Bloom on “Biblicism” (the Southern Baptists as an example)
Selected excerpts from Harold Bloom, The American Religion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992)
…The overwhelming urgency (and viciousness) of Southern Baptist Fundamentalism surpasses all other American instances of that errancy, and makes it shockingly similar to Iranian Shiite Fundamentalism or the worst excesses of the Neturei Karta in Israel. In a most grievous way, the strength and uniqueness of the Moderate Southern Baptist tradition, as codified by Mullins, involuntarily helped produce the furious anti-intellectualism of Criswell, Pressler, and the other representative leaders of the now dominant Fundamentalist faction of the Southern Baptist Convention.
The mystical distrust of language in the Moderates, with its attendant repudiation of theology, is reduced by the Fundamentalists to a total devaluation of all language and all thought. Even as Fundamentalists insist upon the inerrancy of the Bible, they give up all actual reading of the Bible, since in fact its language is too remote and difficult for them to begin to understand. What is left is the Bible as physical object, limp and leather, a final icon or magical talisman. To read Criswell or any other Fundamentalist clergyman on the Bible is almost a literal impossibility, at least for me, because they are not writing about the text, in any sense whatsoever of text, or of that text.
They write about their own dogmatic social, political, cultural, moral, and even economic convictions, and biblical texts simply are quoted, with frenetic abandon, whether or not they in any way illustrate or even approach the areas where the convictions center. They are quoted also as though they interpreted themselves and were perfectly transparent in their meanings-
The mystical distrust of language in the Moderates, with its attendant repudiation of theology, is reduced by the Fundamentalists to a total devaluation of all language and all thought. Even as Fundamentalists insist upon the inerrancy of the Bible, they give up all actual reading of the Bible, since in fact its language is too remote and difficult for them to begin to understand. What is left is the Bible as physical object, limp and leather, a final icon or magical talisman. To read Criswell or any other Fundamentalist clergyman on the Bible is almost a literal impossibility, at least for me, because they are not writing about the text, in any sense whatsoever of text, or of that text.
They write about their own dogmatic social, political, cultural, moral, and even economic convictions, and biblical texts simply are quoted, with frenetic abandon, whether or not they in any way illustrate or even approach the areas where the convictions center. They are quoted also as though they interpreted themselves and were perfectly transparent in their meanings-
It seems heartless to blame the Moderate Baptists for any aspect of this absurdity, but no Southern Baptist (as such) seems to be much at home with or in language. Theology depends upon analogies, arguments, metaphors, all of which enforce the difference between words and the realities they represent. Fundamentalist Baptists never even seem to realize that the Bible is in the first place language. But Moderate Baptists, being sincere and pragmatic Enthusiasts in their unmediated relationship to Jesus, tend to despair that the unmediated experience they have of Jesus ever can be represented in language. We thus have the paradox that the Fundamentalists resent or ignore language, while the Moderates at best are ambivalent towards it, and probably even fear it, since they do not wish it to mediate Jesus for them.
Christian Fundamentalism essentially is a North American phenomenon; except for the United States and Canada, it has had an indigenous life only in Ulster. Its other worldwide manifestations tend to be exported from the United States. Yet I cannot regard it as anything but a parody of what I have called the American Religion. Its spiritual content, to the religious critic, is difficult to locate. This was not always so; there were some serious intellects involved in later nineteenththrough earlier twentieth-century Fundamentalism. Today, there are none, and yet
Fundamentalism threatens to become almost a synonym for Evangelicalism in contemporary America. Partly this is caused by media overreporting, and by the plain shock experienced by our upper-middle-class public each time they find themselves yet again allied with lowermiddle-class Fundamentalists in the support of Reagan, Bush, and their party.
The moral agenda of the Fundamentalists is rather drab, and, like Bush, generally reduces to waving the flag and the fetus at us as though these constituted a single entity.…
Fundamentalism threatens to become almost a synonym for Evangelicalism in contemporary America. Partly this is caused by media overreporting, and by the plain shock experienced by our upper-middle-class public each time they find themselves yet again allied with lowermiddle-class Fundamentalists in the support of Reagan, Bush, and their party.
The moral agenda of the Fundamentalists is rather drab, and, like Bush, generally reduces to waving the flag and the fetus at us as though these constituted a single entity.…
[Bloom 228-230, 232]
