The American Religion, by Harold Bloom, is a study of various manifestations of what Bloom calls the Gnostically-charged "American Religion."#

He primarily talks about Mormons, Southern Baptists, and various smaller sects and about how they are defining America and will define the future of America.#

Harold Bloom is practically a stand-up comedian and sometimes inscrutable and deep on occasion:#

To give a meaning to meaninglessness is the endless quest of religion. [p. 29]

An involuntary believer in the American Religion, I myself need to know better what envelops us all. [p. 38]

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. [p. 40]

The American Religion, unlike Judaism and Christianity, is actually biblical, even when it offers and exalts alternative texts as well. [p. 81]

I would venture Brigham Young was Joseph Smith's finest work. [p. 117]

Paranoia, according to the sage William Burroughs, is just knowing all the facts, [p. 136]

Science and Health [Mary Baker Eddy's "Bible"] is the antithesis of humor or good writing, as it is the antithesis also of the erotic drive. [p. 141]

[The strangeness of the popularity of Christian Science in Germany] surely has little to do with any untranslatability of Mrs. Eddy's Science and Health, which Mark Twain wanted translated into English. [p. 145]

[Ellen White, of Seventh-day Adventism, vision of the] Great Controversy between Christ and Satan begins to resemble not a great debate but a dispute concerning double-entry bookkeeping. "Who cooks the books?" will be heard upon earth, even as it was heard in heaven. [p. 150]

No American faith, not even Jehovah's Witnesses, has a theology so convoluted as that of Seventh-day Adventism. I observe this in admiration, not in disrespect. [p. 150, my emphasis]

[Ellen White] may not wear you down, but she has the air of always going on until she is stopped, and she never is stopped. [p. 151]

Adventists now vie with Mormons in outliving all other Americans, a curious fate for believers whose precursors did not expect to outlive October 22, 1844. [p. 155]

There is something peculiarly childish in these Watchtower yearnings: they remind me of why very small children cannot be left alone with wounded and suffering household pets. [p. 170]

Religious criticism cannot be applied to Scientology, or to the Moonie Unification Church, any more than literary criticism can find its texts-for-discussion in Alice Walker or in Danielle Steel. [p. 181]

[The] student of the New Age must be resigned to that proverbial picnic, to which the authors bring the words (or some of them, anyway) and the readers bring the meanings. [p. 184]

Bloom, in my opinion, misinterprets the need of following plural marriage. He says it is a transcendent act, while I say it is important to follow God, and this is just another example of a commandment at some time. The so-called Abrahamic test of the 1800s. (p. 105)#

Bloom has an interesting interpretation of the different crosses of Christianity: Christ on the cross (Catholics), Christ off the cross (Baptists), and no cross (Mormonism).#