Fifteen years ago the prolific Harold Bloom published The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. As I recall, Bloom identified that religion, whose avatars were Emerson and Whitman, with "gnosticism."Now another Avatar has appeared and Ross Douthat, in today's New York Times, thinks "pantheism" is the proper name. He writes:

As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming. The American belief in the essential unity of all mankind, Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, leads us to collapse distinctions at every level of creation. Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator, he suggested, democratic man seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole.Today there are other forces that expand pantheisms American appeal. We pine for what weve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of thou shalt nots, and a piping-hot apocalypse.At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps bring God closer to human experience, while depriving him of recognizable personal traits. For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.

As they say: "I'm spiritual but not religious!"