re re: America's gnostic religion

[pynchonoid]

Small-g gnosticism (my preference, although Bloom
chooses to call the contemporary Christian variety
Gnosticism or neo-Gnosticism), which is why this is
relevant in a discussion of Pynchon if not at an
evangelical coffee klatch.  


"Our authentic Gnosticisms are scattered wherever our
new southern and western Republican overlords worship:
 in Salt Lake City and Dallas and wherever else Mormon
temples and Southern Baptist First Churches pierce the
heavens. Our American Religion, whether homegrown or
ostensibly Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant, is
more of a Gnostic amalgam than a European kind of
historical and doctrinal Christianity, though very few
are able to see this, or perhaps don't wish to see it.
[...] there are a handful or so of mainline Protestant
ministers who now understand that their neo-orthodoxy
is yielding to a populist neo-Gnosticism. [...] I
sometimes allow myself the fantasy of Saint Paul
redescending upon a contemporary America where he
still commands extraordinary honor, among religions as
diverse as Roman Catholicism and Southern Baptism. He
would be bewildered, not by change, but by sameness,
and would believe he was back at Corinth and Colossae,
confronted again by Gnostic myths of the angels who
made this world. [...]
-Harold Bloom, _Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of
Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection_

info on Bloom's book:
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1573226297/qid=1076612033/sr=1-13/ref=sr_1_13/104-1628275-6858310?v=glance&s=books>


>From: pynchonoid <pynchonoid@[omitted]>
>
>The desire to flee Earth, the intensely contradictory
love/hate attitude to 
>the body, the good/evil dualism-- these staples of
evangelical Christian 
>theology are all characteristics of gnosticism, as
well as prominently 
>featured in Pynchon's fiction.
>
>What were once characteristics of a heresy (from the
point of view of the 
>Christian establishment at the time, many centuries
ago) have migrated into 
>the mainstream, i.e., in the evangelical movement
whose 70 million 
>adherents now dominates Christianity in the U.S.
[...] 

Somebody who seems to spend a lot of time talking with
evangelicals wrote:
[...] Some Gnostic attitudes are prevalent in
Christianity, as you note above, and 
these spring from a shared conception of this present
world as being deeply 
flawed and in the clutches of an evil power. 
Thereafter the two theologies 
sharply diverge.  [...]




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