Bellah, Robert N.

Robert Neelly Bellah (b. 1927) is an American cultural sociologist and sociologist of religion. His contributions have exerted a supreme influence on American postwar cultural studies and the sociology of religion. His widely acclaimed efforts to explore the intellectual roots of contemporary American culture have been repeatedly awarded. He received the U.S. “National Humanities Medal” in 2000.

Bellah grew up in Los Angeles. What proved to be of some significance for his scientific development is the strong Protestant-Presbyterian climate of the family in which he was raised, which likely prepared him for his academic interest. During the course of the Second World War, his studies in sociology, anthropology, and Far Eastern languages at Harvard fostered a shift away from his familiar religious convictions, toward Marxism. Under the influence of his major sociological teacher, Talcott Parsons, he became acquainted with the works of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, and finally committed himself to a neutral sociological perspective. He received his PhD in 1955 and, after a brief appointment at the Islamic Institute at McGill University, Canada, resumed his academic work at Harvard until he left for a full professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967. He taught at Berkeley until 1997.

Bellah's most important contribution to social science is grounded in a single but most consequential idea that he first published in 1967 and later developed in his award-winning book The Broken Covenant (1992). He argued for the existence of a “civil religion in America” that, accordingly, would constitute a form of collective religious commitment besides traditional religious practice, on one hand, and patriotism—its secular version—on the other. Bellah's thesis raised a number of theoretical and empirical issues in cultural sociology. Furthermore, it has been the subject of various academic and public disputes and even has produced, in the words of its originator, a “minor academic industry” (Bellah 1992:ix). Bellah's subsequent scientific work can be considered a further elaboration on several tacit issues of his original postulate and his defense against critical objections to that postulate.

Bellah (1971) defined the complex of civil religion as “a set of beliefs, symbols and rituals” and, referring to Durkheim, as a “reality sui generis” (p. 171). On the basis of his initial cultural comparison of religious systems, Bellah could avoid the risk of universalizing the results he observed in the American field. He argued that a fundamental structural core problem of any society was the institutionalization of the connection between political and religious functions. All cultural studies had to begin with the study of this problem. In this regard, he took the American society as a unique and unequalled case. Drawing on a close interpretation of inaugural speeches of American presidents from the late eighteenth century to the present, Bellah pointed to the constituents and theological roots of American civil religion. They consisted of a historically relative combination of several intellectual traditions: republicanism, utilitarianism, and liberalism, on one hand, and Judeo-Christian religion, on the other.

Bellah went through a comprehensive historical analysis of the various public manifestations of American civil religion. He observed that it persisted in a distorted form until [Page 50]the present but had gradually vanished from public as well as individual consciousness and thus had to be recovered. It was invented and shaped by the founding fathers in their public speeches as they appealed to a set of religious and moral values they deemed indispensable for an operative political constitution. Henceforth, civil religion had been reproduced through the institutionalization of public rituals, such as inaugural addresses or holidays, and symbolic forms, such as language. Starting with the event of the American Revolution, which was seen as the final act of the exodus from the old lands, new themes of death, sacrifice, and rebirth as well as new modes of ritual expression were added to the body of civil religion alongside the American Civil War. As a “third time of trial” (1992), Bellah noted the role that U.S. presidents of the twentieth century had been prescribing to themselves ever since World War I. He found that a core theme of original civil religion, namely, the responsibility of any government not toward its proper interests but toward a higher moral judgment, had been exhausted and threatened.

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