Once a Romantic, always a Romantic. Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University as well as Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English at New York University, was at one time a literary critic with a special interest in Romanticism. In his new book, The American Religion,¹ he attempts to do for American religion what he once did for literature: rewrite it with himself as the hero. In pursuit of this Romantic calling, Professor Bloom argues that there is such a thing as an American Religion and that it transcends all denominational barriers. According to Bloom, American Religion is defined not by a distinctive theology but by the unmediated experience of the self as God. The “American finds God in herself or himself,” he writes, a feat accomplished “only after finding the freedom to know God by experiencing a total inward solitude.” In this solitary freedom, the American is liberated both from other selves and from the created world. He comes to recognize that his spirit is itself uncreated. Knowing that he is the equal of God, the American Religionist can then achieve his true desideratum, mystical communion with his friend, the godhead.

For Bloom, gnosticism unites with American exceptionalism to yield an American Religion that finds God not in nature but in the divine spark within the yeoman farmer: a sort of manifest destiny of the oversoul. Quite clearly, this version of American religion does not describe Sunday services at