To establish this alternative perspective, Bellah develops a very distinctive understanding of the evolutionary process, which he traces back in pre-human, and indeed pre-primate, speciation to arrive at the ascent of critical thinking as it first crystallized in the axial age. In an original sociological reading of ethology and evolutionary biology, Bellah establishes a causal-evolutionary model that begins with the active participation of various life forms in species complexity (rather than species specialization), then moves to mammalian play, empathy, and ritual, and culminates in the primate “episodic” and the uniquely human “mimetic,” “mythic,” and “theoretic” stages of cultural evolution.

Bellah’s grand argument is complex but elegant: social cohesion constitutes, simultaneously, a functional mechanism for group survival and an incubator of more complex forms of social evolution; these various forms of social cohesion, in a certain evolutionary stage of social development, crystallized in institutional “religion”; religion became a generalized means of generating social capacities that increase in every new stage of cultural evolution; failing to develop such patterns (a very real possibility) means the neutralization of the evolutionary process itself; and religion, even in its most domineering forms, entails moral reflexivity and social criticism, based upon the crucial distinction between reciprocal hierarchies and brute exercise of domination. In a nutshell, Religion in Human Evolution is a story of life on Earth stretching itself to consciousness as a product of “relaxed fields” of alternative realities sheltered from the struggle for survival; first interspecific, then species-specific, and eventually intraspecific. I cannot help but think of Robert Bellah having turned Teilhard de Chardin on his head.

The originality, depth, and cross-disciplinary nature of the book is bound to trigger a series of controversies as well as original research programs limited only by the intellectual background and imagination of the reader. I will not dwell on this matter, as other scholars more competent than me have already done so on this website. I only wish to point to some definite accomplishments I believe the book has already made, the impact of which will be deep and lasting.

First, the book has challenged the monopoly sociobiology and militant naturalism alike hold on evolutionary theory. Since E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: the New Synthesis and Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, a rift in the midst of human studies is lurking deep. On the one side stand those who scorn the sacred, spiritual, or religious aspects of social life as various forms of a grand illusion; on the other side, those who claim that evolution does not apply to humankind since we have escaped its “red in tooth and claw” and we are masters of our fate. Religion in Human Evolution does not operate as a bridge between them; rather, it transcends the whole debate by introducing, and bringing into the heart of sociology, a developmental understanding of evolution that depends on the principle of play rather than competition and leads to increased complexity rather than specialization. Bellah exposes us to a much more balanced view of the natural process as a dialectic of necessity and freedom that is able to offer a valid scientific hypothesis of not only how the flesh multiplied, but also how the flesh (eventually) became spirit.

The second accomplishment is nothing less than the detailed and meticulous philological description of the birth of axial thinking itself. To follow Bellah’s guiding light, as it leads the reader through a vast labyrinth of ancient texts to demonstrate, for the first time, the actual ways that mythos became logos, is as pleasurable as it is intellectually rewarding. It delineates the presence of both the indispensable contribution of pre-axial literacy and the sudden eruption of creativity. As I see it, Bellah in one stroke solves the riddle of the “sudden appearance” of axial thinking and offered four case studies of the merging of mimetic, mythic, and theoretical culture. In effect, he provides a strong case for the evolutionary power of society—that new social capacities for organization, cohesion, and mobilization can be mastered only in a process of accumulation; and that the more we move to more complex forms of social organization, the more the individual becomes necessary to provide society with new impetus to push history forward.

The last two accomplishments of the book become evident when we compare its logic with the neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian grand narratives that have monopolized the field of grand historical sociology for the last forty years. The 1970s witnessed a strong revival of Marxism, which was followed by thirty years of a “neo-Weberian revolution,” incorporating a strong dose of Marxist conflict analysis, which until today rules the discipline. The hegemony of the two perspectives, irrespective of their interchangeability or particulars, have established certain assumptions about religion and the nature of historical change—that is, underlying suppositions of the nature of social change in toto.

First, on religion: Both neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian grand narratives tend to downplay or even ignore religion as they reduce it to its political and organizational features and neglect its ideational side. Bellah restores religion to its former glory, not by reminding the reader of its Durkheimian or Weberian features, but by locating it in a wider framework of an endless quest for meaning and alternative perceptions of reality. In this context, religion becomes the key to understanding social evolution (at least up to modernity), since religion and its concomitant practices are the means to firmly establish increasingly complex social power arrangements and structures that otherwise would be unattainable. For Bellah, religion is a generalized means of social action: as religion derives from the relaxed field of play (not “functional” itself), it remains, even in its most institutional forms, a bridge between necessity and freedom, between actual and potential forms of social life, and thus a privileged locus for social criticism and new visions of social organization and justice.

Second, on the suppositions of historical change and the fate of society itself: Neo-Marxist grand narratives tend to be teleological and moralistic, producing reductionist visions of social change and utopian outcomes. On the contrary, neo-Weberian grand narratives are cynically realistic and develop anti-teleological views of historical change that come close to declaring social evolution meaningless, blindly walking (or even bouncing back) through the corridors of history as if guided by accidents, unintentional consequences, and perilous passions. Considering the post-1980s demise of neo-Marxist grand theory, all that is left to us today is the hegemony of this neo-Weberian cynicism and pessimism.

Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution comes to counter this cynicism and pessimism in a most forceful way; and it does so in spite of the open pessimism and cynicism of the author himself, who in the concluding chapter of his book declares that we are in fact an insignificant and short-sighted species that is driving the planet to extinction. There is nothing in the book that prepares you for this conclusion, and rightly so. True as it is that Bellah is very careful to avoid teleological arguments—and his evolutionary scheme always allows for alternative paths, even dead-ends—reading the book unfolds a magisterial hopeful, if not optimistic image of an unbroken pathway that life on Earth has taken to self-reflection, awareness, and eventually an ecumenical sense of justice. And this is persuasively presented as the natural, though fortuitous, outcome of propensities latent in the evolutionary paths opened first by simple life forms, then by the “relaxed fields” of mammalian social life, and realized when we arrived at contemplation by self-reflecting individuals—“nothing is ever lost.” It is in this evolutionary context that Bellah investigates the emergence of axial thinking that is still with us today; in fact, an equally proper title of the book, though I admit, provocative in extremis, would be Human Evolution in Religion.

Thus, the book might be more controversial, and not as straight forward as, for example, Michael Mann’s Sources of Social Power, John Hall’s Powers and Liberties, or W. G. Runciman’s A Treatise on Social Theory, but its “looseness” is its power: more imaginative, more provocative, and more suggestive. Perhaps in part this might be explained by the fact that this masterpiece was written not under normal academic pressure, but in the relaxed field of honorable retirement.

Why was this event so special? It was not just the distinction of the members of the panel themselves, beginning with Bellah, arguably the country’s best known sociologist of religion and author of such seminal essays as “Civil Religion in America” and “Religious Evolution,” and groundbreaking books, including Habits of the Heart and Tokugawa Religion. Rather, the significance of the event lay in its recognition of the importance of the book’s project, a breathtaking survey of the whole sweep of the history of religiosity, which is nothing less than the history of humankind.

It can be said that no one else would have dared to write such a book, nor could anyone else have written it. Comparisons have been made to the wide-ranging explorations of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, early pioneers in social thought who also found in religion the key to understanding much about the social imagination. Bellah’s book is that kind of project.

The wonder is that it is written so well. It reads like a travelogue of ideas, a captain’s diary of a long exploration of uncharted intellectual seas. Bellah asks some simple questions: Where did religion come from? How did it develop? These are questions that have no simple answers, though the voyage of his discoveries through different disciplines and schools of thinking are fascinating, from physics to biology, from ancient history to classic texts. Through it all Bellah maintains a wonder about the questions and their possible answers—a humility towards the vastness of the project—that is both endearing and seductive. The reader is easily brought along for the ride.

Though the 746 pages of the book cover much, and will be mined for their varied insights for some time to come, there are roughly three foci. One is the engagement with scientific theories about evolution. Here Bellah explores the literature on the Big Bang, the beginning of the time/space continuum, and the emergence of self-sustaining life. The evolutionary physical and social development of humans is linked with their cultural development, and Bellah is aided by the theories of Merlin Donald, who outlines three major stages in human cultural history: mimetic, mythic, and theoretic. Bellah views the religious dimensions of this development, seeing in them three types of religious representation—enactive, symbolic, and conceptual.

Fully half of the book is devoted to the axial age, one of the most significant stages of religious change in response to the enlargement of human societies’ cognitive and social capacities. Here, in a way that is reminiscent of Max Weber’s comparative project on the religions of India, China, Israel, and Protestant Christianity, Bellah takes each of several ancient cultural traditions in turn, revealing an exhausting study of historical detail. He looks at ancient periods of Greece, China, Israel, and India. What Bellah explores is how—in four cases that are in many ways quite different from one another—they each have developed some of the characteristics of what are the hallmarks of axial age religiosity: individualism, critical thinking, and theoretical and reflective observation.

The third focus of the book is religion itself—what it is, and how it came to be. Unlike many contemporary thinkers who find the idea of religion to be a puzzling and difficult invention, Bellah seems confident in asserting that it is something—a stretch of human imagination that can be set apart from the other, more material aspects of human occupation. He regards it as an alternative perception of reality. It is one of the “other realities,” which, like poetry and science, “break the dreadful fatalities of this world of appearances.” But the ability to perceive these alternative realities does not come easy or early to the capacities of living species. He searches for those moments in the early development of conscious life when basic material needs are sufficiently met, and the mind can roam freely to imagine distant forms of order and other ways of understanding reality. Bellah sees this not just as a cognitive but as a physical activity, and finds the early origins of ritual and religiosity in the simple acts of play.

The critical comments about Bellah’s book tend to be related to these three foci—the relationship of religion to scientific theories of evolution, the historical cases of ancient religion during the axial age, and the conceptualization of religion and how it emerged. Regarding the scientific aspect, Luke Johnson raised the issue of the connection between biological evolution and cultural evolution. Johnson observed that Bellah meant to use the term “evolution” in more than a metaphorical sense, but he questioned to what degree that is possible. Religious dispositions are not, of course, genetically transferred traits, so this makes commentators such as Johnson question to what extent the exploration of scientific evidence is relevant to developments in religious expression, and to what extent religion can be said to evolve as opposed to simply change. In the subsequent response, Bellah made clear that religious evolution was real enough, though it was related to the evolving capacities of humans and their societies for different kinds of religious representation.

Regarding the specific case studies that Bellah explores as examples of axial age religiosity, specialists such as Wendy Doniger raise significant questions of their own. Doniger pointed out that changes in ways of thinking are gradual, and that elements of the reflective, philosophical ideas associated with the Upanishads are also present in early Vedic writings. Luke Johnson added that theoretical thinking is the privilege of elites, and for the masses, narrative and mimetic forms of religiosity continue to reign supreme. Jonathan Z. Smith questioned the very notion of the axial age, and suggested that Bellah’s book would have worked just as well without mentioning it. Bellah appreciated these insights, while affirming that different strands of religious representation can exist together, that change often does not work in steady increases but in paradigmatic leaps, and that such moments require observation and explanation.

Finally, there have been questions about the way in which Bellah thinks about the notion of religion and its origins. Jonathan Z. Smith asserted that he was intrigued with Bellah’s suggestion that religion is associated with play, but he wondered whether it was even more related to a certain kind of playfulness—games, which are guided by rules as well as by spontaneous creativity. In responding, Bellah affirmed that play and games are closely related to each other, and for that matter both are associated with another form of familiar human activity, work—and that these three often overlap. The religious impulse is related to all of them, though probably more essentially to the activity of play.

Each of the commentators couched their remarks in the context of an enormous appreciation for the immensity of Bellah’s project, and the value of the book for a wide range of subjects in the study of the role of culture in human evolution. It is a book that is large in many ways, a culmination of a lifetime of diligent analysis and fertile reflection, and it sets a new landmark in the efforts to understand the nature of religion in social life.

I am also grateful to the three panelists who spoke so graciously at the panel and who have provided written versions of their comments. I tried to respond to them ex tempore at the event and have seen a video of my remarks, but I will use this occasion to give a more considered answer to the many questions they raised, having to deal with some overlap between them as I go along.

Early on Wendy Doniger calls in question the very idea of the axial age and more generally the very idea of a breakthrough. She writes, “The problem with the idea of a breakthrough is that evolution goes too slowly to be pinpointed in a single age, that change is gradual.” I will first discuss briefly the objection that the fact that change is gradual rules out the idea of moments of dramatic change, of breakthroughs. It is surely the case that much of the time, maybe for millions of years in biological time, change is indeed gradual. Nonetheless there are moments of dramatic change, transitions, in which the emergence of new capacities leads to remarkable new developments. John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary, in their book The Major Transitions in Evolution, describe a number of such developments, as I indicate in chapter 2 of my book. No transition is more remarkable or, as far as we know, more sudden, as the transition from inorganic matter to life itself, something that we know happened maybe 3.7 billion years ago, but that no one knows for sure why it happened. The transition from monocellular to multicellular life is another such transition, as is the emergence of almost all the major body plans of multicellular organisms in the early Cambrian period. Perhaps the single most important transition at the level of cultural evolution is the emergence of language itself, the greatest development in human technology in history, upon which all later developments rest, and relative to which the invention of computers seems minor indeed. And, although there may have been something like proto-language, the emergence of fully grammatical language was almost necessarily sudden. So my argument that theoretic culture emerged during the axial age in the first millennium BCE is hardly startling, nor is it undermined by any emphasis on gradual change, which in the area of metallurgy, agricultural technology, urbanism, etc., was indeed also taking place in the same period.

Doniger’s doubts about the actuality of the axial age focus mainly on India: Wasn’t something like theoretic culture, my index for the axial transition, already present in the Vedas, well before the Upanishads and the Pali Canon of early Buddhism, which are usually seen as exhibiting axial traits? My answer is that no, it wasn’t: the Vedas are largely tribal ritual poetry with a few moments of riddling that could be seen later as foreshadowing metaphysical developments, but are not that different from riddles in many tribal cultures. The startling thing is that the tribal poetry of the Vedas remained the basis of later Hinduism, or at least the Brahmins claimed it did, though it took an awful lot of interpretation to make it seem so. Something similar can be seen in the reworking of tribal myth in Genesis in the Hebrew Bible to make it conform to much later ideas.

The axial age is a complex phenomenon and I cannot repeat here all I said about it in the book. But I should underline one point: an axial transition is only possible when an archaic state has come into existence. Aboriginal Australia could never have given rise to an axial age breakthrough. What is most characteristic of archaic states is the emergence of two mutually entailing ideas: gods and kings. Archaic civilizations fuse the ideas of gods and kings in a single cosmology in which kings are gods or children of gods or will be gods when they become ancestors. I argue that tribal societies are basically egalitarian and have neither chiefs nor gods, but do have powerful beings who are not worshipped but rather identified with in rituals. The cosmological fusion of a degree of divine and political power unknown in tribal societies is the necessary precondition for axial breakthroughs, which in every case call into question the fusion of god and king, claim an immediate relation of ordinary people to the divine and question the legitimacy of the political order. In so doing they use abstract reasoning that can be called theoretic in Merlin Donald’s terms. These theoretic ideas can be metaphysical or ethical or both depending on the case. I argue that they are metaphysical in the Upanishads but become also ethical in early Buddhism.

Doniger raises the question of diffusion versus independent emergence, which as far as I am concerned is a valid and still open question. I tried, as much as I could given the patchiness of the data, to discover diffusion, but failed to do so. The four axial cases are so radically different that I don’t see them as versions of a single breakthrough. There are analogies at a high level of abstraction, but not similarities of substance. Doniger raises the idea of reincarnation, which she finds in Hinduism and Buddhism, but also in Plato. Actually Gananath Obeyesekere, in his Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth shows that the idea of reincarnation is very widespread among tribal peoples on every continent, but refers simply to the idea that children may be the return of dead relatives, completely lacking the theoretical structure of karma as found first in the Upanishads and then in early Buddhism. Reincarnation in Plato also lacks the structure of karma and it is far from clear how seriously Plato intends it. It never attained the centrality in Greco-Roman culture that it had in India. The specific implications of the idea of karma, namely that your rebirth will reflect how you have behaved in your present or past births, is specifically and solely Indian. It is a theoretical development of the widespread and very simple idea of rebirth.

I must admit to a degree of skepticism as to whether overcrowding had the significant consequences that Doniger attributes to it. I think the renouncer idea, so well developed in India but not missing in any axial case, has much more to do with a rejection of the socio-political status quo than a wish to avoid overcrowding. Actually overcrowding would be just the kind of social condition that I think should be avoided in speaking of the “cause” of the axial transition. I pointed to a number of social, economic, and political conditions that might be necessary preconditions for an axial breakthrough but cannot be seen as sufficient conditions. Breakthroughs do seem to occur in advanced agrarian societies when they suffer serious breakdowns, but here, as I note, breakdowns are much more frequent than breakthroughs so cannot be sufficient conditions for them.

Several commentators implied that I wanted to explain the axial age or religious evolution generally only by means of social conditions, but I never do that. In every case individual agency is critical and the kind of person involved in that agency will have enormous consequences. It is one of the indices of axiality that there were in the axial age individual thinkers with whom we can still argue, persons that are real to us as interlocutors, what Mencius called “friends in history.” It is striking to me and decisive for my understanding of the Axial Age that there are no such figures before the first millennium BCE. Undoubtedly the Epic of Gilgamesh is a great story, but we cannot argue with a story. We can however argue with Confucius and Mencius, with the Buddha, with Isaiah and Jeremiah, and with Plato and Aristotle. They are alive to us in a way that earlier figures are not and it is no accident that all the great traditions that are still alive today begin then and not before.

As to Doniger’s reflections on ethics, I never said ethics emerge only in the axial age—all societies have ethics. I said universal ethics begin in the axial age, and I stand by that. All earlier ethics are particularistic. Doniger herself in The Hindus: An Alternative History argues that Hindu ethics are almost completely particularistic. Nor do I equate universal ethics with Kantianism, which is unintelligible without the background of modern individualism arising from the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Neither Confucian ethics nor Buddhist ethics, nor the ethics of the Hebrew prophets, nor the ethics of Plato and Aristotle are Kantian, but they are all universal. Universal ethics is one important indicator of the theoretic element in axial culture, but it is no more important than metaphysics or cosmology.

Let me now turn to Luke Timothy Johnson. My admiration for Wendy Doniger will be evident to any reader of my book from the many citations to her work in the chapter on India. There are no citations to Luke Johnson in my book only because he writes on a period that I do not reach. Nonetheless, I want to express my admiration for his many books and in particular for Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity, because it is a deeply comparative book that takes Greco-Roman religion as seriously as it takes Christianity and finds many parallels between them in the early centuries CE. It is just such comparative work that I find extremely helpful and seeing a specialist reach out to undertake it is most encouraging.

Johnson has raised five serious questions about my book, and I will do my best to respond to them.

1) He asks if my use of evolution is to be taken literally as applying to cultural as well as biological development. Yes, it is. Language is a biological capacity that turned out to have enormous cultural implications, but culture never ceases to be a biological capacity and is subject to the same evolutionary pressures as are biological organisms (many more than humans have incipient cultural capacities, we should not forget). I say in the preface that we need to understand what religion is before we argue about whether it is adaptive or not, yet the question of adaptation looms over the whole book and does not just return at the end of the conclusion. Even in the preface I ask whether we moderns can adapt to our own adaptations, and here the question is definitely survival. I will return to the question of evolutionary adaptation in my next book, if I live to write it, because it is in the modern era, with which that book will be concerned, that the issue becomes absolutely central. In that book I will point out that natural selection, modified in terms of recent biological theory, applies to religion as much as any other cultural sphere. For example, no tribal religion can survive in today’s world without protection from a modern state, because no tribal society, and religion is the cultural basis of all such societies, can survive in competition with much stronger, more complex societies. A careful reading of my book will find such intimations in many places. For example, I cite W. G. Runciman’s argument that the ancient Greek polis was “an evolutionary dead end.”

2) It surprises me to read that Johnson thinks that I, following one (wrong) reading of Durkheim, place the social group higher than the individual. In the theory of my teacher, Talcott Parsons, culture, society, personality, and the behavioral organism are all equally essential and interpenetrating aspects of human action. Myth and ritual, even among the Australian Aborigines, are constantly changing, and who changes them? Individuals, of course, acting within the constraints of their culture, society, and their bodies, but never without an aspect of independent creativity. And when it comes to my treatment of the axial age, I give the highest priority to creative individuals, always acting in a total situation, but with remarkable ingenuity and innovation. Johnson seems to recognize this in my treatment of the axial cases, but there is no change in my theoretical presuppositions there. Of course it is just in the axial age that we first find identifiable individuals with whom we can converse to this day. But I recognize the dancers of ritual and the reciters of myth as my teachers in my acknowledgements and they are surely individuals.

3) Johnson’s questions about the axial age start with issues raised by Doniger so I won’t go over the issue of radical transitions in biological and cultural evolution. Of course they all have precursors—nothing comes from nothing—but they are still radically new.  But Johnson is wrong in thinking I shift entirely to the cognitive in treating the axial age. In the case of ancient Greece I give quite a bit of attention to the development of the sacrificial system and its unusually egalitarian side, something that helps us understand the emergence of political egalitarianism. And I place great emphasis on festivals, especially the City Dionysia devoted to Dionysus. Here mimesis and narrative are central, not theory, but I see the great dramatists, all involved in religious performance, as narrative precursors of the axial breakthrough.

I insist that nothing is ever lost—that ritual and narrative are reconstructed in the emergence of the theoretic, but that they never go away. The focus on the cognitive, the theoretic, in my treatment of the Axial Age is not because that was all there was but because that was what was new. I did not set out to do a comprehensive history of religion in all its complexity—that would have required a much longer book. I had to focus on what was important in terms of my overall argument. Finally, Johnson argues that I stop too soon, that Hellenistic developments in Greece and postexilic developments in Israel are so important that they shouldn’t have been missed. I have already explained why the book ends where it does and that I hope to continue it in the future. Yet is Johnson right? Who are the greatest figures in Greek thought who influenced Christianity? Surely Plato and the Neo-Platonists, and much later Aristotle. The Epicureans were a largely isolated cult in ancient times and their influence on the Renaissance has been much exaggerated. And I end my Israel chapter with Deuteronomy, the core of the Torah, and not with the prophets

4) Here Johnson returns to a question with which I have already dealt. Play is dealt with throughout the book. But my book is not a history of religion but a history of religious evolution and I must focus on new capacities and the new possibilities, for good and for ill (evolution can end in successful survival, or, much more commonly, in extinction).

5) Johnson’s queries about how my book ends again miss the theme of ambiguity and human involvement with our own evolution that runs throughout the whole book. Evolution is not some absolutely deterministic external force that stands over against us. We participate in our own evolution as have all organisms since the beginning of life. How will we do so? Yes, extinction would be a natural evolutionary outcome, yet changing our ways to avoid extinction would also be a natural evolutionary outcome. My ecological reflections at the end of the book are integral to its whole argument.

Finally, let me turn to Jonathan Z. Smith. It was I who asked that he be included in the panel, and at the event I tried to explain why. For one thing he is a lifelong comparativist, as I have been. I think only such a comparativist knows the agony as well as the delight of doing comparative work, where every move is open to question, but where new insights emerge that give great pleasure.

But there was another reason. Smith had been a very strong critic of my 1964 article “Religious Evolution” and I thought it likely that he would have similar objections to my new book. Academic argument, even civil academic conflict, is essential to the life of the mind. I didn’t want to shy away from disagreement, but hoped the open discussion of disagreement would forward the general discussion. But I am quick to admit that I was happy that Smith took a much more charitable view of my book than he had of my long-ago article, though I am also glad he raised enough points of disagreement to allow a continuing discussion.

I am more than happy to accept Smith’s apology for the intemperate language in his criticism of my 1964 article “Religious Evolution.” I also understand the grounds for that criticism that he spelled out in his comment. I agree that the article was highly condensed and the explications he asked for would surely have helped to clarify what I wanted to say. But at this point that is all water under the bridge, shall we say. My new book goes much more deeply into the subject matter of the earlier part of the original article and the subject matter of the latter part of that article will be developed in dramatically new ways in my next book. I see no value in continuing to discuss an article that had considerable influence in its day, but is now outmoded by my own subsequent work.

Before dealing with the questions Smith raises about my new book, let me offer him thanks for mentioning so favorably an early article of mine, “Durkheim and History.” When putting together two collections of my writings, Beyond Belief and much more recently The Robert Bellah Reader, I seriously considered including that article. I decided against it on the grounds that it was too erudite and too specialized, but I now see that that was a mistake. That essay was based on a complete reading of Durkheim, including a thousand pages of French text not then translated in English. I suspect it was just the erudition of that article that Smith admired and that I should have thought of more highly.

So let me now take up the two questions Smith raises about the new book: the first has to do with the status of the axial age, a concern of all three commentators, and the second with the relation of play and work in thinking about ritual. Smith’s first objection to the axial age idea seems to have arisen from Jaspers’s failure to give an adequate causal explanation for its sudden emergence, dealing with it “more as a miracle than an event.” I have no causal explanation of the axial transition, although I do spell out some of the necessary but not sufficient conditions. The event itself has to do with new ideas that cannot be explained in terms of material or social conditions, though some such conditions may be necessary. Individual initiative in response to similar kinds of social crises in the four cases is surely part of the story, though how “causal” they are is problematic. In general I prefer to deal with the axial age in interpretive rather than explanatory terms, and, as I have said before, I am reassured by the fact that most of the great biological and cultural transitions in history remain unexplained to this day.

Just a word about Smith’s unhappiness that ancient Mesopotamia was not included as an axial case. He notes that I characterize Mesopotamia as archaic, but not axial, and he finds Mesopotamia to be more significant in its religious achievements than the other societies I characterize as archaic. I can see how the little information we have about Shang China, due to the nature of the texts that have survived, would limit comparison with the much richer record in Mesopotamia, but I fail to see why the very rich record of ancient Egypt would give it lesser status. In any case Mesopotamia fits my essential criterion of an archaic society, one in which cosmos, gods, and kings are fused. As Thorkild Jacobsen wrote of Mesopotamia, “the cosmos was seen as a state and the state as an essential element in the cosmos.” It is just that fusion that is broken through in every axial case.

With respect to work and play in relation to ritual I really think that there is less difference between us than Smith seems to see. Even though I quote Friedrich Schiller, I don’t think of play in Romantic terms, and especially not in terms of freedom, at least not exclusively. I see play as involving from its earliest animal appearance what Smith calls “constraint,” and indeed rules. Play requires the constraint of aggression and the maintenance of equality between the players and thus is rule-governed from the beginning. Within those rules and constraint it is true that play is free, is its own reward, but it would not be possible without the presence of constraint and rules. Rather baffling to me is Smith’s readiness to see the relation between ritual and games, but not ritual and play, when, as I think most people would agree, games are a kind of play: we “play a game.” Games indeed have rules, which is, I think, Smith’s point, but so, I have argued, does play. As to the opposition play/work, I think it is preferable to play/reality, for I think play is quite real to the players. But that ritual involves work is certain. In my Kalapalo example, months of work lead up to the great rituals and involve the accumulation of food for those who will attend, the preparation of ritual objects, and a great deal of rehearsal. A Navajo sing, lasting several nights, has been compared to a performance of Richard Wagner’s Ring; plenty of work there. Yet I think that there is a powerful element of play in ritual itself, which often involves dancing, celebration and feasting. As on most issues I am a both/and person rather than an either/or person, so I see ritual as both work and play, though perhaps its genesis was in play. Certainly my thirteen years of work on my latest book involved a great deal of work. Yet it often gave me great joy and I felt it was also a kind of play.

I cannot say how much Jonathan Z. Smith’s various appreciative remarks about my book mean to me. I admire him as one of the great students of comparative religion of our day. If he has found my book useful and even enjoyable, then I am immensely pleased.

 *  *  *

NS: Can you say a bit about what you’re hoping to tell us with Religion in Human Evolution?

RB: The purpose of the book is to show how deeply historical—beyond what we normally think of as history, or even prehistory—and how biological human religion is. We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some point stopped and “history” took over is absurd, though it is widespread among various social scientists and humanists.

NS: Reaching so far back in time, how did you go about marking your story’s beginning?

RB: The advent of helpless infants who require intensive, long-term parental care as long as 200 million years ago is an absolutely critical first step. I don’t say that religion appears there, but without it the religious culture that appears much later just isn’t possible. Think about it. The central icon of Catholic Christianity is mother and child. That motif is so deep in not just our human experience but in our animal, biological past. For much of evolutionary history, the period of helplessness was very brief. Most animals become autonomous and able to fend for themselves very quickly. Reproduction comes in a matter of months for many mammals. In larger and more complex mammals, the period of parental care grew longer and longer. There was a quantum leap among the great apes, and with us it became really long. Imagine, an animal that can’t take care of itself until age 21! It’s a weird thing, biologically. But it allows for the development of what the ethologist Gordon Burghardt calls the “relaxed field”; relieving the more brutal pressures of the struggle for existence and opening the possibility for a great deal of experimentation, creativity, and innovation.

NS: And what about the story’s end?

RB: The book actually ends two thousand years ago, and some people may wonder why I would do that. Christianity and Islam aren’t even in it. Between you and me, I’m so glad they’re not, because I don’t have to fight any stupid battles of the culture wars. But the real reason it ends there is that life is finite. I just couldn’t get through the last two thousand years without writing two volumes, and that was more than I could imagine, but I hope to write a smaller book dealing with the recent past.

NS: Still, you insist, almost as a refrain, that “nothing is ever lost.” What does that mean about the connection between this distant past and the present?

RB: “Nothing is ever lost” means that what we are now goes all the way back through natural history. We are biological organisms and not simply computerized brains. By focusing totally on the present, thinking only about science and computers, and forgetting four billion years of life on this planet, we are losing perspective on who and what we are. We’re running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we reach the point where we can’t adapt to our own increasingly rapid adaptations. We run the risk of early extinction. So this certainly isn’t a triumphalist story, but it is trying to get at what, in the very long run, leads to the amazing creatures that we are.

NS: How would you characterize the progress of your own thinking between the 1964 “Religious Evolution” paper and Religion in Human Evolution?

RB: Well, that paper was one of the first things I ever wrote. Actually, the first draft of it was written when I was a postdoctoral student at McGill around 1955. In the back of my mind, religious evolution was the thing I cared about most. It always structured my most frequently-given and most well-received undergraduate course on the sociology of religion. I referred to evolution from time to time, but between that 1964 essay and this book, although I was thinking and learning about religious evolution, other things became more urgent. I finally retired at 70 in 1997, and for the first time in my life I could devote myself to this book as I have for the last thirteen years.

NS: How did those other more urgent concerns present themselves?

RB: I was pulled by external forces. The whole preoccupation with America was particularly ironic because it was the one society I didn’t want to study. I chose to be a Japan specialist in graduate school to get as far away as I could! But once the “Civil Religion in America” paper came out in 1967, all kinds of nonacademic groups wanted to hear from me. I thought, well, this crazy country is all mixed up, and if I can help clarify things I should respond. That led to The Broken Covenant, and then the Ford Foundation asked to fund Habits of the Heart. They were worried about what was happening to the American middle class. I didn’t ask for money for Habits; they pushed it on me. I found four really amazing younger colleagues who did most of the fieldwork. In that way, I got distracted by various things that were intrinsically important—so important that I gave them high priority—but that kept me from doing what my life’s work was meant to be.

NS: What has occupied you most during the last thirteen years that you’ve been working on this book?

RB: I was learning an enormous amount. All my life I have been deeply interested in ancient Israel and ancient Greece, and my graduate degree was in sociology and Far Eastern languages, so I knew a lot about ancient China. Back then I read Confucius and Mencius in their original classical Chinese. Since, I’ve had to catch up with current research in each of those fields. India, though, was the one place where I really started almost from scratch, like an undergraduate. That turned out to be utterly fascinating. I knew a lot about Buddhism because Buddhism is important in East Asia, particularly in Japan, but I didn’t know early Buddhism, and I didn’t know much about what we call Hinduism. Then I discovered the cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald’s notion that human culture, in evolutionary terms, moves from episodic, to mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic—that made all kinds of sense. To some extent, ontogeny repeats phylogeny, because children go through something like the same thing. So it’s a deeply interdisciplinary study. I’m drawing on biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and child-development researchers all in order to understand the deep roots of what would ultimately become religion. I’ve learned so much. It has been a deep pleasure to write this book.

NS: What about Jaspers’ notion of the “axial age,” that crucial period in the first millennium BCE when each of these civilizations flowered? Has it been framing your thinking since the beginning?

RB: It’s already there in the 1964 article. Benjamin Schwartz, a leading scholar of ancient China, organized the first discussion of the axial age in American academic life, I think, in an issue of Deadalus quite early on. Ben was my teacher and my colleague, and I was very influenced by his reading of Jaspers. So Jaspers goes all the way back, but of course I never really applied his insights in detail until I wrote this book. More recently, there was a conference in 2008 at the Max Weber Center at the University of Erfurt in Germany, for which my axial age chapters were provided as a base for discussion.

NS: Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation has recently helped renew public interest in the axial age concept too. What do you think of that book?

RB: I’ve been with her up on the platform, and I know she’s a very intelligent person. But she doesn’t know much about the axial age. For her, it’s all about compassion. Compassion is a great thing, but that just won’t do! When she ends up excluding Greece from the axial age because there was no compassion there, I thought I would pull my hair out. It’s so simple-minded. In terms of the big picture, I don’t see any other book that does anything like what I’m trying to do.

NS: Comparisons like axial theories can allow differences between cultures to be obscured by ostensible similarity. How do you address the danger of such universalism?

RB: The problem of the universal is difficult in every case. The universal and the particular can never be separated; they always go hand in hand. But if you read my four axial chapters you would never think that these cultures are all the same. They are very, very different. I never want to talk theory without giving really detailed ethnographic examples. Here, I learned from my friendship with Clifford Geertz. From our graduate school days on, I always admired Cliff as an ethnographer. Do you know Talal Asad’s essay about Cliff?

NS: The one in the Genealogies of Religion volume?

RB: It’s full of things that are just plain false. It attacks Cliff as an Orientalist and cites Edward Said. I went back and looked carefully at Orientalism. Cliff Geertz is one of the few people whom Said completely exonerates, but you wouldn’t dream that this was the case by reading Asad. I’ve actually been warned by former students not to make Geertz so important in my preface because Geertz is in the doghouse now. Well, I want to bring him out of the doghouse! Cliff always insisted on the really deep detail—the “thick description”—and there’s a hell of a lot of that in this book. I had to educate myself on every one of these societies, both theoretically and in terms of ethnographic details.

NS: Religion in Human Evolution is an incredibly broad and ambitious work, so unlike much of the scholarship being done right now. Do you think there is too much pressure to narrowly specialize in the academy today?

RB: Tell me about it. The pressure to have articles in the primary reviewed journals of your profession in order to get tenure is really awful. The economics of the academic world today makes it all the worse. Who can take thirteen years to write a book like this? Fortunately, I’ve been in good health. But Cliff died at 80. I was very angry at him for that—I wanted him to read this book!

NS: I wonder if you have an opinion of journalist Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, which offers, in some ways, a comparable story about the development of religion in evolutionary perspective.

RB: I think Wright is a very bright guy, and he has some interesting things to say. But he’s very hung up on the notion of gods and, particularly, God. His book overwhelmingly focuses on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. You would hardly know that half the world is not there. Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism are huge traditions of enormous importance, and they aren’t monotheistic. Again, this reflects the fact that our preconceptions about what religion is are so influenced by Protestantism—either real Protestantism or the secularized Protestantism that dominates our culture—and its assumption that beliefs are the most important thing. But it’s clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary. I’m not saying that you can’t learn something from Wright and other journalists like him—Nicholas Wade, for instance.

NS: Yes, Wade’s latest book is The Faith Instinct. You’ve read it?

RB: I read that in advance for Penguin. I told the editor that I admire a lot in the book, but there’s so much I can’t agree with. Wade says at some point that Christianity is the first universal religion. Yet Buddhism is four hundred years older than Christianity, and if it’s not a universal religion I don’t know what a universal religion is. There’s also a strong focus on selectionism and the notion that religion plays a functional role in the evolutionary process. But religion is dysfunctional all the time, as well as functional. It’s not so simple. One of the important things about religion is that it is a sphere which is partially protected from selection. Religious creativity occurs when people pull out of the whole selectivity issue. Becoming celibate—obviously you couldn’t be less selective that that. Yes, selection is always in the background. But it’s not always there in the foreground. If you don’t understand that, you’re missing a lot.

NS: As someone trained in the social sciences, how did you go about engaging with scientific material? How did you weed through the current research and find insights that could help your project?

RB: In part it goes back to the fact that I became a major in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations in the second year of its existence. My whole undergraduate and graduate training brought me into clinical and social psychology, and anthropology. I’ve never been one of these boundary-guarding sociologists who thinks that if something isn’t sociology I can ignore it. This is also very much the spirit of Talcott Parsons; he was the quintessential sociologist, but he never drew any boundaries. Jerome Bruner, a developmental psychologist, was an important early influence. More recently, I did it just by finding who the best people are and reading their books. I’ve had colleagues who helped steer me, but it has really been self-help all the way.

NS: It is rare to see someone lately so informed by both the humanities and scientific research. You seem to be doing very much what Barbara Herrnstein Smith is calling for in her Natural Reflections.

RB: It’s a wonderful book that came just at the right moment for me.

NS: Say more about how it impacted you.

RB: Well, she makes the strong case that an explanatory science and an interpretive science are not incompatible, that they’re working at different levels, that they are revealing different kinds of truths, and that we can learn a lot from each. I wouldn’t say that this was totally new to me. Again, this was very much a part of Cliff Geertz’s thinking too. He wrote an early essay on the evolution of culture and the brain in the 1960s, before most people were talking about it. But Smith writes so eloquently. It’s really more the way she said it. She isn’t interested in bitter diatribe or polemic, and of course neither am I.

NS: Over the course of your career you’ve been able to do a unique kind of public theology within social science. Do you think that that kind of role is still open to younger sociologists?

RB: Christian Smith is an example of a younger person doing that. At one point I very much wanted to bring him to Berkeley, but it was precisely that side of him that my colleagues didn’t like, and he wasn’t brought. Nonetheless, he’s certainly one of the two or three most influential sociologists of religion today, so he hasn’t been excluded from the discussion by any means. Even Bob Wuthnow—though you could hardly call him a public theologian—has a very sensitive ear for religious reality, and his writings are always full of sympathetic understanding of the things he’s writing about. I think it’s possible. But whether I should have included three sermons in The Robert Bellah Reader is still an open question, because I think it did foster a degree of prejudice against a book that has a lot of other things in it. I did that partly deliberately.

NS: To what do you attribute that prejudice?

RB: The academic world is one of the few places where prejudice is supposed to be totally banned, and we’re politically correct on everything, but it’s still a place where you can attack religion out of utter, complete, bottomless ignorance and not be considered to have done anything wrong. It’s astounding to me to hear what some people can say with the assumption that everyone would agree with them, based on nothing whatsoever.

NS: An important part of your message has been the famous concern expressed in Habits of the Heart about “Sheilaism”—the kind of individualistic spirituality that you and your colleagues saw at work in the United States. Some have suggested recently, including your former student Harvey Cox, that some of these nontraditional spiritualities are finding a place in social and political life in a way that wasn’t quite recognized before. Is the way you think about new kinds of spiritualities evolving?

RB: I certainly think that so-called spirituality can have social and even political consequences. I’ve seen this among environmental activists, who often have some kind of eco-spirituality and who are very organizationally loose. They switch from one group to another, and if one group isn’t pure enough they go to another. And yet they spend a long period of their lives doing good work in a cause. In the end what I feel is most problematic about “I’m spiritual but not religious” is: what the hell are you going to tell your children? I’m allergic to the notion that so-called institutional religion—by which people mean organizations such as churches and synagogues—is bad. Institutions are very important and if you think you can get along without them, you’re putting yourself on the wrong line; you can’t.

NS: So your conclusions in Habits of the Heart stand?

RB: If you think about what has happened in American society, or even just today with what is going on with the Tea Party movement, Habits of the Heart was so right on. Radical individualism is even more evident today than when Habits was published twenty-five years ago. It describes the default mode of this deeply misguided society beautifully—horribly, but beautifully.