The American Religion.

HAROLD BLOOM began his career as a professor and critic, two decades ago, by battling to put Milton and the Romantics at center stage, whence he felt they had been displaced by the high-church tea party of the Reverend T.S. Eliot. But his first cross-over hit, the best-selling Book of J, was a long religious essay in which he argued that the author of some of the Bible's best stories had been an authoress. The American Religion returns to the scene of his success.

Bloom's American religion is not any one of the religions of America, but a yearning that touches all of them, "even our secularists, indeed even our professed atheists," and he examines its manifestations among adherents of the five major made-in-America faiths--Pentecostalists, Mormons, Adventists, Christian Scientists, and Jehovah's Witnesses--as well as the beliefs of Southern Baptists and blacks. This leaves a lot out: the only Roman Catholic he mentions is the New Age renegade Matthew Fox. But Bloom is entitled to seek his essences where they may be most clearly found.

He has done a fair amount of reading, and as in all plain talk about what people actually think, the details are startling. Readers who hazily assume that Mormons are quasi'Christians, who just believe that Jesus made a second appearance in pre-Colombian America, are in for a shock. Bloom shows us Upstate New York when it was the California of America, and the .spiritual and sexual antics of Big Sur were getting their try-outs on Oneida Lake.

But the book's claim to be more than a scrapbook stands or falls on its analysis of what religious Americans want. Bloom puts his conclusions on page one. Americans want to be "alone with God or with Jesus . . . a God who is also quite separate and solitary." This is possible because "the self is already of God." In fact, this self is "no part of the Creation" but "higher and earlier than the angels . .. as old as God, older than the Bible." Americans at their most imaginative in fact recapitulate the beliefs of second'century gnostics such as Valentinus of Alexandria, and of Jewish kabbalists.

If this sounds like a strange description of what you learned in Sunday school, the rest of The American Religion makes it no less strange, for while Bloom repeats these assertions again and again, he makes few arguements for his case, and the few he makes are flimsy. Bloom thinks Southern Baptists fit into this scheme because the goal of their religious experience is to walk and talk with the risen Jesus-so much so that they scant the Crucifixion. "Baptists do not need the Crucifixion," he writes, "and show little interest in it." But only a page earlier, he quotes six texts from Romans that Southern Baptists hold as particularly important: they mention Christ's death twice. Bloom makes much of the fact that Southern Baptist crosses are plain and Christless. But so are almost all the crosses of low-church Protostantism, because the Communions which take place under them, unlike Masses, are commemorations, not re-enactments. Next time Bloom is in New York, if he walks down West 57th Street, he will pass Calvary Baptist Church, which says, over its door, WE PREACH CHRIST CRUCIFIED, RISEN AGAIN, AND ALIVE. This, it is true, must be an American (or Northern) Baptist church. But it is at least as relevant to the Southern Baptists as Valentinus of Alexandria.

In a bilious chapter on the church's modern Fundamentalist wing, Bloom gets off one clean shot: "Even as Fundamentalists insist upon the inerrancy of the Bible, they give up all actual reading of the Bible," whose "texts simply are quoted ... as though they interpreted themselves." This is telling, but it would tell more if Bloom's interpretations did not always deadend in second-century Egypt.

Bloom's failure is the more disappointing because there is a book on the American religion which he is specially qualified to write. In this one, mainline Protestants'Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists--barely appear. There is something amusing in the fact that a critic who could flog himself through Science and Health saw nothing of interest in what once was the nation's religious mainline. But surely this absence, after centuries of dominance, is worth pondering.

The main cause of the mainline's withering has been its tropism toward dis-Spirited do-goodery, first seen in the Social Gospel movement and now nearly a century old. In recent years, the heirs of the Social Gospellers have been curiously allied with the apostles of a religion--the word is not too stronger self-fulfillment. The grandfather of that tendency was the clergyman-turned-lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson--on whom, along with Milton, Shelley, and Co., Bloom has lavished his critical love. Bloom quotes bits of the Concord sage here, such as an 1831 journal entry ("It is God in you that responds to God without"). This, as Bloom knows, is not Christianity. But it isn't quite gnosticism either (Emerson's self isn't interested in its existence before or outside of Creation, but in discovering its own divinity here and now). An undistracted look at what Emerson was up to, and what his audiences took from him, might have explained, better than The American Religion, where much American religion is now.