Harold Bloom on Joseph Smith

Last updated on: July 11, 2016 at 9:52 pm by Dan Peterson

Harold Bloom on Joseph Smith 2016-07-11T21:52:24-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Hall of Graduate Studies at Yale University, where the famous literary critic Harold Bloom has long served as Sterling Professor of the Humanities (Wikimedia Commons)

Harold Bloom is an atheist — or, if not an atheist (he denies it), something like one. He’s certainly not an orthodox Jewish believer, let alone a devout Christian. So his remarks below have to be viewed as in some sense metaphorical. Still, they’re remarkable:

“Whatever his lapses, Smith was an authentic religious genius, unique in our national history.”
– Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p 82

“I also do not find it possible to doubt that Joseph Smith was an authentic prophet. Where in all of American history can we find his match? . . . In proportion to his importance and his complexity, [Joseph Smith] remains the least-studied personage, of an undiminished vitality, in our entire national saga.”
– Ibid, p 95

“If there is already in place any authentic version of the American Religion then, as Tolstoy surmised, it must be Mormonism, whose future as yet may prove decisive for the nation, and for more than this nation alone.”
– Ibid p 97

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