... bigotry is something that needs to be fought in all its forms; unreasonable fears and prejudices based on religion will always be with us, but such fears belong in the gutter among the wackos, the haters and the tin-foil hat brigades on both the right and the left. When they rise from the sewers and the swamps into mainstream publications and can be casually uttered in polite company by distinguished professors, something is going very wrong, and people who believe in the American way need to speak up.
As far as I can make out, Professor Bloom is more elitist misanthrope than bigot; his hatred and loathing for Mormonism is part of a broader and deeper disgust with almost everything that the common people think or do in the contemporary United States. The essay drips with condescension and disdain; he hates and fears the Mormons not because they are different from most of their fellow citizens but because they are like them. American Religion, as the professor calls the faiths that ordinary, non-elite Americans profess, is a toxic brew of death denial and mammon worship, and partly as a result American society is a grotesque oligarchical plutocracy.
Having recently reviewed a book of Bloom's, which I rather liked, I would suggest that Bloom lives pretty much in a world of his own imagining. Dispatches from there can be both intriguing and enlightening. This one is both, but not, I suspect, in the manner Bloom intended.
Of course prejudice is wrong. Still Bloom's warning against candidates who are "proudly stupid" is a meme worth repeating....
ReplyDeleteAnd having just read Joe McGinnis's The Rogue, it's worth asking which of their religious beliefs candidates choose to keep under wraps.
There is no religious test for a candidacy in the United States. Period. End of discussion.
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