THE ROBERT BELLAH READER. Edited by Robert N. Bellah and Steven M. Tipton. Duke University Press 2006. Pp. 555. $27.95. Paper. ISBN: 0-822-33871-8. Robert Bellah needs as much introduction to readers of the Journal of Law and Religion as Tiger Woods needs to golfing aficionados. Bellah is truly one of today s most powerful commentators on the social, cultural and religious meaning of modernity, in America and elsewhere. He was a Harvard student (B.A., 1950; Ph.D., 1955), then a Harvard professor until 1967 when he became Ford Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is now Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Cal Berkeley. The Robert Bellah Reader is a collection of twenty-eight of Bellah s most stimulating essays. The collection spans his professional career, beginning with one of his seminal works, Religious Evolution, 1 authored in 1964. None of the essays are from his well-known books such as Habits of the Heart 2 and The Good Society; 3 the volume includes only published articles, lectures, and sermons. The essays reflect Bellah s lifetime focus on social and cultural complexity, religious evolution and what it means to be human, all synthesized and explicated with astounding intellectual range. A welcome addition to this reader is a complete bibliography of Bellah s writings. Nevertheless, it is not the breadth of Bellah s work that is so impressive; it is rather the depth. No one can read Bellah extensively without feeling privileged to read the work of a true scholar, one who is able to combine vast learning with graceful writing. I was anxious to read this collection because, while I have read a good bit of Bellah, most of it has been in the field of civil religion and the interaction of religion and American political culture. Although it was Bellah s essay, Civil Religion in America, published in 1967 (225), that propelled him to academic stardom and forced him, however unwillingly, to participate in a national discussion about the meaning of civil religion in the American context, the core of Bellah s work both before and after the civil religion interlude examined premodern 1. Robert Neelly Bellah, Religious evolution (Bobbs-Merrill 1969). 2. Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (updated ed., U. Cal. Press 2007). 3. Robert N. Bellah et al., The Good Society (Vintage Books 1992). 101
102 JOURNAL OF LAW & RELIGION [Vol. XXIII societies, particularly the role of language, religion and culture in shaping those societies. It was some of this extended work that I wanted to read; and I must say it deepened my appreciation for Bellah, as I now understand how much of his work in global premodern cultures equipped him so singularly to address the meaning of American culture in social and theological terms. I gained a further insight from Bellah s collection: it is important not merely to read a text; sometimes it must be chewed on, digested, and consumed like a good piece of steak. I confess that there was a time when I thought I had done well to have read repeated preparations for teaching a course in American Civil Religion while at Baylor University, in Bellah s celebrated article Civil Religion in America (225) at least twelve times. I was humbled, however, after reading one of Bellah s essays in The Reader, namely Texts, Sacred and Profane (490), in which he suggests that a good text can never be reread too often, and then relates how his own teacher, Talcott Parsons, read or reread Emile Durkheim s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life at least thirty-five times. (493) I believe I have listened to Beethoven s Ninth Symphony at least one hundred times, but I am confident I have never read anything thirty-five times. I am tempted to try, but I fear that somehow my level of conviction necessary to achieve the task is not what it must be, although The Robert Bellah Reader, as first-rate scholarship, might supply the needed inspiration to attempt the endeavor. The Reader is divided into four parts. Part I explores modernity in historical context, with Bellah characteristically demonstrating his considerable familiarity with the masters of the past from Homer, Aristotle and Augustine to Locke, Rousseau and Hegel. He notes that modernity itself has not escaped the fundamental problematic of religion, to which it keeps returning in a variety of forms. (21) Part II seeks to educate an understanding of the United States; and like so many of his contemporaries, Bellah detects an erosion of the legitimacy of the American way of life, which is at bottom a spiritual crisis. (273) Part III is the shortest section but I found it to be the most interesting. Here, he discusses the higher education enterprise in the United States, finding it confused and uncertain about how and what to teach its studentconstituents. This malady mirrors the crisis of modernity (and of postmodernity). Part IV commends the religious life, not merely the secular faith of progress or hope or democracy, but a genuine faith fully informed by knowledge a perfect blend, so to speak, of informed faith and serious learning. This section succeeds mostly because Bellah is
101] BOOK REVIEW 103 such a good model for the life he commends. The Reader is good scholarly reading because Bellah has such a firm grasp on the most important aspect of the human enterprise: the search for meaning in a world where meaning is complex and elusive. The book is a kind of tour de force through human history, drawing on the greatest minds throughout that history, and thus ultimately serves as a kind of synthesis of the world s condition today proffered by one of the most capable and interdisciplinary intellectuals of our time. The learning available here is considerable. The crisis of modernity, while complex and multifaceted, need not overtake us, claims Bellah. In The New Religious Consciousness and the Crisis of Modernity, he notes that two traditions have served as the lasting foundations of meaning in American history: the Biblical tradition and utilitarian individualism. (266) At least since the sixties, he writes, utilitarian individualism seems to have staked the greatest claim on America; and the Biblical tradition, while still vibrant in some circles, has lost ground. (267-269) He thinks that several alternatives to this trend are possible. The one most likely to prevail, he muses, is a continuation of the individualistic approach, expressed in a continuing emphasis on science, technology, bureaucratic organization, legalistic moralism, technical reason, careerism and status seeking, the corruption of religion, and the pursuit of (unequal) wealth and power. (280-281) Not a pretty picture. He calls this the liberal scenario. (280) An alternative scenario, one neither recommended nor probable, is a relapse into traditional authoritarianism. Perhaps the most likely system would be right-wing Protestant fundamentalism, he writes. There is no other alternative system in the American context that possesses the moral absolutism or familiarity with the citizenry, he adds. (282) Never one to be dogmatic about the future, Bellah notes a third alternative that might take root, however unlikely it is. This option would entail nothing less than a complete social and cultural revolution, not a military call to arms but a mass movement, to eschew the endless pursuit of wealth and power and replace it with a much simpler life. This new lifestyle would not abandon free speech, religious liberty, or the quest for ultimate reality, but it would embrace harmony with nature and human brotherhood. No one set of religious or philosophical symbols or beliefs (283) would define the new mode of reality. Utopian, yes, but he adds that only a utopian vision, a holistic reason that unites subjectivity and objectivity, will make human life in the twenty-first century worth living. (284)
104 JOURNAL OF LAW & RELIGION [Vol. XXIII Bellah might be correct in predicting that the United States will continue on the path of utilitarian individualism, but let us hope that it is not occasioned by the near-nihilistic tendencies he fears. Traditional religion, especially Christianity, has from the Founding been the backbone and soul of America, even serving as the agent that tempers the drive toward nihilism. It seems to me unlikely that this state of affairs will change in any radical way in the foreseeable future. But can anyone really predict with any precision what America will become? I doubt it. Bellah s insights into the state of higher education in the United States are disturbing but illuminating. Anyone wanting a penetrating picture of what is happening in today s universities and the dangers the current trends portend should read the five essays that comprise Part III. Many people have said, and continue to say, the things that Bellah addresses in these essays, but Bellah says them with more sophistication from a speaker s platform he has earned. Bellah essentially says in these essays that students today are increasingly receiving a sterile, value-free education that prides itself on passing along knowledge. The classroom increasingly stresses fact over value, while educators transmit boundless information intended to enhance vocational acuity but precious little that satisfies the quest for meaning. Traditional education which, until the modern age sought out the Good life, has been altered to teach objective knowledge built on the foundation of science. Scientific knowing leaves little room for speculative philosophical and theological inquiring. The classical model of practical reason, always accompanied by ethical aims, has been replaced by a modern model of scientific facts that is rarely interested in full personhood. (382-383, 435-436) The progenitor for this shift in educational emphasis, or at least the one to whom Bellah gives the most attention, is Thomas Hobbes. For Hobbes, notes Bellah, there is no point in talking about the good: there is no such thing.... Hobbes s empiricism... uses the newly prestigious model of natural science as an underpinning. (384) If there is any moral aim in Hobbes, it is for self-interested individuals to relinquish themselves fully in the interest of social peace (385) hardly the kind of good life for the citizens (390) that characterized social inquiry from the time of the ancients. Casual readers of Max Weber will conclude that he was on the same path as Hobbes, suggests Bellah. (389-393) After all, for all of his interest in religion, did not Weber conclude that it is power that really counts? Weber certainly seemed to disaffirm any final truth that religion
101] BOOK REVIEW 105 has to offer. And, was it not Weber who was the epitome of the professor who taught objectively, living by the proposition that it is not truth that must be taught to students, but choice? The teacher can confront you with the necessity of choice. He cannot do more, so long as he wishes to remain a teacher and not to become a demagogue. (388-389) said Weber. (389) But read deeper, says Bellah, especially what Weber wrote in his final essays and one will detect the awareness that morals and ethics do count, that there is more to life than power, that there must be moral foundations. Thus, Weber seemed ultimately to drift toward some kind of extraordinary nostalgic idealization of acosmic mysticism. (391) Contrary to Hobbes, Weber and their progeny, Bellah seems never to have even remotely considered one possibility that ethics and morals do not count. He appreciates science for what it is, but knows that it does not supply all of the answers. [S]cience can produce information but not meaning, he reminds us. (443) He fully understands how science competes with tradition and postmodernism in today s academy, but while he finds inadequacies in all of the competing paradigms of knowledge, he rejects none of them since they all bear aspects of truth. He orients his life and work around the search for truth, but he is fully confident that no real educator contributes much unless that person keeps ethics and morals as part of the overall goal. Moral vacuity creates cognitively trivial work, he says. (400) He laments the decline of those academic disciplines, such as the humanities, that enhance our sense of who we are, and the surge of disciplines that only teach one how to go out and gain wealth. I can envision a university of the future where every field that lacks practical payoff will have been jettisoned. When I hear of so-called liberal arts colleges most of whose undergraduate majors are in business administration, law enforcement, nursing, and communications, and philosophy or religious studies majors are few and far between, I think we are already most of the way there. (419) These same themes are revisited in what I deem to be one of the finest essays in the entire collection, The True Scholar. (421) He suggests that the contemporary university is governed by neither the intellectual nor the moral virtues but by a vice: namely cupidity, acquisitiveness, or just plan avarice, the same vice that dominates our society as a whole in the Age of Money. To the extent that this is true, and I think it is not the whole truth, it has come about, I believe, more through default than intention: it
106 JOURNAL OF LAW & RELIGION [Vol. XXIII is the result of many small decisions made by administrators and faculty concerned to keep their institutions afloat in a changing society. Yet to the extent that we are dominated by one of the classic vices rather than the intellectual and moral virtues, we have ceased to be a true university and therefore it is increasingly difficult for us to be true scholars. (428) Bellah s insights on the meaning of our society and the world in which we live will be his lasting legacy not, I think, his highly celebrated articles on civil religion. And for Bellah, it is today s academics that must lead our society to become all that it can be. He thinks the practical nihilism of today s faculty is producing the practical nihilism of today s students. The result is a hopeless vacuum when [w]hat the students need above all is substance, is metanarratives, that will give them some sense of who they are and what kind of world they live in. Only that would counter the incoherence that surrounds them and give them a context in which the skills of critical thinking would make sense. (470) The Bellah Reader closes with three sermons preached by Bellah in churches of his preferred denomination: Episcopal. They center on the themes of community, hope, worship, and humanity, and speak to how Christians achieve meaning. These themes help us understand how Bellah finds the necessary grounding to be one of today s finest communicators of what it means, or should mean, to be a human being. Derek H. Davis * * Dean of the College of Humanities, Dean of the Graduate School, University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, Belton, Texas.