Robert N. Bellah

Robert Neelly Bellah (February 23, 1927 – July 30, 2013) was an American sociologist and the Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion.

Robert N. Bellah
Bellah in 2008
Born	Robert Neelly Bellah (1927-02-23)February 23, 1927 Altus, Oklahoma, U.S.
Died	July 30, 2013(2013-07-30) (aged 86) Oakland, California, U.S.
Spouse	Melanie Hyman ​ ​ (m. 1948; died 2010)​
Academic background
Education	Harvard University (BA, PhD)
Thesis	Religion and Society in Tokugawa Japan (1955)
Doctoral advisor	Talcott Parsons John Pelzel
Other advisors	David Aberle
Influences	Merlin Donald Émile Durkheim Karl Jaspers Charles Taylor Paul Tillich Max Weber
Academic work
Discipline	Sociology
Sub-discipline	Sociology of religion
School or tradition	Communitarianism
Institutions	McGill University University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral students	Jeffrey C. Alexander
Notable works	The Broken Covenant (1975) Habits of the Heart (1985) Religion in Human Evolution (2011)
Notable ideas	American civil religion lifestyle enclave Sheilaism
Influenced	Marc Andrus Robert Wuthnow

Education

Bellah graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in social relations with a concentration in social anthropology. His undergraduate honors thesis won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize and was later published in 1952 with the title Apache Kinship Systems.

Bellah graduated from Harvard in a joint sociology and Far East languages program. Bellah first encountered the work of Talcott Parsons as an undergraduate when his senior honors thesis advisor was David Aberle, a former student of Parsons. Parsons was specially interested in Bellah's concept of religious evolution and the concept of "civil religion". He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1955. His doctoral dissertation was titled Religion and Society in Tokugawa Japan and was an extension of Max Weber's Protestant ethic thesis to Japan. It was published as Tokugawa Religion in 1957.

While an undergraduate at Harvard, Bellah was a member of the Communist Party USA from 1947 to 1949 and a chairman of the John Reed Club, "a recognized student organization concerned with the study of Marxism". During the summer of 1954, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard McGeorge Bundy, who later served as a national security adviser to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, threatened to withdraw Bellah's graduate student fellowship if he did not provide the names of his former club associates. Bellah was also interrogated by the Boston office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation with the same purpose. As a result, Bellah and his family spent two years in Canada, where he was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at the Islamic Institute in McGill University in Montreal. He returned to Harvard after McCarthyism declined due to the death of its main instigator senator Joseph McCarthy. Bellah afterwards wrote,

…I know from personal experience that Harvard did some terribly wrong things during the McCarthy period and that those things have never been publicly acknowledged. At its worst it came close to psychological terror against almost defenseless individuals. …The university and the secret police were in collusion to suppress political dissent and even to persecute dissenters who had changed their minds if they were not willing to become part of the persecution.

Career

Bellah's magnum opus, Religion in Human Evolution (2011), traces the biological and cultural origins of religion and the interplay between the two. The sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas wrote of the work: "This great book is the intellectual harvest of the rich academic life of a leading social theorist who has assimilated a vast range of biological, anthropological, and historical literature in the pursuit of a breathtaking project… In this field I do not know of an equally ambitious and comprehensive study." The book won the Distinguished Book Award of the American Sociological Association's Section on Sociology of Religion.

Bellah's most famous book, 'Habits of the Heart,' was published in 1985 and explored the role of religion in American society. He argued that Americans are torn between individualism and a desire for community, and that this tension is reflected in their religious beliefs.

Bellah is best known for his 1985 book Habits of the Heart, which discusses how religion contributes to and detracts from America's common good, and for his studies of religious and moral issues and their connection to society. Bellah was perhaps best known for his work related to American civil religion, a term which he coined in a 1967 article that has since gained widespread attention among scholars.

He served in various positions at Harvard from 1955 to 1967 when he took the position of Ford Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He spent the remainder of his career at Berkeley. His views are often classified as communitarian. A full biography of Robert Bellah, "the world's most widely read sociologist of religion", written by sociologist Matteo Bortolini, titled A Joyfully Serious Man. The Life of Robert Bellah, has been published by Princeton University Press in the fall of 2021.

Nomination at Princeton

In 1972 Carl Kaysen and Clifford Geertz nominated Robert Bellah as a candidate for a permanent faculty position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). (Bellah was at the IAS as a temporary member for the academic year 1972–1973.) On January 15, 1973, at an IAS faculty meeting, the IAS faculty voted against Bellah by thirteen to eight with three abstentions. All of the mathematicians and half of the historians voted against the nomination. All of the physicists voted in favor of the nomination. After the vote, Kaysen said that he intended to recommend Bellah's nomination to the IAS's trustees despite the vote. The faculty members who voted against Bellah were outraged. The dispute became extremely acrimonious, but in April 1973, Bellah's eldest daughter committed suicide and he, in grief, withdrew from consideration.

Personal life

Bellah was born in Altus, Oklahoma, on February 23, 1927. His father was a newspaper editor and publisher who committed suicide when Bellah was three years old. His mother Lillian moved the family to Los Angeles, where she had relatives. Bellah grew up in Los Angeles and attended Los Angeles High School, where he and his future wife, Melanie Hyman, were editors of the student newspaper. They got married in 1948 after she graduated from Stanford University, and he began studying at Harvard University after serving in the US Army. Bellah's wife died in 2010.

Bellah died July 30, 2013, at an Oakland, California, hospital from complications after heart surgery. He was 86 and is survived by his daughters Jennifer Bellah Maguire and Hally Bellah-Guther; a sister, Hallie Reynolds; and five grandchildren. Robert and Melanie Bellah's eldest daughter committed suicide in 1973. Their third daughter died at age 17 in 1976 in an automobile accident. Raised as a Presbyterian, he converted to Episcopalianism in the Anglo-Catholic tradition.

Works

Robert Bellah is the author, editor, co-author, or co-editor of the following books:

• Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan (1957)
• Religion and Progress in Modern Asia (1965)
• Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (1970)
• Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society (1973)
• The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (1975)
• The New Religious Consciousness (1976)
• Varieties of Civil Religion (1980)
• Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985)
• Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America (1987)
• The Good Society (1991)
• Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation (2003)
• The Robert Bellah Reader (2006)
• Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (2011)
• The Axial Age and Its Consequences (2012)

Awards and honors

Bellah was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967. In 1996, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. He received the National Humanities Medal in 2000 from President Bill Clinton, in part for "his efforts to illuminate the importance of community in American society." In 2007, he received the American Academy of Religion Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion. In 2008, he received the honorary doctorate of the Max Weber Centre of the University of Erfurt.

See also

• American exceptionalism
• Lifestyle enclave
• Political religion
• Sheilaism

References

Bibliography

• Alvord, Danny; McCannon, Kevin (2014). "Interview with Robert Wuthnow". Social Thought and Research. 33: 1–17. doi:10.17161/STR.1808.18443. ISSN 1094-5830.
• Bellah, Robert N. (1955). Religion and Society in Tokugawa Japan (PhD dissertation). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University. OCLC 39969657.
•  ———  (1967). "Civil Religion in America". Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 96 (1): 1–21. ISSN 1548-6192. Archived from the original on March 6, 2005. Retrieved September 7, 2018.
•  ———  (1998). "Community Properly Understood: A Defense of 'Democratic Communitarianism'". In Etzioni, Amitai (ed.). The Essential Communitarian Reader. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 15–19. ISBN 978-0-8476-8827-2.
• Bellah, Robert N.; Tipton, Steven M., eds. (2006). "Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah". The Robert Bellah Reader. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. pp. 523–542. doi:10.1215/9780822388135-034. ISBN 978-0-8223-3871-0.
• Bortolini, Matteo (2010). "Before Civil Religion: On Robert Bellah's Forgotten Encounters with America, 1955–1965". Sociologica. 4 (3). doi:10.2383/33646. ISSN 1971-8853.
•  ———  (2011). "The 'Bellah Affair' at Princeton: Scholarly Excellence and Academic Freedom in America in the 1970s". The American Sociologist. 42 (1): 3–33. doi:10.1007/s12108-011-9120-7. ISSN 1936-4784. JSTOR 41485696. S2CID 142870775.
•  ———  (2012). "The Trap of Intellectual Success: Robert N. Bellah, the American Civil Religion Debate, and the Sociology of Knowledge". Theory and Society. 41 (2): 187–210. doi:10.1007/s11186-012-9166-8. ISSN 1573-7853. S2CID 143469936.
• Bortolini, Matteo; Cossu, Andrea (2015). "Two Men, Two Books, Many Disciplines: Robert N. Bellah, Glifford Geertz, and the Making of Iconic Cultural Objects". In Law, Alex; Lybeck, Eric Royal (eds.). Sociological Amnesia: Cross-Currents in Disciplinary History. Abingdon, England: Routledge (published 2016). pp. 37–55. ISBN 978-1-317-05314-9.
• Dorrien, Gary J. (1995). Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal of Social Christianity. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press. ISBN 978-0-8006-2891-8.
• Eberly, Don E. (1998). America's Promise: Civil Society and the Renewal of American Culture. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 978-0-8476-9229-3.
• Gardner, Stephen (2017). "The Axial Moment and Its Critics: Jaspers, Bellah, and Voegelin". In Alison, James; Palaver, Wolfgang (eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 95–101. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-53825-3. ISBN 978-1-137-53825-3.
• Giesen, Bernhard; Šuber, Daniel (2005). "Bellah, Robert N.". In Ritzer, George (ed.). Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications. pp. 49–50. ISBN 978-1-4522-6546-9.
• Horowitz, Daniel (2005). The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 978-1-55849-504-3.
• Lynch, Gordon; Sheldon, Ruth (2013). "The Sociology of the Sacred: A Conversation with Jeffrey Alexander". Culture and Religion. 14 (3): 253–267. doi:10.1080/14755610.2012.758163. ISSN 1475-5629. S2CID 5560412.
• Miles, Jack (2013). "Review of Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age by Robert N. Bellah and The Axial Age and Its Consequences Edited by Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas". Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 81 (3): 852–864. doi:10.1093/jaarel/lft045. ISSN 1477-4585.
• Rousseau, Nathan, ed. (2002). "Robert Bellah et al. on Individualism and Community in America". Self, Symbols, and Society: Classic Readings in Social Psychology. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 317–343. ISBN 978-0-7425-1631-1.
• Stausberg, Michael (2014). "Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution: A Post-Review". Numen. 61 (2–3): 281–299. doi:10.1163/15685276-12341320. ISSN 1568-5276.
• Swidler, Ann (1993). Foreword. The Sociology of Religion. By Weber, Max. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. ix–xvii. ISBN 978-0-8070-4205-2.
• Thompson, Kenneth (2012). "Durkheim and Durkheimian Political Sociology". In Amenta, Edwin; Nash, Kate; Scott, Alan (eds.). The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology. Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 27–35. doi:10.1002/9781444355093.ch3. ISBN 978-1-4443-5507-9.
• Turner, Bryan S. (2017). "Ritual, Belief and Habituation: Religion and Religions from the Axial Age to the Anthropocene". European Journal of Social Theory. 20 (1): 132–145. doi:10.1177/1368431016645355. ISSN 1461-7137. S2CID 148139838.
• Wood, Richard (2005). "Bellah, Robert Neelly (1927–)". In Shook, John R. (ed.). The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers. Vol. 1. Bristol, England: Thoemmes Continuum. pp. 182–187. ISBN 978-1-84714-470-6.
• Yamane, David (1998). "Bellah, Robert N.". In Swatos, William H. Jr. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press. ISBN 978-0-7619-8956-1. Retrieved September 7, 2018.

Further reading

• Bellah, Robert N. (2002). "Meaning and Modernity: America and the World". In Madsen, Richard; Sullivan, William M.; Swidler, Ann; Tipton, Steven M. (eds.). Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, and Self. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. pp. 255–276. ISBN 978-0-520-22657-9.
• Reno, R. R.; McClay, Barbara, eds. (2015). Religion and the Social Sciences: Conversations with Robert Bellah and Christian Smith. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books. ISBN 978-1-4982-3643-0.

External links

• Robert Bellah's website
• Bill Moyers interview with Robert Bellah on PBS, September 27, 1988
• The Immanent Frame Archived August 25, 2013, at the Wayback Machine, a SSRC blog with posts by Robert Bellah
• Appearances on C-SPAN