us almost nothing, the forty days the Disciples went about in the company of Jesus after his resurrection. I think that not only the Baptists but all adherents of the American Religion, whatever their denomination, quest for that condition. When they speak, sing, pray about walking with Jesus, they mean neither the man on the road to eventual crucifixion nor the ascended God, but rather the Jesus who walked and lived with his Disciples again for forty days and forty nights…

The American walks alone with Jesus in a perpetually expanded interval founded upon the forty days’ sojourn of the risen Son of Man. American Gnosticism escapes from time by entering into the life upon earth already enjoyed by the Man who died and then conquered death.  Religious criticism needs to enter that area, which lies between theology and spiritual experience, an area akin to what early Christians, Gnostics included, would have called the Pleroma, the Fullness, both of space and of time. What the great Southern Baptist sage E.Y. Mullins called soul competency would appear to be the gift that comes from having walked with the resurrected Jesus, and not as part of a crowd of disciples, but absolutely alone with Jesus…

Seeking to explain to myself, as an emergent religious critic, exactly how I felt towards the American Religion, I recalled the observations concerning Emerson written down by Henry James, Senior, in 1884, two years after the sage’s death. James, whose exasperation with his beloved Emerson was memorably expressed in a famous exclamation—“O you man without a handle!”—tried this time to grasp hold of the handle he called “innocence”: 

“He was . . . fundamentally treacherous to civilization, without being at all aware himself of the fact. . . . He appeared to me utterly unconscious of himself as either good or evil. He had no conscience, in fact, and lived by perception, which is an altogether lower or less spiritual faculty. The more universalized a man is by genius or natural birth, the less is he spiritually individualized, making up in breadth of endowment what he lacks in depth. This was remarkably the case with Emerson. In his books or public capacity he was constantly electrifying you by sayings full of divine inspiration. . . . No man could look at him speaking (or when he was silent either, for that matter) without having a vision of the divinest beauty. . . . He was nothing else than a show-figure of almighty power in our nature..."

~ Harold Bloom, The American Religion
“If I have understood Harold Bloom correctly, then I have misunderstood him. If I have got him right then I have got him wrong. Such is the law of misprision. I am bound to misinterpret everything he says. Again, if I have got the gist of his argument, I may have to kill him, or at least wrestle with him, overthrow, usurp, or subsume him. In an Oedipal way, of course.” ~ Andy Martin