spirituality, religion, America, United States, Christianity, Gnosticism, Christian Science, Seventh-day, Jehovah, Pentacostal, New Age, Mormon, Baptist, African American 

Bloom identifies Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James as previous scholars who practiced religious criticism of American religion. He concludes that in America there is a single, dominant religion of which many nominally distinct denominations are a part. Among these he identifies Mormonism, the Southern Baptist Convention, Pentecostalism, and Seventh-day Adventism. To a lesser extent however, he also includes nearly all "Christian" denominations in America, including mainline Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Bloom's view is that all of these groups in America are united by requiring that each person may only truly meet with the divine when experiencing a "total inward solitude" and that salvation cannot be achieved by engaging with a community, but only through a one-to-one confrontation with the divine.