Bellah, Robert (b. 1927)

Religion in Human Evolution

Bellah's account of “Religious Evolution” draws on biblical sacred history, mediated by Hegelian historicism threaded through Durkheim, Weber, and Marx. It shows how religion is enacted in cultural, social, personal, and bodily forms that unfold in history and cannot be grasped outside it. Cultural symbols and beliefs, social practices and institutions, personal habits and attitudes, and embodied disciplines and expression all interpenetrate in constituting religion. Each exercises a degree of autonomy in their interaction that makes it irreducible to any one of the others. They mutually constitute each other through history, and religion is historically constituted through all the dimensions of human action.

Religious rejection of the world emerges in the first millennium BCE in Israel, Greece, India, and China at the core of every historic salvation religion, defining the Weberian axis of religious evolution in Bellah's original formulation. Renouncing the world represented within the framework of cosmological dualism crystallizes an otherworldly true self, or Buddhist nonself, deeper than the flux of everyday experience, facing a reality over and against itself. It holds up an overarching ethical aim and stance, unified into a whole way of life, to answer the question of what we must do to be saved. Conversely, the collapse of cosmological dualism and world rejection marks modern modes of religious symbolization, action, and organization within complex societies shaped by institutional differentiation and cultural pluralism. Modern world acceptance features a multiplex monist worldview centered on a multidimensional self. Each person is responsible for critically self-conscious and conscientious participation in the process of religious symbolization itself, shared among a modern priesthood of all believers no longer bound by the obligations of doctrinal orthodoxy imposed by the tutelary authority of the state-established religion.

But since religion is centrally the narrative self-interpretation and ritual enactment of all human cultures, Bellah argues, the whole of the history of religion is our own. We remain deeply embedded in it, from tribal peoples to the present. This holds true even when—and especially when—we think of religion in peculiarly modern Western terms as primarily private beliefs held by individuals and voluntary associations made up of like-minded believers or spiritual seekers. Religion reflects the whole of life in premodern societies, shifting in shape as social and cultural complexity evolve together. World-rejecting religious symbols, rites, and congregational communities break through the cosmological and moral unity of archaic and tribal societies in tandem with their political and economic structures. But we need to understand tribal and then archaic religions and societies in their own terms to grasp how such salvific breakthroughs carry the whole of human cultural and religious history into modern world acceptance. This includes the early modern Protestant patterning of American modernity, grounded in convictions of individual free conscience, conversion, providence, and covenant permuted into ideals of individual free choice, revolution, progress, and constitution.

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