When it comes to discussing religious faith in American culture today, I think that American adults probably fall somewhere along a continuum that includes anti-religion atheists (such as Richard Dawkins), atheists who are not strongly anti-religion (such as Bloom, who is a self-described Gnostic), philosophic agnostics, people of religious faith who do not hold a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, and people of religious faith who do hold a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, with other religious positions among these.
However, as I've suggested above, American political culture today includes a highly articulate secular culture that may contain stridently anti-religion atheists, less stridently anti-religion atheists (such as Bloom), philosophic agnostics, and people of religious faith who do not hold a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible but are able to walk and chew gum at the same time by holding firmly to their religious faith but also holding firmly to secular values in the public square of civic discourse. I would characterize the articulate secular culture as the prestige culture.
But I also drew attention above to the people who see themselves as at the bottom of American culture today.
However, the people of religious faith who do not hold a fundamentalist view of the Bible but who are able to walk and chew gum at the same time by holding their religious faith, on the one hand, and, on the other, by holding secularist values in the public square are not usually people who see themselves at the bottom of American culture today.
In other words, most of the people who do see themselves at the bottom of American culture today are arguably the targets of the Republican noise machine.
But not all of those people who see themselves at the bottom hold a fundamentalist view of the Bible.
If people of religious faith who do not hold a fundamentalist view of the Bible were to read Bloom's book, would they lose their religious faith, as Bloom himself has? Maybe they would. But it does not necessarily follow that they would.
Moreover, if they read and appreciated Bloom's book, they would probably emerge as less likely to listen to and be influenced by the Republican noise machine, because they in effect would have read a book by a secularist without losing their religious faith, as the author himself has. In this way, they might separate themselves out from the potential victims of the Republican noise machine.
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