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"Is it true, as some claim, that the more modern a society, the weaker our sense of the sacred? Does a sense of the sacred somehow 'liquefy,' as Habermas suggests, as society grows ever more 'rational'? In this collection of brilliant and bold meditations on the works of Durkheim, Weber, Rousseau, Goffman, and others, Robert Bellah arrives at his own nuanced answers. An important and enlightening read."--Arlie Hochschild, University of California, Berkeley

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THE Robert Bellah READER

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface.........................................................................................................viiIntroduction....................................................................................................1I COMPARATIVE AND THEORETICAL...................................................................................191 Religious Evolution...........................................................................................232 The Five Religions of Modern Italy............................................................................513 To Kill and Survive or to Die and Become......................................................................814 Stories as Arrows: The Religious Response to Modernity........................................................1075 Max Weber and World-Denying Love..............................................................................1236 Durkheim and Ritual...........................................................................................1507 Rousseau on Society and the Individual........................................................................1818 The History of Habit..........................................................................................203II AMERICAN RELIGION............................................................................................2219 Civil Religion in America.....................................................................................22510 Religion and the Legitimation of the American Republic.......................................................24611 The New Religious Consciousness and the Crisis of Modernity..................................................26512 The Kingdom of God in America: Language of Faith, Language of Nation, Language of Empire.....................28513 Citizenship, Diversity, and the Search for the Common Good...................................................30314 Is There a Common American Culture?..........................................................................31915 Flaws in the Protestant Code: Theological Roots of American Individualism....................................33316 The New American Empire......................................................................................35017 God and King.................................................................................................357III UNIVERSITY AND SOCIETY......................................................................................37718 The Ethical Aims of Social Inquiry...........................................................................38119 Class Wars and Culture Wars in the University Today..........................................................40220 Freedom, Coercion, and Authority.............................................................................41021 The True Scholar.............................................................................................42122 Education for Justice and the Common Good....................................................................434IV SOCIOLOGY AND THEOLOGY.......................................................................................45123 On Being Catholic and American...............................................................................45724 Religious Pluralism and Religious Truth......................................................................47425 Texts, Sacred and Profane....................................................................................49026 Epiphany: "Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit"...................................................................50427 Pentecost: "Beginning in the End of Times"...................................................................51028 All Souls Day: "The Living and the Dead in Communion"........................................................515Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah.......................................................................523Index...........................................................................................................543

Chapter One

Time in its aging course teaches all things. -Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

Though one can name precursors as far back as Herodotus, the systematically scientific study of religion begins only in the second half of the nineteenth century. According to Chantepie de la Saussaye, the two preconditions for this emergence were that by the time of Hegel religion had become the object of comprehensive philosophical speculation and that by the time of Henry Thomas Buckle history had been enlarged to include the history of civilization and culture in general. In its early phases, partly under the influence of Darwinism, the science of religion was dominated by an evolutionary tendency already implicit in Hegelian philosophy and early-nineteenth-century historiography. The grandfathers of modern sociology, Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, contributed to the strongly evolutionary approach to the study of religion as, with many reservations, did Emile Durkheim and Max Weber.

But by the third decade of the twentieth century the evolutionary wave was in full retreat both in the general field of science of religion and in the sociology of religion in particular. Of course, this was only one aspect of the general retreat of evolutionary thought in social science, but nowhere did the retreat go further or the intensity of the opposition to evolution go deeper than in the field of religion. An attempt to explain the vicissitudes of evolutionary conceptions in the field of religion would be an interesting study in the sociology of knowledge but beyond the scope of this brief essay. Here I can only say that I hope that the present attempt to apply the evolutionary idea to religion evidences a serious appreciation of both nineteenth-century evolutionary theories and twentieth-century criticisms of them.

Evolution at any system level I define as a process of increasing differentiation and complexity of organization that endows the organism, social system, or whatever the unit in question may be with greater capacity to adapt to its environment, so that it is in some sense more autonomous relative to its environment than were its less complex ancestors. I do not assume that evolution is inevitable, irreversible, or must follow any single particular course. Nor do I assume that simpler forms cannot prosper and survive alongside more complex forms. What I mean by evolution, then, is nothing metaphysical but the simple empirical generalization that more complex forms develop from less complex forms and that the properties and possibilities of more complex forms differ from those of less complex forms.

A brief handy definition of religion is considerably more difficult than a definition of evolution. An attempt at an adequate definition would, as Clifford Geertz has recently demonstrated, require an essay in itself for adequate explanation. So, for limited purposes only, let me define religion as a set of symbolic forms and acts that relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence. The purpose of this definition is to indicate exactly what I claim has evolved. It is not the ultimate conditions, or, in traditional language, God that has evolved, nor is it man in the broadest sense of Homo religiosus. I am inclined to agree with Mircea Eliade when he holds that primitive man is as fully religious as man at any stage of existence, though I...