The American Religion Quotes

“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.”
― Harold Bloom, The American Religion

“Urging the need for community upon American religionists is a vain enterprise; the experiential encounter with Jesus or God is too overwhelming for memories of community to abide, and the believer returns from the abyss of ecstasy with the self enhanced and otherness devalued.”
― Harold Bloom, The American Religion

“a sense of cultural, historical, and religious belatedness, inevitable in the Evening Land of America, increases the appetite to know, rather than to believe or to trust.”
― Harold Bloom, The American Religion

“I will venture, in this book, that while Judaism and traditional Christianity are not biblical religions (despite all their assertions), the American Religion indeed is biblical, though its Bible may be confined largely to Saint Paul (the Southern Baptists) or be an American set of replacement Scriptures (the Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, Christian Scientists, among others).”
― Harold Bloom, The American Religion