The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah

By Anthem Press

"The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah" is the first major collection of essays on the life and work of Robert N. Bellah (1927–2013), one of the foremost sociologists of religion of the twentieth century. Bellah’s work was central to many fields: the sociology of Japanese religion; the relationship between sociology and the humanities; the relationship between American religion and politics; the cultures of modern individualism; evolution and society. Bellah’s seminal work on “civil religion” in the early 1970s created a huge debate across the disciplines that continues into the present times; his coauthored book "Habits of the Heart" (1985) was a best seller and the object of sustained discussion in the general public sphere; his last magnum opus, Religion in Human Evolution, published at 84, was a monument to an extraordinary scholarly and intellectual career. The object of this collection of essays by top American and European scholars from the social sciences and humanities is to highlight the richness of Bellah’s work. Each essay has a double character: it introduces a single topic in an accessible and complete way and then presents a reflection on the viability and import of Bellah’s ideas for interpreting contemporary phenomena.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783089642

Book preview

The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah

ANTHEM COMPANIONS TO SOCIOLOGY

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Series Editor: Bryan S. Turner (City University of New York, USA/Australian Catholic University, Australia/University of Potsdam, Germany)

Titles in the Series

The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville

The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte

The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills

The Anthem Companion to Émile Durkheim

The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch

The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes

The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand Tönnies

The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde

The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel

The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt

The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim

The Anthem Companion to Karl Marx

The Anthem Companion to Max Weber

The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff

The Anthem Companion to Pierre Bourdieu

The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah

The Anthem Companion to Robert Park

The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons

The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen

The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah

Edited by

Matteo Bortolini

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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© 2019 Matteo Bortolini editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-962-8 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-962-8 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: On Being a Scholar and an Intellectual

Matteo Bortolini

Part 1 MAJOR THEMES

Chapter 1 Dialogues between Area Studies and Social Thought: Robert Bellah’s Engagement with Japan

Amy Borovoy

Chapter 2 Civil Religion and Public Theology

Steven M. Tipton

Chapter 3 Out of the Deep Past: The Axial Age and Robert Bellah’s Project of Social Criticism

John D. Boy and John Torpey

Part 2 YESTERDAY AND TODAY

Chapter 4 Broken Covenant Redux? Civil Religion in Crisis

Philip Gorski

Chapter 5 Robert Bellah’s Catholic Imagination

Jeffrey Guhin

Chapter 6 Habits of the Heart Revisited : American Individualism before and after the Communitarian Moment

Eric R. Lybeck

Part 3 UNEXPECTED MASTERS

Chapter 7 Friends in History: Eric Voegelin and Robert Bellah

Peter Brickey LeQuire

Chapter 8 The Protestant Imagination: Robert Bellah, Maruyama Masao and the Study of Japanese Thought

Andrew E. Barshay

Index

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Andrew E. Barshay teaches modern Japanese history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of three books: State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (1988); The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions (2004); and most recently, The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956 (2013).

Amy Borovoy is Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University; her field is cultural anthropology. Her work focuses on social democracy in modern Japan. She is the author of The Too-Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependence, and the Politics of Nurturance in Postwar Japan (2005). Her current manuscript, Japan in American Social Thought, explores Japan studies as terrain for reflection on the good society in the postwar American social sciences, and the struggle to challenge Euro-centrism in the context of American hegemony.

Matteo Bortolini is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Padova, Italy. His research focuses on intellectuals and ideas, religion and the comparative historical sociology of the social sciences. He is writing a biography of Robert N. Bellah.

John D. Boy is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Leiden University. Previously he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam and a visiting research fellow at Utrecht University’s Center for the Humanities. He received his Ph.D. in sociology with a certificate in women’s studies from the City University of New York. A sociologist with broad interests in religion, urban space and digital networks, his recent work seeks to understand how social media impinge on urban life and hierarchies of social status.

Philip Gorski is Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University. He writes on religion and politics in comparative and historical perspective. His most recent book is American Covenant (2017).

Jeffrey Guhin is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCLA, and his research interests include education, culture, religion and theory. His first book, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, is tentatively titled Let There Be No Compulsion: Muslim and Christian Schools in America, and it is a comparison of two Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian high schools. His next book, for which he has completed fieldwork, is an ethnographic comparison of morality and citizenship in three urban public school districts. Finally, he has another project in formation that will compare moral correction in Muslim, Catholic and secular 4th grade classrooms in seven global cities.

Peter Brickey LeQuire is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Samford University and Visiting Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He holds a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and is a former Visiting Scholar of Wolfson College, Cambridge. His scholarship has appeared in the journals such as Anamnesis, Clio, Economic Affairs, The European Journal of Sociology, Kierkegaard Research, Politics and Religion and The Review of Politics. He is a contributor to The Point, a magazine founded on the suspicion that modern life is worth examining.

Eric R. Lybeck is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Manchester Institute of Education at the University of Manchester. Working in the emerging field of Critical University Studies, his work draws on processual and civic approaches to social knowledge and practices to make new connections between the disciplines of sociology and education. His doctoral research at Cambridge explored the history of the social and legal sciences during the late nineteenth-century transfer of university models from Germany to America. He is currently editor-in-chief of the journal Civic Sociology, which is published by University of California Press.

Steven M. Tipton is Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus at Emory University and author of Public Pulpits: Methodists and Mainline Churches in the Moral Argument of Public Life (2007) and The Life to Come: Re-Creating Retirement (2018). He is also the coauthor of Habits of the Heart and The Good Society.

John Torpey is Presidential Professor of Sociology and History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is also the Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. He is the author of several books in the fields of comparative-historical and political sociology, including most recently The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental (2017). He was a student of Robert Bellah’s while pursuing his doctoral degree at the University of California, Berkeley.

INTRODUCTION: ON BEING A SCHOLAR AND AN INTELLECTUAL

Matteo Bortolini

¹

If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?

Dōgen

Intellectuals are people who work with ideas to make a living.² They create ideas. They compare ideas. They revise ideas. Sometimes they discard their ideas and replace them with better, or just different, ones. When they are confident enough—or when other concerns compel them to do so—intellectuals cast their ideas in the form of a text and publish it. Whenever they enter a space of attention, their ideas, their texts and their gestures are framed by their peers, audiences and critics according to a complex web of distinctions. The originality of their theses, the soundness of their method, the flow of their texts from premise to conclusions, the aesthetics of their prose, the quality of their performance—everything is dissected and ranked vis à vis other ideas, methods, styles and performances. As a consequence, hierarchies arise, consolidate and then crumble.

Far from being a distortion of the free circulation of ideas, this play of distinctions occupies the center of the field of cultural production, and extends from ideas and texts to their authors. When they first meet, intellectuals invariably exchange a series of standard questions—Where did you get your PhD? Who was your mentor? Where do you teach? Going to any conferences this summer? Read any good books lately?—each question employed as a tool to decipher others on the spot, to estimate their social and intellectual capital, to situate them within the hierarchy of a field, a genre, a discipline. The truth is, as much as they like to be listened to, and assessed, as creative, original individuals—"Listen to me! Listen to me!"—intellectuals routinely come in batches, in kins, in tribes. Their standing and reputation are thus signaled by their pedigrees, the company they keep and the ideas they refuse as much as those they embrace.

It is the nature of the cultural object I am presenting to require such a lecture on the sociology of ideas and intellectuals. Besides being an introduction for students or a critical survey of the work of a distinguished scholar, a Companion to is also a sign of recognition within the play of distinctions in the field of cultural production. Being the subject of a Companion to is to be indicated—as the presentation of this series read—as a major figure in the development of a discipline or an artistic niche, one that has left a mark. Being the subject of a Companion to is to be inducted to the hall of fame of intellectuals or, as scholars love to say, to be canonized.

A quick look at other Companions to confirms not only the canonizing function of such cultural objects, but also the stratified character of the consecrated authors. Some of them need no introduction—Max Weber and Émile Durkheim are obvious examples (Sica 2016; Turner 2000; Smith and Alexander 2005). Nevertheless, the many Companions to lesser, forgotten or controversial authors offer a wide sample of interesting arguments. The editors of the Anthem Companion to Everett C. Hughes describe the Chicago master’s contribution to American sociology as indisputable and decry the oblivion in which he has fallen of late (Helmes-Hayes and Santoro 2016: 1–2). Rich in biographical information and citational data, their 37-page tour de force portrays Hughes as a scholar whose legacy rests in his teaching and example and ultimately justifies his importance as the mentor of Howard S. Becker, David Riesman, Anselm Strauss, Eliot Freidson, and Goffman. In the case of an unlikely member of the club, Peter Baehr and Philip Walsh (2017) admit that the presence of Hannah Arendt, a well-known critic of the very idea of social science, in a book series dedicated to major sociologists might look puzzling, but argue for her significance by writing that her criticisms can be turned to constructive use, especially because she asks tough questions and offers alternative ways of thinking about matters that are vital to sociologists.

All these problems should magically disappear when writing of Robert Neelly Bellah. One of the closest students of a towering giant of sociology, Talcott Parsons, Bellah always introduced himself as a sociologist and had a linear academic career as a member of two renowned departments—Social Relations at Harvard and Sociology at Berkeley. From civil religion to Sheilaism, the concepts he coined or revived entered common sociological parlance and crossed the boundaries of the academic field, a proof of his relevance as a public intellectual rooted in social science. His analyses of Tokugawa Japan, American cultural myths and religious evolution are recognized as signposts of twentieth-century humanistic sociology, while his coauthored 1985 book, Habits of the Heart, is routinely cited as one of the few bestsellers written by sociologists (Gans 1997). In the wake of his death on July 30, 2013, world-class scholars hailed him as a pioneer in the social study of religion, the leading sociologist of religion of recent decades and even the preeminent sociologist of religion of his generation (Juergensmeyer 2013; Joas 2013; Swidler and Fischer 2013). Four years later, in dedicating their book on the emergence and evolution of religion to Bellah, Jonathan H. Turner and his coauthors (2017: xvi) called him "the most important sociologist ever to theorize about religion—and we include even Max Weber here." Although writing from a critical perspective, the eight distinguished scholars who agreed to contribute to this collection took Bellah’s status as a top sociologist for granted and presented his often controversial ideas as the gems that have earned him a place in the empyrean of social science.

In this introduction, I justify the existence of a Companion to Robert Bellah on different grounds—a move that is parallel, and complementary, to arguments solely based on the content and the impact of Bellah’s ideas. First, and perhaps unexpectedly, I show that the influence of Bellah on the sociology of religion, let alone on sociology in general, has always been dimmer than perceived. Second, even if it were easy to demonstrate Bellah’s eminence in social science through the power of his ideas alone, the argument itself would be intrinsically bound to be provisional and short-lived. In fact, as Weber wrote in one of Bellah’s all-time favorite pieces, Wissenschaft als Beruf,

In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years. That is the fate to which science is subjected; it is the very meaning of scientific work, to which it is devoted in a quite specific sense, as compared with other spheres of culture for which in general the same holds. Every scientific fulfilment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated. Whoever wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this fact. (Weber 1946: 137)

Rather than rehearsing a list of ideas that will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years, I advance a different argument: Bellah deserves a Companion to because he embodied an exemplary idea of being a scholar and an intellectual which sprang directly from the radical conception of human beings as symbolic, and thus self-transcending, beings in which his sociological and philosophical work was rooted. In a sense, and not without irony, I present Bellah as a cultural hero whose importance depends not on his being a representative sociologist according to contemporary standards—he was not—but rather on the fact that his realization of being a scholar and an intellectual was firmly grounded in his philosophical and sociological theory of the human condition. In other words, Bellah was what he preached and preached what he was, and that made him a model scholar and intellectual.

Such an assessment of Robert Bellah is possible only if writer and reader agree on two points: first, that intellectual canonization might come in various guises, according to different agendas and criteria; and, second, that Bellah, his work, and his influence have to be redefined through a process of framing, deframing and reframing. In what follows, I contextualize Bellah as a sociologist of religion, showing how and why the quality and the degree of his influence have been misconstrued, but also highlighting his understanding of the necessary relationship between creative intellectual work and transcendence as an intrinsic aspect of the human condition. My argument goes beyond regular academic logic, which disproportionately focuses on decontextualized ideas; at least in part, this depends on the fact that, far from being a self-evident repository of excellent intellectual work, canons are the product of the history of stratified and competitive communities:

The canon is a formative moment of an activity, not a set of monuments or an object of complacent idolization. Or, rather, the canon is the sedimentation of past practices and achievements that are recognized to be superlative, and that inspire apprentices to match or surpass them. (Baehr 2002: 157)

A hundred years after Weber’s lecture, in Baehr’s words canons look like dynamic, polymorphous and elusive objects that are as apt to produce new scholarly practices as they are to be produced by them, and are best understood as political, rather than intellectual, phenomena. Any proposed inclusion in a canon (or exclusion from it, for that matter) must be supported by an intensely imaginative political rhetoric, one which has little to do with rational argument, honorific formulas or objective measures of scholarly influence such as the number of one’s citations or the prestige acquired by one’s intellectual progeny. Before scholarly analysis and adversarial rhetoric, however, some storytelling is needed to answer a few preliminary questions: Who was Robert Bellah? Where did he, and his ideas, come from?

A Scholar’s Life

Robert Neelly Bellah was born in Altus, Oklahoma, on February 23, 1927, the first child of L. Hutton Bellah and Lillian Neelly.³ His father was the publisher and editor of the Altus Times Democrat daily newspaper, a well-known public figure in the region. When they lost a fortune in the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the Bellahs decided to rejoin Neelly’s relatives in Los Angeles. Soon after the move, however, Hutton Bellah disappeared, only to be traced a couple of years later to Yuma, Arizona, where he had committed suicide. Young Robert Bellah grew as a diligent, achievement-oriented student, with a deep passion for books, politics and classical music and a growing contempt for Southern California.

Admitted to Harvard on a scholarship in early 1944, Bellah was soon drafted, and he spent his service as a clerk assigned to discharge procedures for American troops in Europe. Back in Cambridge, he enrolled in the newly formed Department of Social Relations. At the same time, he became a member of the Communist Party of the United States; he interpreted his militancy mainly in intellectualistic terms, organizing study groups and public events starring noted Marxist intellectuals (Bellah 2005). His BA dissertation in Social Anthropology, presented in 1950, won him Phi Beta Kappa honors and was later published by Harvard University Press as Apache Kinship Systems (Bellah 1952). By then, Bellah had already abandoned the Communist Party for an allegedly less ideological, but perhaps more fashionable, doctrine—structural-functionalism—and had been married for nearly a year to Melanie Hyman, who was to be his wife for 61 years.

The encounter with Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, one of the leaders of the postwar social sciences, was crucial for Bellah’s early career and his Bildung as an intellectual. Parsons promoted a naturalistic, albeit post-positivist, conception of sociological inquiry that praised the value-freedom of the scientist on the one hand, but also considered objective social science as a basic national resource for policy studies and inspiration (Klausner and Lidz 1986). Parsons was not only the epitome of the so-called model of scholastic virtue, an idea of the academic intellectual that included being serious; hard-working; committed to produce socially or politically ‘relevant’ research […]; enthusiastic; curious; careful (Guetzkow et al. 2004: 206; Shils 1997). He was also a skilled academic broker, one who stood at the center of the most powerful intellectual networks of the time: structural-functionalism, modernization theory, cybernetics and Area Studies (Gilman 2003; Isaac 2012).

Under Parsons’s wing, in 1950 Bellah entered a joint doctoral program in Sociologyand Far Eastern Languages. His research project, inspired by Weber’s work on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, focused on one major civilizational case study left unexamined by the German sociologist in his quest to explain the rise of modern industrial society: Japan. Bellah’s original plan to conduct in situ empirical work was shattered in the fall of 1952, when he was denied a passport because of his past political militancy. He then set out to write a thoroughly historical-sociological work using Parsonian theoretical tools—the pattern variables and the AGIL scheme, then in their infancy (Bellah 1964). His dissertation, entitled Religion and Society in Tokugawa Japan, was presented in 1955.

Before and after Bellah concluded his doctoral work, the Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, McGeorge Bundy, urged him to cooperate with the FBI in the investigation of members of the Communist Party. Both times Bellah refused to name names other than his own, thus alienating Bundy and the Harvard Corporation (though not Parsons and his colleagues). As his chances of obtaining a job at Harvard vanished, he accepted a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. The institute’s founder, Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1959), promoted an open dialogue between scholars and believers as a means to a deeper, and truer, knowledge of major religions. Like Parsons, Smith held strictly disciplinary divisions in contempt, and like Parsons he became a crucial figure in the development of Bellah’s conception of scholarly and intellectual excellence.

Thanks to his work at McGill, Bellah could go back to Harvard in 1957 as a research associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. One year later he was given a four-year appointment to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Harvard Divinity School. His thesis was published in 1957 as Tokugawa Religion. The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan. The book explained the rise of Japan as an industrial power highlighting the relevance of those ideational factors which were neglected by coeval modernization theorists. The political emphasis of the Japanese value system had enabled Tokugawa rulers to mobilize their subjects’ collective loyalties in favor of steady industrialization, thus gaining an edge on their major Asian competitor, China (Bellah 1957). Tokugawa Religion also focused on a spiritual movement, Shingaku, as a carrier of that inner-worldly asceticism connected to the emergence of the spirit of capitalism. In his subsequent work on Japan, Bellah abandoned the search for Protestant ethic analogies and focused on contemporary Japanese intellectuals who had tried to find an original approach to modernization (Bellah 2003). In the mid-1960s, Bellah’s involvement in the Conference for Modern Japan and a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford marked his entry to the elite of American social scientists.⁴

The bulk of his energies, however, was expended in the creation of a multidimensional theoretical framework for the study of religion. Inspired by the work of Parsons and theologian Paul Tillich, whom he befriended at Harvard in the late 1950s, Bellah defined religion as a subsystem of the cultural system endowed with the function of reproducing societal meaning complexes and managing psychological tensions. His theoretical and historical-comparative work—which at the time embraced studies on Japan, China and Islamic countries—came to a first synthesis in a paper elaborated during a seminar on societal and cultural evolution that Bellah conducted at Harvard together with Parsons and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt. In Religious Evolution, published in 1964, the development of religious symbols was framed in the context of the growing differentiation, rationalization and emancipation of humankind from its material, social and metaphysical environments. During the latest stage of religious evolution, which Bellah called modern religion, monist and dualist representations had given way to an infinitely multiplex world where the search for ultimate meaning had turned each individual into a sect himself, thus opening endless possibilities of sense-making (Bellah 1970).

As the 1960s came to an end, Bellah’s approach as a scholar underwent a profound, and at times exhausting, transformation. Working in close contact with his former graduate schoolmate, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, he moved from functionalism toward a synthesis of hermeneutics and historical sociology that was miles away from the Enlightenment fundamentalism and the allegedly professional stance of the postwar social sciences. As a result of this theoretical shift, he disowned Parsonian jargon for an evocative language that both academics and the lay public could understand (Alexander and Sherwood 2002). At the center of this process of intellectual emancipation from Parsons’s influence stood A Theory of Religion, a volume which, in Bellah’s plans, would revolutionize the sociological approach to the study of religion.⁵ Bellah’s scholarly turn was paralleled by a major existential shift: in 1967 he left Cambridge for Berkeley and became the Ford Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies and the chairman of the Center for Japanese and Korean Studies at the University of California, as well as an adjunct professor at the local Graduate Theological Union.

Shortly before moving, Bellah published Civil Religion in America (Bellah 1970). The essay suggested the existence of a common, abstract and cross-denominational religion in the United States, and pointed to its integrative and prophetic nature. This ambivalent character made the American civil religion both a consensus-making element and a powerful tool of national self-criticism. It had first emerged during two major times of trial: the American Revolution and the Civil War, and Bellah called the late 1960s a third time of trial from which a truly global civil religion might arise. Boosted by a felicitous choice of words and the protests against the Vietnam War, Civil Religion in America sparkled a lively cross-disciplinary debate, which forced its author to develop an expertise in American history. This ultimately pushed him to change his mind: in The Broken Covenant Bellah (1975) described the American civil religion as an empty and broken shell which had to be interpreted and complemented by public-spirited interventions on the part of major religious actors.⁶

Bellah’s first collection of essays, Beyond Belief, included much of his previous work along with his proposal of the new epistemic framework of symbolic realism. Bellah defined religious symbols as attempts to grasp totality beyond any distinction and proposed a new hermeneutic sociology whose practitioners would be indistinguishable from theologians and humanists. The introduction to a collection of Émile Durkheim’s writings on morality and society was another major moment in the development of symbolic realism, as were his many statements about the teaching of religion, where he forcefully called for a new integration between knowledge, commitment and faith (Bellah 1973). More than his many arguments, however, it was Bellah’s forceful slogan—to put it bluntly, religion is true—that echoed in the minds of his interlocutors (Bellah 1970: 253). This made him the most radical proponent of what came to be known as interpretive social science, a loose scientific-intellectual movement which included, besides Geertz and Bellah, scholars such as David Schneider, Victor Turner, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (Bortolini 2014).

Together with Geertz, in 1972–73 Bellah sought to create a school for interpretive social science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. His appointment was contested by philosophers and physicists, who launched a devastating attack on his academic qualifications. When his first born, Tammy, committed suicide early in April 1973 Bellah left Princeton. In spite of these public and private trials, his research never stopped: in 1976 he and Charles Y. Glock concluded a five-year research project on countercultural groups with the publication of The New Religious Consciousness (Glock and Bellah 1976). At the same time, The Broken Covenant was a success, but Bellah was growing impatient with the direction taken by the debate on the American civil religion, which he saw as an unacceptable distortion of his ideas, and with the attacks he suffered for his radical epistemic views, which led him to abandon both civil religion and symbolic realism to their destiny.

The years 1976–1979 were, for better or worse, a pivotal moment: Bellah’s third daughter, Abby, died at 17 in a car accident, leaving him, his wife and his other two daughters in a profound state of despair. At the same time, he started working on a new project, "The Moral Basis of Social