I learned this afternoon that Robert Bellah has died following complications from surgery. He was 86. Bellah was one of the giants of American sociology, especially the sociology of religion. He taught at Harvard for ten years and then at Berkeley for most of his career. Bellah was a student of Talcott Parsons, and some of that influence can be seen in his late work, Religion in Human Evolution. (Bellah was a rather better-informed theorist of social evolution than Parsons.) But he is best known for his work on American religion and society. He formulated the concept of “American civil religion” in the late 1960s and it quickly became the standard shorthand for the fusion of Christian and secular ideals and rituals that anchor much of American public life. His work on that idea led to the book The Broken Covenant in 1975, and much else besides. A little later on he was—together with Charles Glock and other colleagues and students—at the leading edge of the study of changing forms of private religious practice. Initially, in The New Religious Consciousness, the focus was on religious aspects of 1960s counterculture and their persistence into the 1970s. By the 1980s this line of thought led to Habits of the Heart (again a collective product), a study of American religious practice and its connection to the common good. Habits of the Heart had a huge influence in the field. For a serious piece of social science it sold in large quantities; it pinned down some aspects of spiritual life in the U.S. (most notably with the idea of “Sheilaism“) that were in the air at the time; it helped set the agenda for a revived sociology of culture in the United States; and its methodological mix of in-depth interviews backed by survey research was an influential template for a great deal of sociological work that followed it.
I can’t really do justice to the man and his work here. I’m sure that over the next few weeks there will be many more in-depth appraisals from colleagues and experts. But he was the sort of academic whose influence was felt both through his work and his students, and whose scholarship shaped work in subfields at one and two removes from his own, even if this wasn’t always directly acknowledged.
{ 25 comments }
Peter L. 07.31.13 at 10:22 pm
Here are the words of Robert Bellah criticizing Richard Dawkins:
Richard Dawkins’s thinking about religion rests on a fundamentally flawed position. He treats the existence of God as a theory that must be proven—as a scientific hypothesis or falsifiable theory that must be proved with more or less empirical evidence. Since he thinks that it cannot be done he concludes—by means of an equally indemonstrable hypothesis—that God is a delusion and religion is bad. So where is the error? Very simply, religion is not an intellectual theory or proposition that stands or falls on a simply rationally valid proof. Since Einstein’s theory of relativity and Heisenburg’s uncertainty principle, the Enlightenment’s notion that only rational proven truth is valid has gone into eclipse. But religions go back to the very beginnings of humanity. Most probably, before they had learned to speak humanoids were dancing sacred dances and almost certainly drawing sacred drawings. Why did they do these things? To demonstrate the meaning and beauty of birth, life, and the horror of death that they deeply felt but could not yet explain in words.
[…..]
Religion, for Dawkins, is a cognitive system, a kind of science, but bad science with bad consequences. For the social scientist religion is not primarily a theory at all: it is the many ways humans have sought to find meaning, to make sense of their lives. As such it is an inescapable sphere of life, like economics or politics. Because there is much wrong with our economy… shall we get rid of economics? Because there is much political corruption… shall we just abolish politics? I emphatically reject Dawkins’s hostility toward religion. And I can’t understand what impels him — wonderful thinker, lecturer and writer that he is — to wander off into areas that he is so ignorant of.
*************
What do you make of these comments? Is Bellah correct in anything he says here?
First, for him to suggest that Relativity and the Uncertainty Principle introduce sufficient lack of knowledge about reality for a deity to be interpolated not only is nothing more than a god of the gaps argument, but it’s a god of a gap that he only believes is there because he fails to understand either of the scientific concepts about which he’s making claims.
As to his criticisms of Professor Dawkins: he suggests that it’s Professor Dawkins that makes religion a scientific hypothesis, but religion has already done that by making suggestions about the nature of reality and humanity. If there is nothing in religion that can be investigated by science then there is nothing in religion that affects reality, in which case it is functionally non-existent. As soon as religion makes claims about reality then science – the methodological inspection of reality – has a vested interest in validating or refuting that claim. When religion goes further, and starts to sponsor specific teachings that not only make claims about scientific concepts but goes so far as to contradict the well-supported current paradigm understand with fraudulent and deceptive claims then no degree of stridency could be unjustified, not that it’s been that well evidenced in the first place.
Then he falls into a curious position not of the argument from ignorance, but rather of accepting the validity of religion because it sprang up in a era of ignorance.
It’s when he falls back on his sociology, however, that he makes his categorical error. He assumes the sociological model that religion is an intrinsic part of human nature which hasn’t been adequately demonstrated – and takes that further in assuming that it has validity by virtue of being inherent.
Even if we were to accept that religion is inevitable given human nature, that says something about humanity but it doesn’t necessarily validate the concept of religion.
Rakesh 08.01.13 at 12:52 am
Just reading Kitcher’s Ethical Project. Has anyone compared Bellah and Kitcher? It seems that this essay needs to be written. Two great minds
Omega Centauri 08.01.13 at 2:43 am
Peter, Without having previously exposed to Bellah, I think you are being a bit too harsh. I fully accept that religion is not a rational desciption of reality, and do think it increases harmful “delusional” thinking. But, nevertheless it is a major part of the human landscape. And trying to describe or influence that landscape without understanding the strong mystical component is going to be ineffective. In effect they are both correct. They are spimply looking at the subject from different mental perspectives. Being able to look at a problem from multiple perspectives can be a very useful excercise, you might even gain fresh insight into how things work in the real world.
Tony Lynch 08.01.13 at 2:57 am
The problem is when science and religion ignore the fact/value distinction. The weird thing for me is how Dawkins and Harris see science as determining proper human norms, just as it is weird when religion tries to tell me about the facts of human speciation or whatever. I see NOMA as making that point. I suspect this was Bellah’s too.
Hector_St_Clare 08.01.13 at 4:06 am
Re: Religion, for Dawkins, is a cognitive system, a kind of science, but bad science with bad consequences. For the social scientist religion is not primarily a theory at all:
Speaking as a (Christian) believer: Dawkins is right here, and Bellah is wrong. Some religions- Christianity, at least- is absolutely a ‘cognitive system’ that makes specific historical claims about things that are purported to have happened. If the miracles recounted in the New Testament didn’t happen, then Christianity falls apart. Clearly, I’d disagree with Dawkins about whether those truth claims are correct or not- and more generally, about metaphysical naturalism- but I’d agree with Dawkins that the validity of those truth claims- not any fluff about ‘values’ or ‘meaning’- is what the whole debate comes down to.
There may be other religions- Judaism, perhaps, or Buddhism- that are more about meaning or values and less about historical truth claims, but certainly Bellah isn’t correct about all religions, and specifically not about Christianity.
Alison P 08.01.13 at 7:31 am
The problem is when science and religion ignore the fact/value distinction.
When one disagrees with the values endorsed by a Christian, the counter-argument by the Christian is based on a factual assertion (that historical events reveal God’s preferences which override my personal ethics). Without the factual assertion, why would you abandon your own values in favour of Christian values?
IOW if Christians are not making an assertion about facts, then what privileges their ethics over the alternatives? For example over Buddhists who say their ethical systems reduce suffering. I guess that is also a factual assertion (and at least you can investigate it).
Jonathan Mayhew 08.01.13 at 9:05 am
The amateurish use of Einstein and Heisenberg in the quote quoted by Peter sets my teeth on edge. Major science fail.
And, yes, you should study religion as a way that people make sense out of things. I don’t know anyone who disagrees with this. But then there’s no reason to privilege any particular system of religious values. Once you make religion about aesthetics then you are basically working within an agnostic / atheist paradigm, respecting everything but without really taking any truth claims seriously anymore.
Wonks Anonymous 08.01.13 at 2:14 pm
Most religious believers do not actually know what dogmas they are supposed to believe in. See “Theological Incorrectness”. People don’t relieve in religion because they’ve accepted some kinds of scientific tenets. But people can believe in lots of other things without good reasons. And the claim that religions are about beauty or a higher truth only comes about once we’ve received evidence against the more mundane claims made by those religions.
Rmj 08.01.13 at 4:14 pm
I would not defend Bellah’s assertions about religion as quoted above. I don’t agree with much of it.
Which doesn’t mean his critique of Dawkins is unsound.
To begin with, I think this much is correct:
Religion, for Dawkins, is a cognitive system, a kind of science, but bad science with bad consequences.
The idea that only science can lead to “truth,” or let us limit ourselve to “accurate knowledge about the world,” is simply balderdash. Can science explain why I love my wife, without resorting to reductio ad absurdums or treating me as less than a living individual, an existential (if you will permit) being? I’m sure science, somewhere, could “explain” why I enjoy Bach, too; but the explanation would not increase my enjoyment one jot, nor really add to my understanding of Bach, either.
Are these experiences not part of reality, however? If science is “the methodological inspection of reality,” what then is philosophy? Or any academic subject. Are they simply “other” methodologies, but only science is “THE” methodogy.
Good grief, what blinkered ignorance. But that can’t be, because we are in the post-Englightenment era, long past the “age of ignorance.” O brave new world, that has such creatures in it! Feh. Science can create antibiotics, but cannot stop us from abusing them so badly the are already on the verge of being useless. Science can create methods of improving life even as it creates improved methods of destroying life. Science has no greater claim to superiority in human affairs than religion does; and both function best when their root is centered in humility and the vastness of ignorance that surrounds our tiny realm of knowledge and understanding (the terms or not coterminous).
Bellah’s argument is not the one I would make, but he was right about many things, among them that Dawkins on religion is a man speaking on a subject he proudly proclaims he knows nothing about.
Nice work, if you can get it. Maybe I can be an expert in philosophy by proclaiming how little I know about it.
Consumatopia 08.01.13 at 5:40 pm
If this was Bellah’s view of religion, then what was his problem with “Sheilaism“? If religion just offers demonstrations of the meaning and beauty of life, then why shouldn’t one consider such demonstrations from all traditions? Heck, once you’ve given up on the claim that your religious claims are rationally justifiable, I hardly see how that’s avoidable. If your faith is built on long-standing tradition, and you know that there are other faiths out there with traditions at least as long-standing as yours, why not consider what they have to say? Are not their meanings and beauties just as legitimate as those of your ancestors?
Peter T 08.01.13 at 11:20 pm
consumatopia
Yours is a fair question from the point of view of of someone considering religious belief from the outside. I suspect it it looks like a silly question from the inside – something like “other people love their children too, so what’s so special about your children? Would not any children do?” I say this as an atheist. Another way to put this might be that religion does not “demonstrate” the meaning of life (to whom would it do so?) – it gives life meaning, for believers.
Kenny Easwaran 08.02.13 at 1:38 am
Rmj said:
It sounds like you’re taking a very narrow view of science. I would count music theory, history, and psychology as branches of science (in the general sense) that can explain why you enjoy Bach, help your understanding of Bach, and say at least something about why you love your wife. Obviously, these are very difficult sciences (unlike physics and chemistry, which are comparably quite easy) so there is still a lot of progress to make on fully explaining or understanding these things. But that doesn’t make them any less scientific.
(Anyway, sorry about the tangent. Back to Bellah.)
Hector_St_Clare 08.02.13 at 3:46 am
Peter T,
I’m considering religion from the inside, and I agree with consumatopia. my religion is a theory claiming certain factual occurrences and historical events. If those events didn’t happen, the whole thing is bunk.
js. 08.02.13 at 4:19 am
I’m hesitant to wade into these waters, but I do find this a rather odd claim. Despite Hector’s 13, I just don’t think that most of the religious people I know would even think to defend the idea that their religious beliefs are rationally justifiable. Justifiable, sure, but not in any way that one might try to justify the claim that Mohenjo-daro was inhabited in such-and-such a period (to take a suitably distant example). Maybe it’s just that I’m giving a somewhat narrow interpretation to “rational justification”, but at the same time, “You can’t explain everything by rational means,” is a pretty decent paraphrase of things I’ve heard several religious people say. None of this of course seems to in the least bit imply that their preferred set of beliefs is not the absolutely right one (for reasons that remain utterly obscure to me).
(Sorry if this is a bit OT.)
Consumatopia 08.02.13 at 4:48 am
I’m not saying that religion without rationally justifiable truth claims is “bunk”, as Hector puts it, I’m saying that it’s inescapably individualist. As Peter T asked, to whom would religion “demonstrate the meaning and beauty of birth, life” etc? It must be to the individual who chooses to go along with it. But if that’s the case, what’s wrong with combining demonstrations from multiple religions, or even coming up with your own?
js. 08.02.13 at 5:36 am
That makes sense to me, and it’s how I would think about it, but I think for people who seriously subscribe to established religions, a rather lot turns on the appeal to and reliance on authority. Some chosen individuals have a special sort of access to a special sort of truth, etc., and because they do, and because you and other right-minded people can see this, you follow them and their teachings qua their teachings. You don’t just go usurp the position of the chosen one(s). (That’s how it’s supposed to work, I think. Also, if that sounds snarky, the snark is definitely not directed at your comments—it’s not really supposed to be snarky at all.)
bad Jim 08.02.13 at 8:33 am
There isn’t much left of religion if we reject all arguments from authority, tossing aside sacred texts and disregarding revelation and tradition, which is to say by proceeding as science did at its inception, concluding that ancient wisdom was so unreliable as to be practically worthless. This may be why scientists tend not to be religious.
That’s not to say that ancient texts and traditions are utterly without value, but when they’ve been displaced from the domain of utility we can’t expect a consensus about what that value might be. It’s aesthetic for some, emotional for others, social, political, moral, or whatever, just like the rest of our cultural inheritance.
nothingforducks 08.02.13 at 7:31 pm
As others touched on above, the sociological conception of religion that Bellah advocates is also in itself very particular and historically determined. In most of the major religions that people identify with, Abrahamic and non, the notion of “Calling” or “Covenant” or “Submission” is integral. To say that these are mere expressions of subjective understanding or coping with the world is itself a prejudice or bias that makes nonsense of most actually lived religious action and commitment. The vast majority of religous systems do try to stand on some normative, rational basis (as most believers themselves believe, however obscurely), just they usually fail at this. 19th-century German liberal Protestant theology and the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz have had an immense effect on these “But what is religion really?” debates, and I think people should point this out more often and try to drag the discussion back to the realm of normative truth-claims.
SusanC 08.02.13 at 7:55 pm
The US religious groups studied by Bellah were mostly Protestant, and Protestant denominations have something of a history of being wary of the potential abuses inherent in the “organized” aspect of organized religion (see Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation etc). “Sheliaism” could be seen as an extreme form of the Protestant trend away from priestly authority towards a more personal religion. Richard Dawkins also has a fair amount in common with Protestant radicals, but takes the obvious next step of denouncing all religion, not just the Catholic church. (Although, interestingly, the Dawkins/PZ Meyers fans are more organized than a lone atheist would be: they have web sites etc. where they collectively share their non-belief in God. Call this semi-organized non-religion, if you like. I say semi-organized, because they have much less dogma that, for example, the Catholic church).
What I found a bit unsatisfactory in the couple of things by Bellah I’ve read is insufficent acknowledgment that this American trend away from organized religion towards unorganized religion (or semi-organized non-religion) mght have really good motivating reasons. That there are real problems with priestly authority driving the Protestant Reformation, Sheilaism, Dawkins etc. Possibly all these people are not wrong when they opt for less organized forms of religious (or anti-religious) activity.
SusanC 08.02.13 at 8:35 pm
I winced a bit at that quote, wondering whether it was just sloppy or short-hand for a better argument.
It’s fairly clear that a lot of church-goes have a good time meeting their friends every Sunday, don’t particularly care about finer points of metaphysics, and indeed have not much reason to care.
Consider instead a physicist trying to solve some problem, like predicting the results of a particle accelerator experiment. Of course, they care that they get the prediction right within experimental error, but do they worry too much about (say) Copenhagen Intepretation vs Everett’s many worlds while doing the real business of computing an approximation to a sum over an infinite set of Feynmann diagrams? Questions like: do these other worlds really exist might be met with a dismisive gesture.
Possibly most people (who aren’t philosophers) aren’t going to let doubts about the consistency of the metaphysics get in their way of having fun. (I’m tempted to quote either Martin Heidegger or Kierkegaard here, but I’ll leave it at that).
Omega Centauri 08.03.13 at 4:33 am
I think very few religious people are concerned about provability or even self-consistency of the doctrine. Partly it is because they are operating in the thought system of that religion, which was incorporated into their worldview when they were to young to question or resist. And partly it is a form of ancester worship -my parents, grandparents etc. were really into this stuff, and the worst thing they could imagine is I might become an unbeliever -“I promise not to disappoint them”. For some avoiding temptation to be a non-believer is a matter of life-or-death (or they have to be a good actor). So of course people become very good at ignoring the contradictions.
Then for the majority, it is mainly a social experience, and a set of commonly held myths that make interacting with other members easier. And finally, they almost always believe that their religion is an indispenable part of the best possible social system.
Of course people are very susceptible to seeing miracles in chance events. Why did I survive that scary event? It must be because god has a purpose for me. They don’t do the statistical thought experiment that a true scientist/philosopher would: (if it were truly random, the survivors -whoever they were would still think it a miracle that they were a survivor). And all sorts of other mere coincidences (that cloud looks like an imagine of the virgin Mary, therefore -its all true). All of these modes of thought and being, cause the meme-clusters we call religion to have tremendous power to survive multiple generations of host.
js. 08.03.13 at 4:42 am
Normative basis—yes, of course (that’s the whole point, surely). But “rational” how? Quite seriously, I just have no idea how any religion, conceived as such, could have a rational basis. (And just to avoid possible confusion, my feelings about Richard Dawkins etc. are like the Siberian winter.)
js. 08.03.13 at 4:45 am
Omega Centauri (21) said much better what I wanted to say.
Ib Jørgensen 08.03.13 at 8:39 am
In ‘A Common Faith’ John Dewey aimed at distilling the religious from religion maintaining that we need the first but not the latter. My conviction is that unless humanity succeeds in arriving at some common spiritual belief about our continued existence as a species we shall not be able to overcome the global problems confronting us. Much in established religions, first and foremost supernatural phenomena (gods, beliefs in afterlife, miracles, etc etc) stand in the way of such a common faith, not to speak of the hostilities between various creeds they engender all over the world. But it goes without saying that there is a lot in established religions that could become part of such a common faith. I have a feeling that Bellah would be in almost total agreement here. He didn’t believe in any supernatural power. Here is the email he sent to a former student on the occasion of the death of the syudent’s father:
Dear Sam:
Where were you before you were born? That’s where you will go after you die.
Well before I was born, I was in the sperm of my father and the egg of my mother, I had within me the earliest beginnings of the components of a billion or more years of life, the genes that I share with worms (a lot) and with mold (some), and the atoms that I share with the universe all the way back to the big bang. So returning to all that isn’t so bad.
Further, I will join the company of saints, of all those whose cultural work has made it possible for me to have been a half-way decent person, and what I have added to the cultural pool, even when I am long forgotten, will go on having an influence (unless we become extinct soon, which is also possible) for a long, perhaps an immeasurable time.
As for eternal life, that is now. If we don’t see eternity in a grain of sand, when will we ever see it. As for resurrection, as Tillich said, dead men don’t walk. But Christ was surely resurrected in the consciousness of his disciples and is more alive today than the day he was crucified, in the faces of all those who follow his example and who keep him alive.
Many wonder workers have resurrected the dead. I never understood those who think the truth of Christianity hinges on the physical resurrection of Jesus. If that is the test then a lot of nutty religions are also true. Eternal life is here and now. Christians have hardly come to a consensus on life after death. Augustine thought we would join the choir of angels in singing an eternal Hallelujah. Fine with me.
But most Americans who believe in life after death think they will rejoin their dead family members and live happily ever after. A very modern, bourgeois, kind of afterlife, hardly what traditional Christians thought. But I have no interest in destroying the beliefs of others. If thinking one will rejoin one’s loved ones helps bear the pain of death then I’m all for it. I have to look elsewhere, and, with Heraclitus, declare that life and death are one.
Best, Bob
dianabuja 08.04.13 at 9:59 am
Robert Bellah was on my dissertation committee and orals. A wonderful person, and scholar. I feel quite privileged to have been able to work with him.
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