For four decades, Robert Bellah\u27s books, articles, and public speaking have influenced thoughtful sectors of American faith communities, including readers of Christian Century. Though widely known among academic specialists, a holder of an elite endowed chair at one of the premier public universities in America, Bellah is best known in church circles for the books Habits of the Heart and The Good Society (both co-authored with the team of Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton). Their interpretation of the deep cultural patterns of American life has found resonance among religious leaders of many stripes, and shaped sermons and adult education hours in many American congregations

Wood, Richard L.

English

University of New Mexico

University of New Mexico
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Sociology Faculty and Staff Publications Scholarly Communication - Departments
2007
Reading Robert Bellah: On Faith, Culture, and
Power in America
Richard L. Wood
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Wood, Richard L.. "Reading Robert Bellah: On Faith, Culture, and Power in America." Christian Century 2007 (2007).
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/soc_fsp/12
 Reading Robert Bellah 
On Faith, Culture, and Power in America 
Christian Century 2007 
Richard L. Wood 
 
 For four decades, Robert Bellah’s books, articles, and public speaking have 
influenced thoughtful sectors of American faith communities, including readers of 
Christian Century. Though widely known among academic specialists, and holder of an 
elite endowed chair at one of the premier public universities in America, Bellah is best 
known in church circles for the books Habits of the Heart and The Good Society (both 
co-authored with the team of Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and 
Steven Tipton). Their interpretation of the deep cultural patterns of American life has 
found resonance among religious leaders of many stripes, and shaped sermons and adult 
education hours in many American congregations.  
The recent publication of a new collection of Bellah’s writing offers an occasion 
to revisit the insights of this keen interpreter of American faith life. The Robert Bellah 
Reader (Duke University Press, edited by Bellah and Steven M. Tipton) brings together 
many of his seminal articles and speeches, on topics ranging from the possibilities and 
dangers of America being the sole world hegemonic power today to the deep cultural 
currents of the 1960s. Regarding the latter, many Christian Century readers will 
recognize with sadness and anger how two strands of American culture, the deep 
individualism of the 1960s and a longstanding strand of “traditional authoritarianism,” 
 2
have joined forces to forge a resurgent American nationalism under President George W. 
Bush – with the tragic results we see around us today.  
The chapter on The New American Empire in particular exemplifies the way that 
Bellah’s analysis of deep societal trends allows him to read the signs of the times with 
prescience. He notes with concern the expansion of American unilateralism in the war on 
terror, especially as articulated by the Bush administration in the “National Security 
Strategy of the United States of America” (issued in 2002 and guiding American policy 
today). Suggesting the historic pattern of empires collapsing due to military exhaustion 
and bankruptcy, he argues:  
It is surely in our interest to connect all nations, great and small, in 
agreements that limit weapons and mandate arbitration rather than 
assuming we will always have the capacity to dominate the world by 
force. My great fear is that this latest American outburst of “the arrogance 
of power” [the then-approaching Iraq war] will mobilize most of the world 
against us…We have embarked on an endless “war on terrorism” in which 
the invasion of Iraq is only the next step – until exhaustion sets in. A 
chance for another course, another role for America in the world, depends 
ultimately on the reform of our own culture. A culture of unfettered 
individualism combined with absolute world power is an explosive 
mixture. (pp. 355-56) 
 
No other analysis published in 2002 better captures the dynamics that have so 
damaged American credibility, ideals, and interests in the intervening five years. 
Crucially, in his call for “the reform of our own culture,” Bellah sees past the fashionable 
calls to replace Republicans with Democrats in our government. Though surely aghast at 
the corruption ushered in by recent years of Republican dominance, Bellah knows that 
ultimately our political life reflects deeper trends whose foundations are embedded in the 
culture of American life. Only by rethinking, reshaping, and recommitting ourselves to 
sources of meaning that can sustain a truly democratic culture – and can elicit the 
 3
vigorous adherence of millions of fellow citizens – will American culture be reborn.  
Bellah’s most influential writings have been dedicated to promoting this 
reshaping of American culture. Habits of the Heart argued that the long-standing strength 
of American culture, with its understanding of shared destiny and communal interest, was 
collapsing under of the onslaught of “expressive individualism” and “utilitarian 
individualism” in American culture. It called on Americans to reclaim biblical religion 
and civic republicanism as crucial antidotes for our culture’s ills. Habits quickly became 
a central text in seminaries and congregations within “mainline” Protestantism and 
Catholicism, and to a lesser extent in Judaism and some sectors of evangelical 
Christianity.  
Habits was criticized for its inattention to more structural influences on American 
life; these critics often argued that Bellah and his co-authors paid insufficient attention to 
political and economic power, in favor of the niceties of culture. Given that we can now 
see how racism and economic inequality were reemerging in the 1980s, these criticisms 
were well-founded in a certain sense. But they fundamentally miss the point: Bellah 
argues that such political and economic processes are founded upon the kinds of shared 
cultural assumptions on which Habits focused. In our contemporary terms, Bellah and 
company analyzed the “soft power” dynamics of culture rather than the “hard power” of 
politics and economics, and argued that the former fundamentally shape long-term 
dynamics of hard power. They likewise defended Habits’ focus on white middle class 
American culture, arguing that its hegemonic status gave it profound influence on all of 
social life.  
But, ironically, the very cultural trends Bellah identified were rapidly pushing 
 4
communitarian forms of civic republicanism and biblical religion out of the “mainline”: 
By the end of the century, radically individualist forms of religion and spirituality were 
surely closer to mainstream American culture. To the extent much counterweight to 
radical individualism existed at all, it was located more in traditional authoritarian 
expressions of religion (whether Catholic, evangelical, Muslim, or other) than in the old 
mainline currents. Thus, neoconservative ascendancy linked to radical individualism in 
religious garb dominated the initial years of the new century, until neocon gaffes and 
disastrous policies undermined their project. And thus, the cultural reform project that 
Habits strove to launch was stillborn, or at least forced into prolonged gestation beneath 
the surface of social life. 
That gestation was nurtured by many sources, among them the sequel to Habits, 
written by the same Bellah-led team of authors. The Good Society makes explicit an 
argument only implicit in the earlier book: that deep cultural reform can only be the fruit 
of a thorough-going rethinking of our shared institutions. That is, we must rethink our 
assumptions about how our economy, government, churches, schools, media, and other 
institutions foster or undermine a “good society.” The latter book has been less widely 
read, perhaps because its central argument swims upstream against the powerful current 
of American culture: It asks us to foreswear the arrogance and illusion of being “self-
made,” and instead to recognize the ways that institutions shape our lives. Along with 
that recognition, it calls us to dedicate ourselves to reconstructing those institutions, both 
through our everyday engagement with work, church, and schools and through active 
political and civic work. The task at hand: re-forging institutions that can sustain our best 
human striving, help us face our sobering societal challenges, and thus become the 
 5
society we are called to become.  
The two books together have helped a generation of religious leaders interpret 
American society for their congregations. They have also inspired other efforts at the 
long-term reconstruction of American institutions, including congregations and 
universities (see sidebar for one such endeavor).  
 
Sidebar: 
On a spectacular autumn day in the American Southwest, twenty-five clergy and 
faculty from a variety of religious traditions and intellectual disciplines gather over a 
shared meal at a public university to reflect together on key challenges facing citizens and 
faith communities in America. Called Nexus: Religion in the Public University, this is a 
different kind of university series: Nexus seeks to bridge the contemporary chasms 
between faith and reason, between university and congregation, between diverse faith 
traditions, and between the intellectuals we call faculty and the intellectuals we call 
clergy. As Bellah has argued, these chasms are artificial, unnecessary, and corrosive of a 
thriving American culture, but they are very real, constituting significant divides and 
assumptions in contemporary America. In particular, these divides undermine the ability 
of either congregations or universities to address the challenges faced by American 
culture and society in the 21st century.  
On this day, religious leaders from Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Mennonite, 
Roman Catholic, Congregationalist, Unitarian-Universalist, Byzantine Catholic, Jewish, 
Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions gather with university professors of 
religious studies, history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, language, medicine, and 
 6
political science. They first join an audience of several hundred to hear Dr. Anouar Majid 
present “Saints at Odds: Islam and America in the World,” on the fundamental challenges 
facing both Islam as a faith tradition and America as a nation. He argues that America’s 
response to 9/11 continues to undermine our status as beacon to democratic aspirations 
worldwide, and to erode the precious legitimacy on which effective power must draw. 
But he also challenges the Muslim world to recognize its failure to confront effectively 
and systematically the internal distortions that have helped breed terror in the name of 
Islam.  
After a vigorous public question-and-answer session, the religious leaders and 
faculty join Dr. Majid over a private lunch sponsored by the University, to talk about the 
and challenges Majid presented to congregation and classroom, preachers and teachers. 
It’s an engaging and invigorating discussion, pastorally and intellectually – one of six 
such encounters a year between these religious and university leaders.  
On other occasions this group discusses global warming, the challenges to faith 
amidst a materialist and hyper-individualist culture, terrorism and democracy, the ethical 
challenges of new medical technologies, religion and science, globalization, or the 
differing Jewish and Christian understandings of being Achosen people.@ Religious 
leaders and university teachers alike find new inspiration in these conversations. Through 
the Nexus dialogue, we strive to link congregation-based pastoral work and university-
based pedagogical work to an overarching project: Diagnosing the state of American 
society, analyzing its underlying dynamics, and discerning its future possibilities. These 
clergy-faculty conversations aim for a reflective and informed interpretation of the 
context in which we live B and thus to better help preachers and teachers interpret the 
 7
world for and with the members of their congregations and classrooms.  
Though conceived locally and funded by The Louisville Institute, the inspiration 
for Nexus came from the writings of Robert Bellah. At the core of his work lies an 
understanding of society as fundamentally a conversation about how we arrange to live 
together – including the rules of the game codified in law, but just as importantly the 
culture we share and often take for granted. Much of Bellah’s work has sought to 
consciously reconstruct American culture by re-appropriating its positive threads and 
critiquing its destructive threads.  This cultural critique has its positive expression in 
institutional reform, the building-up of institutions that generate meaning, solidarity, and 
commitment in people’s lives. The Nexus conversations reflect Bellah’s project of 
reclaiming our culture through reflective conversations about topics that matter – and his 
belief that faith communities and universities are crucial sites for doing so.  
 
 
 
Throughout a five-decade career as scholar, cultural critic, public intellectual, and 
civic sermonizer, Bellah has identified the deep cultural trends of American life with 
clear-eyed realism. Along with his sharp view of the acute costs of our cultural trends, 
this has sometimes marked his writing with a tone of declension, often misinterpreted as 
a nostalgic cultural conservatism. But his realism has consistently been leavened with a 
dose of theologically-grounded hope that the Spirit is surely at work beneath the surface 
of social life. This has produced two key emphases in his writing: 
First, his realism about the sheer scale of American power today, and the global 
 8
responsibility that comes with that power, combine with his hope for a better future to 
produce in some recent writings a positive view of America’s global mission. Given the 
recent misadventures of an administration that claimed such a global mission, and the 
resulting enormous costs in human blood and national legitimacy, this view of a 
democratic mission to the world is widely contested. Yet one must ask: what is the 
alternative? Properly understood and circumscribed by a far healthier respect for other 
peoples and for human rights, might an American commitment to a democratic mission in 
the world still make sense?  
Second, despite a jeremiad tone, Bellah’s writing consistently looks toward a 
future in which the most authentic liberating currents of recent cultural trends might 
combine with democratic and biblical strands of America’s past to become the vanguard 
of a new American future. But such an outcome would require far deeper cultural 
reconstruction than a simple changing of the guard in the nation’s capital – a long-term 
project to link cultural reconstruction to thorough reform of our political economy. Bellah 
welcomes all sorts of voices into that project, but insists that “religion is the key to 
culture.” Thus, pastors and religious scholars are crucial to rebuilding America from the 
catastrophe of the present period: by rebuilding and reinvigorating our faith communities 
and religious traditions, we can lay the groundwork for an American role in a global 
future that reflects God’s will for humanity. 
***** [Christian Century: could end here, for shorter article] 
For a glimpse at Bellah’s current major project, one should not miss The Robert 
Bellah Reader’s opening chapter on “Religious Evolution.” Though this piece was first 
published over forty years ago, it has remained influential, and Bellah is today hard at 
 9
work revising and clarifying its central theme: the role of religion across the entire sweep 
of human history, understood in light of current knowledge across many scholarly fields. 
This return to his intellectual roots completes a remarkable arc in Bellah’s biography: 
From a specialized academic to a public intellectual engaged in the crucial debates of the 
day, he has remained throughout a scholar to the core. His writing has been part and 
parcel of being a social scientist, citizen, and member of a faith community, integrated in 
a life that has responded to the demands of our age and the claims of his faith tradition 
upon his talents. As faith communities, we have learned much from Bellah; as a culture, 
we have a great deal yet to learn.  
   
Author info: Richard L. Wood is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of 
Religious Studies at the University of New Mexico. He holds an M.A. in Theology from 
the Graduate Theological Union and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of 
California at Berkeley, where he studied under Robert Bellah. He is the author of Faith in 
Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing in America (University of Chicago 
Press 2002).  
 


Reading Robert Bellah: On Faith, Culture, and Power in America

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