Robert Bellah

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Robert Bellah

Robert Neelly Bellah (1927–2013) was an American sociologist of religion, educated at Harvard (where he studied with Talcott Parsons) and long-serving as Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley (1967–1997). His major works include Tokugawa Religion (1957), the essays "Religious Evolution" (1964) and "Civil Religion in America" (1967), The Broken Covenant (1975), the co-authored bestseller Habits of the Heart (1985), and his final magnum opus, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (2011). Bellah is arguably the most influential American sociologist of religion of his generation: he single-handedly rehabilitated evolutionary theorizing about religion after its mid-twentieth-century retreat, and his concept of "civil religion" remains a standard tool for analyzing the religious dimensions of national life. His continued relevance is visible in ongoing debates over the Axial Age, the cognitive science of religion, secularization, and the religious grounding of public life.

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Notes

Initial Theory

In his 1964 essay "Religious Evolution," Bellah laid out his preliminary theory. Defining religion as "a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man [sic] to the ultimate conditions of his existence," he argued that what evolves is the religious symbol system — not God, not religious man, but the cultural apparatus through which humans represent ultimate reality.

Evolution, for Bellah, meant "a process of increasing differentiation and complexity of organization" that endows a system with greater adaptive capacity and autonomy relative to its environment.

Key questions for Bellah are

• what does religion represent (typically "reality")
• "the kind of symbol system involved,
• the kind of religious action it stimulates,
• the kind of social organization in which this religious action occurs and"
• the implications (social or otherwise) for social action and society in general..."

On this basis he posited five ideal-typical stages — primitive, archaic, historic, early modern, and modern — each marked by a more differentiated symbolization:

• primitive religion, a simplistic representation of "combinations...of experience which are contingent upon [a] particular social and physical environment." Note that the symbolic representation of experience is an advance against animals and the "pre-religious" who could only "passively endure" suffering and not "transcend and dominate" it through symbolization. Remember here, for Bellah, "religious symbolization is concerned with imaging the ultimate conditions of existence." Here here see that reality is being represented but through myth (the symbol system), that this myth encourages ritual (religious action). Here there is no "religious organization." "Church and society are one." As for social implications, all this helps tie the society together, in Durkheim's sense.
• archaic religion — a representation of reality as a single but now hierarchically ordered cosmos, inhabited by objectified beings "conceived as actively and sometimes willfully controlling the natural and human world... in a word they have become gods" (p. 364). Here the symbol system is still monistic ("there is still only one world") but elaborates "a vast cosmology in which all things divine and natural have a place" (p. 364), stabilized by craft literacy. The religious action this stimulates is worship and above all sacrifice — "communication systems" through which gods and men can interact (p. 365), introducing "a greater element of intentionality" but also "an increased burden of anxiety" (p. 365). Socially, religion remains largely merged with other structures, but cults multiply with social differentiation, a two-class system emerges in which noble families claim "superior religious status," and the divine king stands as "the chief link between his people and the gods" (p. 365); specialized priesthoods exist but serve "an essentially transient clientele" — still no congregation (p. 365). As for social implications, "social conformity is at every point reinforced with religious sanction" (p. 365); yet gods acting "with a certain freedom" introduce "an element of openness" (p. 365), since the fortunes of rival groups can be read as shifts of divine favor — a rationalization of political change (Israel, Homeric Greece, Chou China) that ultimately "began to place the archaic pattern itself in jeopardy" (p. 366).
• historic religion — a representation of reality split in two, proclaiming "an entirely different realm of universal reality, having for religious man the highest value" (p. 366) and devaluing this one. The symbol system is transcendental, dualistic, and "demythologized" relative to archaic cosmology, and for the first time universalistic: man is "no longer defined chiefly in terms of what tribe or clan he comes from or what particular god he serves but rather as a being capable of salvation" — "it is for the first time possible to conceive of man as such" (p. 366). The religious action this stimulates is "above all action necessary for salvation" (p. 366): historic religion "convicts man of a basic flaw" (greed and anger; sin; heedlessness of God) and the ideal becomes separation from the world. Socially, we get for the first time differentiated religious collectivities: "the single religio-political hierarchy of archaic society tends to split into two at least partially independent hierarchies, one political and one religious" (p. 367), the roles of believer and subject become distinct, and society settles into the four-class system of the great historic civilizations. As for social implications, a new level of tension enters history: political acts "could be judged in terms of standards that the political authorities could not finally control" (prophet vs. king, pope vs. emperor), and religion comes to provide "the ideology and social cohesion for many rebellions and reform movements" — a "more dynamic and especially a more purposive role in social change" (p. 368) — while continuing for long periods to legitimate the existing order.
• early modern religion — a representation marked by "the collapse of the hierarchical structuring of both this and the other world" (p. 368). Dualism remains, but as direct confrontation: much of the cosmological baggage is dropped "as superstition," and the stress falls on faith, "an internal quality of the person," over acts marked "religious" (p. 369). The religious action this stimulates is world-affirming: "salvation is not to be found in any kind of withdrawal from the world but in the midst of worldly activities" (p. 368); indeed "religious action was now conceived to be identical with the whole of life" (p. 369), the service of God as "a total demand in every walk of life." Socially, the Reformation rejects both papal authority and the old two-level religious hierarchy, replacing it with a new two-class system of "elect and reprobates" — a vanguard group rather than a qualitative religious elite (p. 369) — while church and state lose their reified standing in favor of "a more flexible multi-centered mode of social organization based more on contract and voluntary association" (p. 370). As for social implications, "for the first time pressures to social change in the direction of greater realization of religious values are actually institutionalized as part of the structure of the society itself" (p. 370) — the self-revising, voluntaristic, democratic social order.
• modern religion — a representation marked by "the collapse of the dualism that was so crucial to all the historic religions" (p. 371). After Kant, "it is not so much a question of two worlds as it is of as many worlds as there are modes of apprehending them"; "an infinitely multiplex one has replaced the simple duplex structure" (p. 371), and religion must be grounded "in the structure of the human situation itself" (p. 371). The religious action this stimulates is the search for meaning beyond any church: "the search for adequate standards of action, which is at the same time a search for personal maturity and social relevance, is in itself the heart of the modern quest for salvation" (p. 373). Socially, organization becomes radically fluid and voluntary — Thomas Paine's "My mind is my church," Jefferson's "I am a sect myself" (p. 373) — with doctrinal enforcement dropped and the church reduced to providing "a favorable environment" in which "each individual must work out his own ultimate solutions... without imposing on him a prefabricated set of answers" (p. 373). As for social implications, culture and personality themselves "have come to be viewed as endlessly revisable" (p. 373) — which can be read as the collapse of meaning, or, as Bellah argues "more fruitfully," as "unprecedented opportunities for creative innovation in every sphere of human action" (p. 374).

Bellah insisted the stages were not inevitable, not a ranking of truth or value, and never wholly superseded — but the scheme's directional logic (compact to differentiated) and its culmination in liberal Protestant-inflected modernity drew sustained criticism for covert teleology and Eurocentrism.

The Revised Theory: Religion in Human Evolution (2011)

In his final book Bellah rebuilt the theory on new foundations. The stages are now tribal, archaic, and axial, and they are grounded not in Parsonsian differentiation but in the biological and cognitive evolution of the human species, drawing on Merlin Donald's sequence of cultural evolution: episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretic culture. Religion originates in embodied capacities we inherit from our mammalian ancestry — empathy, cooperation, and above all play, which opens the "relaxed field" in which ritual becomes possible. Tribal religion (Kalapalo, Australian Aborigines, Navajo) is mimetic and mythic — ritual enacts meaning bodily, myth narrates it orally. Archaic religion arises with chiefdoms and kingships, joining meaning to power in the figure of the god-king. The Axial Age (first millennium BCE: Israel, Greece, China, India) sees the breakthrough of theoretic culture — graphic invention, external memory, and theory construction — which for the first time makes criticism of tradition possible: "New models of reality... are propounded as a criticism of, and alternative to, the prevailing models. We are in the age of criticism."

The Typology of Religious Representation

Threaded through the book is a fourfold typology of religious representation, adapted from Jerome Bruner's developmental psychology. Each type is a progressively more differentiated way of representing reality:

• Unitive representation — the "null category": the unitive event (oneness with reality, the dissolution of the subject–object boundary) cannot itself be represented; symbols can only point to it paradoxically, as in negative theology's void and silence.
• Enactive representation — the bodily acting out of religious meaning: bowing, kneeling, dancing, eating; reality is "lived rather than thought," understood as an extension of the body.
• Symbolic representation — myth, image, and narrative, which "assimilate" reality to human needs and integrate inner and outer, self and world.
• Conceptual representation — clear definition and accurate observation, methodically combined through logic, which render a decentered world of objects independent of the subject.

What Is Evolving

What evolves, on the 2011 account, is the human capacity for representation itself — the ability to think about, model, and represent reality ever more adequately and accurately, a thing that leads to consider power over nature. Each new mode adds a capacity without discarding earlier ones: "though he speaks of stages, earlier stages are not lost, but only reorganized under new conditions" — the book's governing principle that "nothing is ever lost." The trajectory runs from bodily enactment through symbolic narrative to conceptual thought, whose distinctive power is to "render knowledge" (episteme) as opposed to mere opinion (doxa): "When logic and observation are methodically combined, they render knowledge, episteme as the Greek philosophers put it, as opposed to doxa, opinion." Religious evolution is thus the growth of representational capacity — humans become able to model the cosmos narratively, then to criticize and remodel it theoretically. Bellah is careful to add that new capacities imply no moral ranking: "Religious evolution does add new capacities, but it tells us nothing about how those capacities will be used."

Summary Table: Stages of Evolution and Types of Representation

Level	What (what is represented)	How (how it is represented)
Stages of Religious Evolution (2011) (evolution as "increasing differentiation and complexity of organization...which endows... with greater capacity..." (p. 358)
Tribal	A single mythic cosmos — ancestral beings, "the Dreaming," the group as continuous with nature	Mimetic and mythic: enactive ritual participation (dance, sacrifice, identification with ancestral beings) plus oral narrative myth
Archaic	One hierarchically ordered cosmos with gods, priests, and the divine king at its apex; social stratification mirrored in the divine order	Cultic: organized worship and sacrifice, priesthoods, divine kingship; myth systematized with the aid of early writing (craft literacy)
Axial	A transcendent realm beyond the empirical world; the self before ultimate reality; universal ethics	Theoretic culture in dialogue with mythic: texts, external memory, analytic argument, theory, criticism, second-order thinking
Typology of Religious Representation (Ch. 1)
Unitive	The unitive event itself — oneness, the ground of all representation, beyond the subject–object split	Strictly unrepresentable ("a null category"); pointed to only paradoxically — negation, emptiness, silence, the void
Enactive	Reality as extension of the body; objects understood through bodily manipulation	Bodily enactment: gesture, posture, ritual action — meaning "lived rather than thought"
Symbolic	Reality assimilated to inner needs, wishes, and feelings; integration of self and world	Symbols, images, myth, and narrative (symbolic play, storytelling)
Conceptual	A decentered, "decontextualized" world of objects independent of subjects — reality "really there"	Clear definition and accurate observation combined through logic and demonstration; renders knowledge (episteme)

Bellah on the Superiority of the Conceptual Stage

Despite his explicit disclaimers that evolution is not progress "from worse to better," nevertheless there is a clear epistemic one. What evolves here is humanity's ability to accurately and adequately represent reality as it is. Not a human being, but molecules an atoms in motion. Not God in/as the sun, as Kepler believed, but atomic fusion under conditions of high pressure. Bellah repeatedly characterizes conceptual/theoretic representation as an achievement of a higher order — more powerful, more adequate, and uniquely capable of yielding knowledge:

• "Narrative, with its capacity to reach into our bodies and reformulate our identities, individually and socially, also contains, in its womb so to speak, conceptual possibilities. But the attainment of conceptual representation is an achievement in its own right."

• "Concepts are based on clear definition and accurate observation, so that they are concepts of something definite. When logic and observation are methodically combined, they render knowledge, episteme as the Greek philosophers put it, as opposed to doxa, opinion. Knowledge is based on demonstration; narrative does not demonstrate; rhetoric can persuade but not demonstrate."

• "Conceptual representation renders possible a world of objects independent of subjects, a world that is 'decontextualized.' This is part of the enormous power of conceptual representation, the ability to manipulate objects without being disturbed by subjective impulse, wish, or whim."

• The religious types "can be put in an evolutionary order, not in terms of better or worse, but in terms of the capacities upon which they draw."

• "It will be my argument that the axial breakthrough involved the emergence of theoretic culture in dialogue with mythic culture as a means for the 'comprehensive modeling of the entire human universe.'"

• The axial civilizations are "in several ways 'more developed' than the societies that preceded them," marked by "new developments in the realm of thought... that [Momigliano] sums up with the significant term 'criticism.'"

• "Religious evolution does add new capacities, but it tells us nothing about how those capacities will be used."

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