Editing Walt Whitman (section)

===Religion===
Whitman was deeply influenced by [[deism]]. He denied any one faith was more important than another, and embraced all religions equally.<ref name=Reynolds237>Reynolds, 237.</ref> In "Song of Myself", he gave an inventory of major religions and indicated he respected and accepted all of them—a sentiment he further emphasized in his poem "With Antecedents", affirming: "I adopt each theory, myth, god, and demi-god, / I see that the old accounts, bibles, genealogies, are true, without exception".<ref name=Reynolds237/> In 1874, he was invited to write a poem about the [[Spiritualism (movement)|Spiritualism]] movement, to which he responded: "It seems to me nearly altogether a poor, cheap, crude [[wikt:humbug|humbug]]."<ref>Loving, 353.</ref> Whitman was a religious skeptic: though he accepted all churches, he believed in none.<ref name=Reynolds237/> God, to Whitman, was both [[immanent]] and [[Transcendence (religion)|transcendent]] and the human soul was immortal and in a state of progressive development.<ref name="Kuebrich">{{cite book|author-first=David|author-last=Kuebrich|chapter=Religion and the poet-prophet |editor-first=Donald D.|editor-last=Kummings|title=A Companion to Walt Whitman|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2uTCiN347lMC&pg=PA211|access-date=August 13, 2010|year=2009|publisher=John Wiley and Sons|isbn=978-1-4051-9551-5|pages=211–}}</ref> ''American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia'' classes him as one of several figures who "took a more [[Pantheism|pantheist]] or [[Pandeism|pandeist]] approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world."<ref>{{Cite book |title = American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia |url = https://archive.org/details/americanphil_xxxx_2008_000_9069252 |url-access = registration |editor-first1= John |editor-last1= Lachs |editor-first2= Robert|editor-last2= Talisse |year = 2007 |isbn = 978-0415939263 |page = [https://archive.org/details/americanphil_xxxx_2008_000_9069252/page/n335 310]|publisher = Routledge }}</ref>
According to literary critic [[Harold Bloom]]:
{{Blockquote|Walt Whitman was the crucial celebrant of what I think we yet will call the American Religion, the momentary fusion of all denominations in an amalgam of Enthusiasm and [[Gnosticism]]… Our theologians and prophets of the American Religion include Emerson, [[Joseph Smith]], and [[Horace Bushnell]], among others. The philosopher [[William James]] is its psychologist, and Walt Whitman forever will be its poet-prophet, who sings only songs of myself. We now have an American Jesus and an American Holy Spirit, and have largely banished [[Yahweh]], except that he marches as Warrior God, endlessly trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.<ref name="LOG#" />}}