Bellah graduatedsumma cum laude fromHarvard College in 1950, receiving aBachelor of Arts degree in social relations with a concentration insocial anthropology.[14] His undergraduate honors thesis won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize and was later published in 1952 with the titleApache Kinship Systems.[15]
Bellah graduated fromHarvard in a joint sociology and Far East languages program. Bellah first encountered the work ofTalcott Parsons as an undergraduate when his senior honors thesis advisor wasDavid Aberle, a former student of Parsons.[16] Parsons was specially interested in Bellah's concept of religious evolution and the concept of "civil religion". He received hisDoctor of Philosophy degree in 1955.[17] His doctoral dissertation was titledReligion and Society in Tokugawa Japan[18] and was an extension ofMax Weber'sProtestant ethic thesis to Japan. It was published asTokugawa Religion in 1957.
While an undergraduate at Harvard, Bellah was a member of theCommunist Party USA from 1947 to 1949[19] and a chairman of theJohn Reed Club, "a recognized student organization concerned with the study ofMarxism".[20] During the summer of 1954, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at HarvardMcGeorge Bundy, who later served as a national security adviser toJohn F. Kennedy andLyndon B. Johnson, threatened to withdraw Bellah's graduate student fellowship if he did not provide the names of his former club associates.[21] Bellah was also interrogated by the Boston office of theFederal Bureau of Investigation with the same purpose. As a result, Bellah and his family spent two years in Canada, where he was awarded apost-doctoral fellowship at theIslamic Institute in McGill University inMontreal. He returned to Harvard afterMcCarthyism declined due to the death of its main instigator senatorJoseph 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.[20]
Bellah'smagnum opus,Religion in Human Evolution (2011),[22] traces the biological and cultural origins of religion and the interplay between the two. The sociologist and philosopherJürgen 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."[23] The book won the Distinguished Book Award of theAmerican Sociological Association's Section on Sociology of Religion.[24]
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 betweenindividualism and a desire for community, and that this tension is reflected in their religious beliefs.[25]
Bellah is best known for his 1985 bookHabits 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 toAmerican civil religion, a term which he coined in a 1967 article that has since gained widespread attention among scholars.[26][27] Bellah argues that contemporary American religion is not limited to churches but also includes a trans-denominational civil religion. By analysing presidential speeches, he reveals the central role of references to God in public discourse. According to Bellah, although there is a formal separation between church and state, politics and social life are still shaped by religious forms and influences.[28]
He served in various positions at Harvard from 1955 to 1967 when he took the position of Ford Professor of Sociology at theUniversity of California at Berkeley. He spent the remainder of his career at Berkeley.[29] His views are often classified ascommunitarian.[30] A full biography of Robert Bellah, "the world's most widely read sociologist of religion",[31] written by sociologist Matteo Bortolini, titledA Joyfully Serious Man. The Life of Robert Bellah, has been published by Princeton University Press in the fall of 2021.[32]
In 1972Carl Kaysen andClifford Geertz nominated Robert Bellah as a candidate for a permanent faculty position at theInstitute for Advanced Study (IAS).[33] (Bellah was at the IAS as a temporary member for the academic year 1972–1973.)[34] 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.[33] The dispute became extremely acrimonious,[35][36] but in April 1973, Bellah's eldest daughter committed suicide and he, in grief, withdrew from consideration.[37]
Bellah was born inAltus,Oklahoma, on February 23, 1927.[14] His father was a newspaper editor and publisher who committed suicide when Bellah was three years old.[7] His mother Lillian moved the family toLos Angeles,[7] where she had relatives.[citation needed] Bellah grew up in Los Angeles[38] and attendedLos Angeles High School, where he and his future wife, Melanie Hyman, were editors of the student newspaper. They married in 1948 after she graduated fromStanford University, and he began studying at Harvard University after serving in theUS Army. Bellah's wife died in 2010.
In 1977, Bellah conducted an affair with William M. Sullivan.[39]
Bellah died July 30, 2013, at anOakland, California, hospital from complications afterheart surgery. He was 86 and was survived by his daughters Jennifer Bellah Maguire and Hally Bellah-Guther; a sister, Hallie Reynolds; and five grandchildren.[27] Robert and Melanie Bellah's eldest daughter committed suicide in 1973. Their third daughter died at age 17 in 1976 in an automobile accident.[40] Raised as aPresbyterian, he converted toEpiscopalianism[21] in theAnglo-Catholic tradition.[41][42]
Bellah was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967.[45] In 1996, he was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society.[46] He received theNational Humanities Medal in 2000 from PresidentBill Clinton,[47] in part for "his efforts to illuminate the importance of community in American society."[48] In 2007, he received the American Academy of Religion Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion.[13] In 2008, he received the honorary doctorate of the Max Weber Centre of the University of Erfurt.[49]
^Bellah, Robert N. (2005)."McCarthyism at Harvard".The New York Review of Books. Vol. 52, no. 2.ISSN0028-7504.Archived from the original on February 19, 2024. RetrievedSeptember 7, 2018.
^Bergman, Barry (October 26, 2006)."Of God, Justice, and Disunited States".The Berkeleyan. Berkeley,CA: University of California, Berkeley.Archived from the original on September 7, 2018. RetrievedSeptember 7, 2018.
^Coleman, John A. (August 5, 2013)."Remembering Robert N. Bellah".America. New York.Archived from the original on July 15, 2023. RetrievedNovember 18, 2019.
^Bellah, Robert N. (June 2013)."A Reply to My Critics".First Things. New York: Institute on Religion and Public Life.ISSN1047-5141.Archived from the original on May 6, 2016. RetrievedNovember 18, 2019.
^Andre, Claire; Velasquez, Manuel (1992)."Creating the Good Society".Issues in Ethics. Vol. 5, no. 1. Santa Clara, California: Santa Clara University.ISSN1091-7772.Archived from the original on December 10, 2015. RetrievedMay 5, 2008.
^"B"(PDF).Book of Members, 1780–2010. American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Archived(PDF) from the original on November 23, 2018. RetrievedMay 30, 2011.
——— (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.ISSN1573-7853.S2CID143469936.
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.ISBN978-1-317-05314-9.
Gardner, Stephen (2017). "The Axial Moment and Its Critics: Jaspers, Bellah, and Voegelin". InAlison, 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.ISBN978-1-137-53825-3.
Giesen, Bernhard; Šuber, Daniel (2005). "Bellah, Robert N.". InRitzer, George (ed.).Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications. pp. 49–50.ISBN978-1-4522-6546-9.
Horowitz, Daniel (2005).The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press.ISBN978-1-55849-504-3.
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.ISBN978-0-7425-1631-1.
Thompson, Kenneth (2012). "Durkheim and Durkheimian Political Sociology". InAmenta, 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.ISBN978-1-4443-5507-9.
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.ISBN978-1-84714-470-6.
Yamane, David (1998)."Bellah, Robert N.". In Swatos, William H. Jr. (ed.).Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press.ISBN978-0-7619-8956-1.Archived from the original on May 30, 2023. RetrievedSeptember 7, 2018.
Bellah, Robert N. (2002). "Meaning and Modernity: America and the World". InMadsen, 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.ISBN978-0-520-22657-9.
Reno, R. R.; McClay, Barbara, eds. (2015).Religion and the Social Sciences: Conversations with Robert Bellah and Christian Smith. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books.ISBN978-1-4982-3643-0.
