Philip S. Gorski

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JB: You’re working on a book on civil religion at the moment. Could you tell me a little bit about that project?

PG: Sure. It wasn’t really the book I had planned or expected to write. It was more occasioned by hearing certain things in Obama’s campaign rhetoric that reminded me of ideas about civil religion that I had picked up from Robert Bellah at graduate school. He was my adviser, so it was something that was parked in the back of my brain, and I remembered in particular his rather despairing line in The Broken Covenant where he said that American civil religion is nothing but “an empty and broken shell.” Suddenly it seemed like it was reappearing, so I wrote something about this for The Immanent Frame, and an editor from a press saw it and said, “Oh, you should write a book about this. It’s very topical.” It’s something that I was really quite engaged by at that time, more than some of the other things I’d been thinking about working on, so I started digging more deeply into it. The starting point was really Bellah’s argument that he develops in the Daedalus article from ’67 and then the Broken Covenant book. In reading some of the reactions to his argument, I pretty quickly saw that a lot of people fundamentally misunderstood—or maybe also intentionally misunderstood—what he was up to and accused him of being a proponent of some kind of political idolatry, or national self-worship. I knew this wasn’t at all what he intended, but it made it quite clear to me that one had to draw some sort of a conceptual distinction between what he wanted to call civil religion and then something else, which I decided was best called religious nationalism. Eventually, I started to conceptualize civil religion as a mediating tradition in between two other alternative traditions within American political culture, the third being some form of radical secularism. The easiest way to conceptualize it is to imagine religion and politics as separate fields or arenas, and there’s an ongoing argument about what the proper relationship between them should be. It re-erupted most recently in reactions against Rick Santorum’s remarks about the JFK speech. You can imagine three basic modalities: these spheres are completely separate, they’re completely fused, or somewhere in between. There’s some sort of overlap or tension between them. So that’s the sort of underlying thought for these three different traditions: civil religion, radical secularism, and religious nationalism. But of course that’s a very formal way of thinking about it. One has to think about this more substantively, as well. I guess what I realized when thinking about religious nationalism is that it draws on a very different set of texts. So it draws in particular on the kind of blood sacrifice and apocalyptic tropes within the Hebrew and Christian scriptures; it draws on tales of conquest in the Pentateuch or Kings; it draws on the apocalyptic prophecies in Daniel and the book of Revelation. Civil religion, by contrast, draws much more on the prophetic tradition: the Hebrew prophets proper, and one can certainly put Jesus in that same group in certain ways—you can see him as part of that prophetic tradition. The other difference is that civil religion also draws on a non-theistic tradition, which is civil republicanism—something that had been rediscovered in American political culture during the 60s when Bellah was writing the civil religion book, and it finds its way into his argument. So in essence, I agree with Bellah about what the two central threads of the civil religious tradition are: there’s a prophetic tradition within the Bible and civic republicanism as it grows out of the American Revolution. Where I diverge from him is in trying to be much clearer that this is not the only tradition, but that we need to think about there being at least three competing and sometimes opposing traditions for thinking about the proper relationship of religion and politics in the United States.

JB: And what can this tell us about civil religion in American today?

PG: The contemporary relevance of this is fairly clear. Our current politics is in many ways defined by the people on the edges, by radical secularists on the Left and religious nationalists on the Right. Not to say that this is all that’s going on in American politics, but if you take this religious slice of it, I think that’s a lot of it, with the culture wars and so on. The two feed off one another to a certain degree. The radical secularists become a stand-in for anybody who’s on the Left and anybody who’s not the religious nationalists, and the radical religious nationalists become a stand-in for everybody who’s religious. When people look at religious people from the Left, you get this kind of undifferentiated and polarizing picture, so there is this rather unfortunate synergy between the two positions. That’s the political thrust of the project, to say that there is this other mediating tradition. It doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody’s just going to get along, but at least there is a tradition that might actually bring people together again into more of a common argument. I think one of the big discoveries of this that’s also most relevant to the present is the way in which the conservative movement in the last few years has completely written equality out of the American political tradition. It’s actually quite foundational. I think the tension between liberty and equality is one of the defining tensions of the American political tradition, and people disagreed about how to define equality. Certainly political conservatives tended to define it more narrowly. They had a very narrow understanding of equality and opportunity, but they didn’t pretend that it was unimportant. Now if you listen to the rhetoric of many political conservatives, all they talk about is liberty: liberty, liberty, liberty. It’s quite amazing to think how much of an impact that a once-fringe group of libertarians has had on the conservative movement. This also involves a very particular reading of the founding documents, for example. It’s not coincidental that they constantly cite the Constitution and not the Preamble to the Constitution, and surely not the Preamble to the Declaration, which is where the values of national solidarity, “We the people,” and equality, “Created equal,” are to be found. These are the governing principles of the American tradition; the Preambles express the higher aspirations. There’s this kind of originalist, literalist reading of these documents, which of course resonates with a certain kind of scriptural hermeneutic for a lot of these people, too. This is also of course the way that they read the Bible. Part of the more immediate political message of the book will be to reclaim and to reassert equality as one of the central values of the American republic.

JB: In Montreal in 2009, I had the good fortune to go to the AAR [American Academy of Religion] panel that you were on with David Kim, David Morgan, and Ebrahim Moosa. Among you and the other panelists, there was optimistic talk about Obama’s role in civil religion, but the tone was tentative. I’m wondering now if you think Obama’s been able to establish a new rhetoric of this kind of civil religion that you’re talking about.

PG: Definitely not. I, like a lot of people, have seen some of my higher hopes disappointed. I think that’s just what happens in politics, and it’s a good reason not to invest all of your hopes and all of your energies in politics. There is a sort of curious way in which I think some of the jibes from the Right were correct about the almost messianic fervor around Obama at the time. I was talking with a conservative colleague a couple of weeks ago, and he told this very funny joke: “I hear the Obama team is actually in Jerusalem. Oh, really; what are they doing? Oh, they’re visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. What is it that they’re doing there? Well, they’re actually trying to get a burial plot for Obama. You’re kidding. They actually want to have him buried there, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher? Yeah, that’s what they’d like. Is this going to work out? Well, they had to do a lot of hard negotiating, but in the end, they worked it out. Well, what were the terms? It’ll cost a billion dollars. They reported this back to the President, and he wasn’t entirely on board. He said, ‘A billion dollars? Just for two nights?’”

JB: [Laughs]

PG: It’s true that I think there were some messianic hopes invested in Obama, and a lot of folks, including myself, were swept up in that. But on the other hand, I think without that kind of over-reach in our aspirations, you never get anywhere. I’m not as critical of his administration as a lot of people are. I think he basically hasn’t done much that I wouldn’t have expected him to do. There are certainly some disappointments. Guantanamo was certainly a big one. But a lot of this just turned out to be much harder than he realized, or than any of us thought. Within the constraints of American politics and the world we live in, I think he’s done a reasonably good job. In terms of the civil religious tradition, I think part of the problem there that I’ve come to realize is that the prophet is actually somebody who’s supposed to stand outside of politics. The prophet’s not supposed to, him or herself, be somebody who’s an actual political actor. This has always created a performative contradiction for American presidents, in enacting the discourse of civil religion. The way that it’s usually been handled consciously or unconsciously is by creating a fairly sharp divide between certain occasions: campaign speeches and the high ritual of events like the State of the Union and the Inaugural Address, where they speak much more in poetry. But you can’t talk like that all the time and govern, I don’t think. So it’s actually quite difficult to manage that from a purely performative standpoint. I guess the bigger question it raises is, “Why do there seem to be fewer voices,” or, “Why are the voices that are out there that do speak in this kind of prophetic tradition not being heard?” The carrier of that tradition for the last hundred years has been the Black Church. I’m no expert on this. I just throw this out there. There are people like Cornel West, for example, who continue to try to keep this alive, but are there younger voices that we don’t know about? Are they just not getting heard? America’s becoming a more complicated place, a more pluralistic place. Clearly there would have to be voices. You can’t expect this aging generation of Civil Rights leaders to do the heavy lifting forever.

JB: This leads to an interesting question: who’s going to take up the mantle of theology? In your essay in The Post-Secular in Question, you ask, “What’s the role of sociology?” Your answer is that it could be a moral science that recovers the idea of “the good.” What would that moral sociology look like? Is there a relationship that you see between the creation of a civil religion and the creation of a sociology that’s more concerned with the good?

PG: That would certainly be a hope of mine, and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a great deal lately, whether there’s a limited kind of moral realism that we could defend, and that we might actually be able to contribute to through social science or at least through academic reflection of some kind or another? My suspicion is that there is; I just don’t know what the scope of it is. It would have to be premised on some understanding of human flourishing—that human beings are put together biologically, neurologically, in a certain way—that they have certain kinds of capacities or propensities—that their flourishing and well-being in general involves the development and cultivation of these propensities and capacities. Of course I’m simply channeling a lot of research that’s being done in neighboring fields. There’s recent work in positive psychology, for example, which is starting to get a great deal of attention by people like Jonathan Haidt and Marty Seligman. There’s a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition that people like Martha Nussbaum and Richard Kraut have revived and defended in recent years. Even some folks like Amartya Sen have tried to make a basis for a different way of thinking about economics and development policy. So the question is, “How do you develop a theory of the human good which doesn’t become a kind of hardened dogma, a sort of a one-size-fits-all understanding of what a life well-lived is going to mean?” We don’t live in Athens anymore. We live in a much more diverse, much more egalitarian, much freer society. Clearly there has to be a great deal of room for people to act freely. Part of flourishing is also making mistakes and learning and developing, so it’s not the idea that you simply prescribe some kind of a lifestyle. I think this notion that Nussbaum has developed, a kind of capacities approach to justice—that you need to create a basic set of preconditions for people to explore their own particular talents, capacities, inclinations—that that probably strikes the right balance between liberalism and a more robust form of moral realism. I think where sociology might contribute to this is in thinking harder about how you create the preconditions for the sorts of social connections and communities that are clearly part of human flourishing. We know that this is one of the clear results of recent work in positive psychology: that relationships to other people are critical. There’s a lot of confirmation for this in evolutionary biology and psychology, the mounting evidence of pro-social characteristics of human beings. But most of these disciplines are really focused on the human organism, or they’re focused on the human psyche. They don’t really think deeply about the social, per se, so this is where sociology might actually step in and make some kind of a contribution to this, I think. But I expect there’ll be a lot of resistance. One of the first things that you learn in graduate school in the social sciences is about the fact/value distinction, that there is no way of knowing or discovering what’s good. I don’t think people really believe that. I think that’s why most people go to graduate school, because they think this will help them answer these kinds of questions. But you get professionalized and socialized out of this during your first few years in graduate school. It’s salutary to the degree that we learn to establish a certain kind of reflexive distance to our tacit assumptions about what’s good, but I think the next step is to return to those basic practical questions that really animate people and get them interested in academic life and scholarship in the first place.

JB: That’s really interesting. So in some ways it’s breaking down the limits of what an objective science can discuss. It makes me think of the ways in which sociology and economics can articulate with people who do governance. I can’t help but think about this sociology of the good as theology for technocrats, or something like that.

PG: [Laughs] Right.

JB: Do you think there’s any way to push an agenda through sociology that could speak to something much broader, or are we very insular in the way we work with disciplines, in the way that, in a Weberian sense, we compartmentalize our society, secularize it?

PG: I guess I would say two things. First, I think one of the theological virtues that any technocrat would have to learn first is some measure of humility. [Laughs] Yeah, I think perhaps one of the most important things is to make room for people who do work that’s more publicly engaged. Again, there’s a lot of resistance to this, sometimes motivated by resentment of people who get attention from the wider public or have some kind of non-academic success. It’s not to say that you can go to the other extreme. I don’t think that everybody in the academy should suddenly become some kind of activist or public intellectual. There has to be some sort of balance struck between the autonomy of the scientific community and its engagement with the public, which is probably difficult to maintain. It certainly seems to me that this is a moment where there is a lot of academic capital or knowledge that’s been stored up within the research university, which just gets ignored, gets drowned out. Nobody pays any attention to it. This is partly an institution-building question, too, of course. It’s not just a matter of a particular individual deciding, “I’m going to speak to the broader public.” Well that’s not going to get you heard. You have to figure out ways to reach a broader public, and that’s a huge problem in and of itself, obviously. Non-academic intellectuals have figured this out.

JB: I wonder if we can talk about Émile Durkheim a little bit. In that same essay on recovering the good for sociology, you talk about Aristotle’s influence on Durkheim. If Durkheim is this figure at the birth of sociology, and he’s able to influence government and morality and science in the Third Republic, is there anything in Durkheim that we should be thinking about now, that we can use to create a sociology that’s more concerned with the good, or eudemonia? What can we take from Durkheim?

PG: That’s a very good question. Certainly one thing that I would say, which is an obvious point to make about Durkheim and civic life, is the importance of different forms of collective ritual. That’s something of which there’s actually very little in the United States. To some degree, I think this is just a long-term influence of a culture shaped by dissenting Protestantism, which is very leery of ritual and representation of any kind, which has an iconoclastic MO. But ritual is important. Going back to civil religion and the Obama campaign, that was part of what generated the excitement. We all know about the big crowds that turned out, the rallies, and the stadium events. For a lot of people, that was one of the first times that they had really experienced a kind of classic collective effervescence, in Durkheim’s terms, in a political arena. It used to be that there were a lot more of these political rituals in US culture, and they’ve really declined over the last forty or fifty years. I know it sounds kind of hokey, but it probably wouldn’t be a bad thing, for example, if there were some kind of National Service Day, where as many people as possible pledged to volunteer a day of their time to do something for the community. Or if there were more opportunities for young people, for example, to do something like Americorps, that there were forms of involvement in service that weren’t just military service, which kind of defines what we talk about. “Have you served your country?” That tacitly means, “Have you been in the military?” That’s fine; it’s one way of serving your country. But I worry sometimes that it’s kind of the only one.

JB: You framed your concern about the lack of collective ritual within the past forty or fifty years, and I think collective effervescence is a very nice way to put it. But even in some of the critiques of Bellah’s civil religion, there’s a fear about interwar and WWII Germany. How do you avoid the idolatry of nationalism, and how do you find a civil religion that’s not idolatrous?

PG: The civil religion that’s not idolatrous is one that’s prophetic in the sense that it sees the American project as defined by a set of ideals, as opposed to being defined by a set of accomplishments. So if you imagine America as this great nation which has achieved all of these things, and you list all of the things that it’s achieved, in a way you’re already a little bit on the slippery slope toward idolatry. That always has to be held in balance with a recognition of how often and how much the US falls short of its central ideals that are part of the project. The United States, because it’s a nation of immigrants and because it’s so deeply pluralistic, can’t be defined in terms of some shared background culture or in terms of some kind of ethno-national descent. It’s not Sweden, where they can disagree, but at the end of the day, they’re still Swedes. The only way in which you can really have any kind of coherence to an American project is to have it based around some set of ideals. But one has to always be somewhat critical. I think the real danger sign that you’re slipping toward some form of potentially dangerous state idolatry is when you start to hear too much about blood and blood sacrifice. This is a very dangerous kind of rhetoric, which one hears inevitably in times of war and conflict. It tends to redefine national belonging in the United States around race, around lineage, clearly to exclude more recent immigrant groups. That, I think, is the danger, where an attempt at a civil theology can degenerate into some kind of state idolatry.

JB: With the time we have left, maybe I can ask you about your experiences writing for The Immanent Frame. When you answered my first question, you talked about how that’s been productive, and I wonder if you can reflect on that a little bit.

PG: I would have to give a shameless plug for The Immanent Frame. I’ve posted on it three times, and two times it’s led to major publication invitations. It’s very clear to me that The Immanent Frame does fulfill a little bit this function we were talking about earlier, interfacing to some degree between a broader public and the scholarly community. I realize it’s not people all over America waking up, and the first thing they do is click on The Immanent Frame, but clearly there are folks in the world of journalism and publishing and public policy who tune in occasionally and look at what’s going on. So it does perform a really great function. I think it’s been great. It’s been highly successful. I am one of these guys who reads it almost every day, just to sort of see what’s new. It’s endlessly interesting.

JB: Have you ever assigned any articles from The Immanent Frame to students, or has it ended up on a syllabus yet? Or is that domain still for peer-reviewed articles?

PG: That’s an interesting suggestion. The answer is, no, I haven’t done that, but I probably should think about doing that. I do mention it to people, graduate students and undergraduate students who have a broad set of interests in religion and politics that The Immanent Frame tends to talk about. And I do know graduate students who read it, too. That’s a good idea because a lot of these things would be very good vehicles for discussion in an undergraduate seminar or lecture class. I’ll take that under advisement.

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.

Given that “religious freedom” seems to be a troubling concept at the moment, it might be worth returning for a moment to the 1950s, to mark the difference between then and now, if only to highlight the contours of what we now take to be obviously and empirically identifiable as “religious pluralism.” The 1950s was an era of many things—the Beats, the Cold War, and bestsellers like Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale, a psychologist and Christian minister, boldly proclaimed that Americans could experience a better life (more friends, more money, more happiness) by cultivating a positive mindset. The book was widely panned, but Peale was very much of his time: as he wrote, everyone—no matter their creed or religion—could benefit from positive thinking. All Americans could do as the first chapter implores: “Believe in Yourself!”

Peale’s book features as an important exhibit in Will Herberg’s 1955 Protestant-Catholic-Jew. Herberg used the popularity of positive thinkers such as Peale as evidence that the social and political forces of sectarian difference were waning. Postwar America brought Protestants, Catholics, and Jews together in new ways—in suburban enclaves, in public schools, and on the factory floor. Herberg’s analysis of religious pluralism and “the American Way” echoed classical Durkheimian and Weberian articulations of secularization. Along with Peter Berger (The Sacred Canopy) and Robert Bellah (“Civil Religion in America”), Herberg extended and confirmed classical theories’ understanding that religion’s privatization (institutionally and individually) coupled with new social interactions among multiple religious individuals contributed to secularization. In the American case, they noted, individuals’ beliefs were increasingly private and atomized (“believe in yourself!”), yet nominal religious identity remained an important marker of the true scope of religious pluralism in American democracy. Or, as Herberg put it, Protestant-Catholic-Jewish pluralism revealed the religion of America to be democracy itself: the plurality of religions points to a “common faith” called democracy, itself the “religion of religions.”

Today, this analysis of religious pluralism sounds archaic, if it is noted at all. Today, sociologists who study religious pluralism in the United States observe robust religious differences and a plurality of observable groups. The shift is significant, particularly in its implications for how we think about religious “freedom.”

Why did this shift happen? The usual answer is that religion changed. It had been private, but it became public. Something “happened.” Given the benefit of hindsight, many scholars now find the story of radical upheaval in the 1960′s as the engine behind this shift to be incomplete or misleading. But that said, sociologists working at the time observed “religion” working in ways that they had not predicted, and which demanded theoretical revision. Of the many alternatives proposed, the “religious economies” model rose to the fore as the strongest alternative and revision to secularization theory.

Religious economies models focused particularly on the question of pluralization of religions and its effects on religious participation. In a marked turn from classical theory, this model’s proponents argued that religious plurality and vibrancy is a natural consequence of limited or absent state regulation of religion. In the United States, therefore, religious vibrancy can be explained as the consequence of religious groups operating in a religious free market, one made possible (or perhaps better put, revealed within) the First Amendment. Where state regulation is absent, religious groups are free to organize as they wish, and rise or fall based on their abilities to appeal to religious consumers. Religious economies models borrow explicitly from the Chicago School of economics. So, in this model a rational, voluntary, religious actor will consistently seek out the religious option with the compensatory system that best suits her. Individual religious freedom is maximized in a religious marketplace where multiple firms exist. Competition has the effect of increasing religious vitality and fervor rather than marking its decline, and creating an ongoing religious equilibrium. Thus, as the argument goes, a plurality of Protestants—Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists, even Mormons—vie for members. Over time, the losing firms are those who can’t attract or hold members, and the ultimate winners are all those people who can maximize their religious potentials in a firm of their choosing.

This is all well and good, detractors note (and there have been many critics). Except, however, for the fact that this free market model also generates a whole bunch of religious losers. These are the people that are not playing the game at all, or are not playing it very well. Jews and Catholics, slaves, Native Americans, and so many others are difficult to place into the religious economies models. Not surprisingly, they often appear to be differently and often not adequately religious (or, by extension, even adequately American).

The illusion of the free market is the subject of Bernard Harcourt’s recent genealogical critique of the Chicago School of economics. As he argues, the concept of the naturally regulating, universal free market recurs in multiple generations of free market economic thought. Where the market is conceptualized as naturally existing, he notes, regulation becomes an enemy: the state’s meddling poses a threat to the naturally developing and self-regulating equilibrium. But this is not all, of course, for as he notes, the self-regulating free market also is threatened by those actors who are not able to self-regulate—those economic actors who are not free and rational, for example. Whether they refuse to act as proper self-regulating economic actors or because they cannot do so, they become unnatural actors. Thus, even as regulation threatens market equilibrium, it nonetheless plays an important role in policing and regulating those actors. The state can protect, rehabilitate, regulate, or penalize them. Harcourt argues, in short, that one of the effects of the logic of the free market is to designate those economic actors who are free of the need for regulation and those who are not so free.

We can take the analogical step to consider how Harcourt’s observation may relate to free market religion. Religious economies models view the failures of various religious groups to participate in the market as problems inherent in the groups themselves—failures, for example, to cast off religious peculiarities so that they can participate in the thriving religious commerce of modern democracies, and real, “free” religiosity. They rarely if ever point to problems that might be inherent in the market itself: that it might not be as free as they imagine, or that it might in fact be regulated, or regulating.

I am hardly the first one to point to the limitations to the religious economies models. As I have noted, the criticisms have been legion. But none of these serious critiques have stuck. One has to wonder, why not?

One reason, I believe, is that even the staunchest critics of the religious economies models share its basic premise—namely that a plurality of religious groups indicates the presence of religious freedom, and that this freedom furthermore indicates the presence of democracy. While it is explicitly articulated in the religious economies model, it is embedded as an operating premise in almost every recent analysis of religious pluralism.

Take, for example, scholars who analyze religious pluralism with institutional models. Sociologically speaking, an institutional model identifies organizational fields (for example, religious, financial, educational, or the like) that are so designated because of the various laws, regulations, cultural norms, and professional rituals that both define its legitimate actors and enable their functioning and coordination. Various regulations and norms operate within and at the boundaries of fields, and have the effect of shaping (or demanding) some measure of conformity by all actors who participate within them. As such, an institutional approach both calls attention to a field’s norms and regulations and to the cultural rituals and habits that normalize them. We could imagine that the study of a religious field, then, would identify the norms of “freedom” shaping actors’ views of their position within a field, and the legal and social structures that demand conformity to them. Altogether, it seems that sociologists drawing on these models would be well positioned to challenge the illusion of the free religious marketplace.

But surprisingly, this is not what we hear. Instead, sociologists who use this theoretical frame nonetheless maintain that the field of American religion is free, both from state control and state support. They likewise argue that the salutary effects of this freedom are such that new entrants to the field are uniquely able to determine their own, “authentic” spirituality. No one compels them to be other than what they truly can be: naturally free religions, able to interact peacefully with each other. As one of the fiercest critics of the rational actor model thus argues, religious groups are “free to find … fertile soil or perish.” In the United States, “each group could embody its religious impulses in the pragmatic organizations that the American experiment made possible. It was a system born of the Protestant impulse, but nurtured in the pragmatic and pluralist democracy of the United States.”

In America, religion finally comes into its own, in all of its manifest plurality. Insofar as religious groups willingly submit to freedom, they certainly change. But their transformation is not into an American norm but into freedom itself. This regulation is self-evident and natural. The free market allows—and in fact trains—religious groups to be free: to cast off the cultural and political baggage or problematic connections to other parts of life. What we confront in these theories, and what ties them together, is much less a theoretical frame of pluralism than a political doctrine of freedom.

Two things are thus worth pondering at greater length than this forum allows. First, we can consider the consequences of our current concept of religious freedom. Our public discourse has, for a host of reasons, abandoned an earlier vision of religious pluralism that focused on the private religiosity of individuals, and that was designated by the shared language of a civil religion or spirituality (and which as even Herberg noted, is so easily transformed into the nightmarish, anti-democratic transgression of religious nationalism). Rhetorically and politically, we need our religions to be more clearly identifiable than that. In order for religions to be free, they must be differentiated, both from each other and, more importantly, from the elements of society that would regulate them and keep them from being free. Except that, as Harcourt’s examples would remind us, this freedom is an illusion. Much like the “positive thinking” of Norman Vincent Peale, our pluralist thinking hides the mechanisms through which we recognize religions as free or many, and hides the reasons why we find those evaluations useful or necessary.

Second, the “new” sociologies of religion claim to have successfully challenged secularization theory, but it is clear that most sociologists working in this framework now cling even more tightly to one of its central tenets: differentiation. In fact, we could argue that our current political and sociological uses of pluralism depend upon—and demand evidence of—religion’s differentiation from other parts of social life. It is only through differentiation that religion is free. This “fact” of theory and empirical work itself demands further exploration of the twinned and complex visions of religious toleration and economic freedom embedded deeply in liberal political theory, from Locke and Smith to Mill and beyond.

For if the power of the positive religious thinking embedded in religious economies models highlights anything, it is that our concepts of free markets and free religions are tied in deep ways, and not only analogically. I doubt that embarking on a historical or genealogical project will allow us to shed the pluralist thinking that inhabits us. But we might be in a better position to observe and speak of its effects.

Readers interested in Bellah’s work obviously remember his 1964 paper on “Religious Evolution” (Jonathan Z. Smith gave us an interesting reading of the differences between the two works), and some may even know that he wrote a first draft of that essay while in Montreal in 1956—that is, 55 years before he published Religion in Human Evolution. Students of Bellah also know that his undergraduate course on the sociology of religion always included a historical section in which two or more world religions were compared to show the development of religious symbols, actions, and organizations within different societal and cultural contexts. In fact, Bellah’s attempt at casting a theoretical narrative of the evolution of major religions was never just an academic topic or an intellectual interest: it was the task he assigned himself at the very beginning of his scholarly journey.

As Talcott Parsons’s beloved student at the Department of Social Relations at Harvard in the 1950s, Bellah was subject to high expectations—one could even say the highest of expectations—as his teacher considered him to be the best theorist he had ever had among his students. As he internalized these expectations as one of the keystones of his self-image as a top-achieving intellectual, Bellah devised for himself an ambitious scholarly program. A couple of quotes from a letter sent by Parsons to Harvard President Nathan Pusey on January 24, 1961, will suffice to illustrate the point. In his note Parsons described his 32-year-old colleague as “a special modern variant of the older style of universal scholar,” and spoke of Bellah having “developed a life plan of research” of “comparative historical studies of the relations between religion and society in the areas of the principal great world religions.” According to Parsons, in order to accomplish this “basic program of scholarship” Bellah had equipped himself with an astonishing amount of historical and theoretical knowledge, and the outcome of his inquiry was going to be of primary importance from both a scholarly and a practical point of view. As early as 1961, Bellah had pledged himself to a lifelong agenda that greatly exceeded his published work on East Asia and modernization.

This personal commitment—which one may all too easily evoke with Puritan ideals of “duty” and “calling”—explains, at least partly, why Bellah went back to his original plan after thirty years of silence on evolutionary matters. As most readers know, Bellah’s long “holiday” was due to the unexpected success of his 1967 essay “Civil Religion in America,” which brought him away from his earlier concerns and made him into a specialist in American religion and politics; this second phase of his career reached its peak with the publication of two co-authored books, Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, which firmly established him as a public intellectual. After his retirement from UC Berkeley in 1997, Bellah went back to his roots and, even if he has never given up writing on American matters, he successfully resumed his original plan and brought it to a (provisional) end. I will return to the relationship between Bellah, the American civil religion, and Religion in Human Evolution in a moment.

The roots of Bellah’s “life plan of research” also help to make sense of some of the basic theoretical decisions he took forty years later. As the readers of Religion in Human Evolution know, for example, the book unexpectedly starts…from the start, that is, from the Big Bang and the origin of the universe. Even if the strictly non-sociological stuff fills barely 40 pages within a 700-page book, some critics have paid it a disproportionate degree of attention, often without trying to understand its place within the wider line of reasoning; one such critic is, regrettably enough, Alan Wolfe, who in his New York Times book review wrote: “I never thought I would read a work in the sociology of religion that contained a discussion of prokaryotes and eukaryotes. I now have.” In the book, Bellah vindicates his comprehensive and deep narrative out of a more general sense of universal connection, according to which “we, as modern humans trying to understand this human practice we call religion, need to situate ourselves in the broadest context we can, and it is with scientific cosmology that we must start.”

From the point of view of the sociology of ideas, this strategy might be seen as both a homage to a venerable sociological tradition—going all the way back to Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer and the incredibly vast array of interests of 19th-century sociology—and as an attempt to bring Talcott Parsons’s work to a higher level of complexity and explicative power. Many may not know, but Parsons was a biology major and remained a voracious reader all his life, eager to make almost everything fit inside his signature “theory of social action.” Given Parsons’s charismatic personality and influence, these interests repeatedly impacted the members of his inner circle. Edward Tiryakian, who was a graduate student at Harvard in the mid-1950s together with Bellah, told me an anecdote about Parsons’s interest in decidedly non-sociological themes that I would like to share: “In one of his discussions… [Parsons] was talking about the evolution of species. So he looked at people and he said: ‘Do you realize the evolutionary significance of the worm having a hole from mouth to anus?’ And he looked at people. Now what do you do when Parsons looks at you? People just went,‘Wow!’” Twenty years later, when Bellah had found his own scholarly voice and only tangentially participated in the development of Parsonian theory, Parsons tried to make sense of the whole human condition devising a comprehensive AGIL (Adaptation, Goal Attainment, Integration, Latency) scheme covering almost everything from the ultimate ground of the “telic system” to the material (i.e. chemical and physical) bases of all living systems. This time the audience’s reaction was much different from Tiryakian’s “wow,” as Parsons had irreparably gone out of fashion and his more mature efforts went almost unnoticed outside the circle of his disciples and connoisseurs.

Parsons, however, was saying something of the utmost importance: reality is an almost endless succession of levels and layers, each one emerging from simpler ones—whatever “simpler” means in this context—and giving rise to more complex ones, which possess new, emerging properties. Likewise, Bellah’s point is that biological, psychological, social, and cultural structures combine without any clear causal primacy in creating new capacities upon which further changes build endlessly. Within this framework, religion as a distinctive societal sphere of symbols, practices, and institutions both draws on capacities developed elsewhere and shapes other orders of reality. Bellah’s analysis of the interplay between religious action and the social structure(s) and psychological factors that focused attention on a single leader—a development that in turn allowed the shift from tribal to archaic religion—is, from my point of view, one of the most electrifying sections of the book. Incidentally, this also means that, pace Smith, the burden of mechanism, agency, bearer, and so on never falls entirely upon “the biological” or “the genus Homo.” As a matter of fact, Bellah’s use of Merlin Donald’s typology becomes fully clear when evolution starts to take place outside the human organism (and the human brain)—that is when, after the invention of writing and the creation of external memory, societal and cultural forms become full and irreplaceable partners of human evolution. At the end of the day, and pace Wolfe, the point is that the non-sociological stuff is there precisely so that the sociological and anthropological can properly shine without any reductionistic innuendo.

This also explains why it might be pointless to look for any strictly sociological mechanism in Bellah’s book. As David Martin has noticed, there is no Spencer—and no L. T. Hobhouse, Gerhard Lenski, or W. G. Runciman—in Religion in Human Evolution. Émile Durkheim’s evolutionary thinking is wholly absent, and general models such as the differentiation and re-integration process sketched by Parsons in Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives are nowhere to be found. Martin is right in saying that Bellah is not even interested in tracing the diffusion of ideas or roles; that is, in the historical paths that bring society from one kind to another. In both regards, Religion in Human Evolution might be compared with another exceptional sociological work, Niklas Luhmann’s Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft , which included a neo-Darwinian evolutionary model based on the variation, selection, and stabilization of adaptive characteristics. The model, however, was not applied to explain the shifts between the four main forms of societal differentiation (segmentary, center-periphery, stratificatory, and functional differentiation): according to Luhmann, all social science could say was that only a handful of types of society have existed in human history and that the basic structures of social systems never emerge or change randomly. Luhmann’s, as well as Bellah’s, silence about historical change in general should not be mistaken for lack of scholarship or courage: on the contrary, it comes from a lucid understanding of the promises and the limits of theory vis-à-vis the study of individual historical facts and processes that takes Parsons’s tendency to over-theorize seriously and tries to find a way to transcend its shortcomings.

The story of Robert Bellah and Religion in Human Evolution can thus be told as the quest a hero had to bring to an end against all odds and impediments, and as the dutiful effort of a metaphorical son to resume and further the work of his metaphorical father within a long line of ancestors—even putting the clear Weberian inspiration aside, Bellah’s decision to go back to pre-axial and axial-age civilizations after a life of work on modernity and modernization might be read as parallel to Durkheim’s decision to focus on Australian aboriginals after The Division of Labor in Society and Suicide, a choice that Bellah himself once interpreted as a journey into the unconscious sources of social existence analogous to Freud’s work on dreams.

But I would like to conclude by telling the story once again as an attempt to finally break a spell. As I said above, the major obstacle between Bellah and the completion of his life-task was the success of his 1967 essay, “Civil Religion in America,” and his decision to engage in the discussion on American politics, morality, and religion for the following thirty years. This proved to be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, thanks to the American civil religion debate Bellah became a renowned and respected intellectual within the academic world and the wider public sphere; on the other hand, the strict identification of all his efforts with that famous essay was, at times, hard to bear, especially when his ideas or interests changed and he wanted to break new ground. As it happens with famous actors or singers, Bellah had been typecast and remained trapped in the gilded cage of success. Moreover, as he came to learn after some attempts to disengage himself from the identification with “Civil Religion in America”—in the late 1970s Bellah even stopped using the phrase “civil religion”—labels are hard to remove. After an interlude when he was mainly acknowledged as the author of Habits of the Heart, Bellah was again tied to “Civil Religion in America.” Religion in Human Evolution might then be read as an attempt to break the American civil religion spell forever—Bellah has put on our desks a larger-than-life work that dwarfs everything he did and wrote in his long, extraordinary career. I would make a fool of myself by saying that the main thrust beyond Bellah’s latest work is the resentment of the unappreciated intellectual. No need to call Nietzsche into question: I am just saying that besides the aspiration to bring his self-assigned life plan of research to an end, Bellah might have had another, all too human, desire to fulfill.

At the heart of great scholarly and literary works stands a handful of delicate threads connecting erudition, creativity, commitment, and a dense, meaningful life. I have tried to show some of these threads, and in so doing I narrated a couple of stories that make no justice to the theoretical argument of Religion in Human Evolution, and that might disappoint its readers. All I can say is that, just like anything else, they are simply small pieces of a much bigger and intricate mosaic.

But writing for an audience that includes non-specialists and specialists alike—and specialists from many different fields at that—risks raising expectations for what we will cover. Jon Butler, for example, takes us to task for not including enough history; Molly Worthen suggests that we need more theology. Similarly, other reviewers have called for more constitutional law, political philosophy, and organizational sociology. Not to mention the members of many different religious groups who have written to ask why their group—the Quakers, say, or the Eastern Orthodox—are not featured more prominently. We readily concede that American Grace does not cover all of these subjects in depth. Perhaps, however, other authors will build on the themes, arguments, and data of American Grace to examine these other subjects in greater detail. And one of us (Campbell) is currently engaged in another project to go deep in examining one such topic discussed at length by Jon Butler—Mormonism.

David Hollinger, in contrast, does not call for anything, but instead hints at a lament for the state of religion as we describe it. We have been struck by his comment that the form of religion we describe is “bland” or, more pointedly, that blurred religious boundaries mean that Americans do not take their religion very seriously. Other critics, too, have commented on the tolerant religiosity described in American Grace, but unlike Hollinger, argued that such a religion is hardly worthy of the name. Wilfred McClay, writing in the Wall Street Journal, noted that “Surely there is something ironic about preferring a form of religion that asks us to admire and study the great prophets and preachers while warning us against imitating them and their true-believing faith.” Like Hollinger, theologian Charles Mathewes accepts our empirical description of American religion, but unlike Hollinger, he rejects the idea that “bland is beautiful.” In a panel discussion at the 2011 American Academy of Religion annual meeting Mathewes argued that “American Grace is very bad news for American religion and civic life, because churches seem unable to offer a thick counter-narrative to contemporary society.”

If Americans do not take their religion all that seriously, or fail to insist on its superiority to other religions, does this mean that religion has lost its ability to inspire change—either for individuals or society as a whole? Of all the questions to arise in the commentary surrounding American Grace, this is perhaps the most interesting, important and, ultimately, impossible to answer. Have we reached the end of prophetic religion? Is ecumenism ineluctably unable to stir souls? Must a prophetic religion be intolerant of those who disagree? Our own history suggests not. The civil rights movement certainly involved a prophetic call for personal and social reform, yet united Americans of many different faiths. America would be a meaner place without the recurrent challenge to accepted ways that religiously-rooted social movements have posed throughout our history, but we’re unconvinced that prophetic religion is intrinsically incompatible with religious pluralism.

It would be churlish of us to offer point-by-point responses to such thoughtful and generous commentaries. But one point has come up in the discussion of American Grace, including the essays of both Worthen and Butler, that warrants a reply. Both raise a red flag over the following sentence in the book:

The First Amendment to the Constitution says that Congress shall pass no law to curtail the free exercise of religion, but these sparse words do not fully reflect the way in which religious diversity is encoded in America’s national DNA.

In a recent symposium on American Grace, another commentator suggested that there are historians waiting to attack us in a dark alley because of this line, and that we probably regret ever having written it.

To the contrary, we have no regrets—although we have both decided to avoid dark alleys, at least when we know there might be historians around. At the risk of straining a metaphor to the breaking point, our point is simply that just as humans have a genetic code that shapes, but does not determine, their growth and development, so too was America set on a path that eventually led to our current state of—relative—religious harmony. For the Founders, religious diversity might have meant Presbyterians and Episcopalians, but the constitutional architecture they designed has enabled the conditions for harmony among a much wider array of religions. While constitutional guarantees are undoubtedly a necessary cause of religious tolerance, they probably are not sufficient. This is not a story of nature only; nurture mattered too. The constitutional prohibitions on the establishment of religion and wide protection for the free exercise of religion have interacted with other features of American society—immigration, civil society, public schools, the Cold War—to bring us to the point where, to borrow again from the language of genetics, the latent potential for religious tolerance has been “expressed.” None of this is to ignore the deadly manifestations of bigotry directed toward specific religious groups in America’s past, nor the current (albeit muted) antagonism toward Muslims, Mormons, and atheists. Just as our genes do not determine our destiny, these examples remind us that America’s DNA does not guarantee religious tolerance.

In his essay Torpey reminds us of the tensions arising from Islam’s presence in America, obviously a flashpoint of controversy for the current state of inter-religious relations. We say only a little about the public’s attitudes toward Muslims in American Grace but are now able to say more. Since the publication of our book we have collected another round of data, by returning to the same people we interviewed in 2006 and 2007. (Results from our latest round are soon to be published as an epilogue in the forthcoming paperback edition of American Grace). In this latest survey we dug deeper into Americans’ feelings about Muslims, by asking our respondents if they would approve of a mosque being built in their neighborhood. For comparison, we also asked how they would feel about a Christian church or Buddhist temple. The results are a classic case of interpretation hinging on perception. On the one hand, one could say that Muslims are welcomed. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say that they would be fine with a mosque in their neighborhood. Yet on the other hand, Muslims are less welcome than Christians or Buddhists. More Americans object to a mosque (35 percent) than a church (8 percent) or Buddhist temple (25 percent).

While it presumably comes as no surprise that a mosque evokes a more negative reaction than other houses of worship, those who—like us—care about the state of inter-religious relations should still be concerned about the negativity toward Muslims. We are even more concerned, however, about the partisan flavor of anti-Muslim feeling. When we employ an arsenal of demographic, social, religious, and political characteristics to predict unease with a mosque, we find that politics matters most. One’s level of religious commitment matters not at all, while there are only slight differences across religious traditions, with evangelicals slightly more opposed to a mosque than anyone else. It is partisanship—whether someone identifies as a Republican or Democrat—that has the biggest impact on attitudes regarding a mosque and thus, by implication, toward Muslims. When holding everything else constant, 56 percent of strong Republicans are bothered by a mosque, compared to 24 percent of strong Democrats. That is a huge gap.

The overlap between partisanship and anti-Muslim sentiment is a potentially explosive combination, especially if opposition to Islam were to become a regular feature of conservative political rhetoric. While, today, such sentiments are only on the fringes of acceptable discourse, more incendiary anti-Islamism might very well inhibit the inter-religious bridging in personal relationships that, for other religious groups, has led to their place in the religious mainstream (cf. Catholics, Jews). Non-Muslims might be reluctant to befriend Muslims, while Muslims might be socially marginalized and thus radicalized.

In other words, there is nothing inevitable about religious tolerance, in spite of the nation’s metaphorical DNA. Mormons are an especially timely example. They are one of the most religiously insular groups in America and, accordingly, face opprobrium in some circles (cf. Mitt Romney).

Our newest data also reveals a second major finding—“creeping secularism”—which also raises questions about the future trajectory of religious tolerance in America. In American Grace we detail the growth in the Nones, the religiously unaffiliated, who are concentrated among younger Americans. Now, with our latest data, we see evidence that the rise in Nonery is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. What we term “the second aftershock” has, in fact, measurably strengthened since the first of our Faith Matters surveys in 2006. Secularism is surging among the Millennial generation. The youngest Americans—18 to 25—are far more secular than even those age 26 to 30. Not only are they the most likely to disclaim a religious affiliation, they are less likely to attend religious services, believe in God, believe in hell, and say that religion is not important in their lives. Young people are drifting, maybe even running, away from religion. And the public has noticed the slow and steady creep of secularism; just in the last five years, more and more Americans report a diminished role for religion in American society.

We also find further evidence for a key claim in American Grace, namely that America’s receding religiosity, especially among the young, is largely due to an allergic reaction to the mixture of religion and conservative politics. As a result, the religious-secular divide has a partisan flavor, suggesting a parallel with the partisan nature of anti-Muslim sentiment.

There is, however, a big difference between attitudes toward Muslims and the non-religious. While only a small percentage of non-Muslim Americans are personally acquainted with a Muslim, a growing percentage of religious Americans know someone who is “not religious”—rising from 44 percent of Americans in 2006 to 51 percent in 2011. Just as homosexuals coming out of the closet and revealing their sexual orientation to family and friends is one cause of the increasing support for gay rights, so too as more secular and even atheist Americans express their views to close acquaintances, tolerance for secularism seeps through the broader population. This degree of bridging seemingly bodes well for the health of relations between religious and secular Americans.

On the other hand, the label of “atheist” remains anathema to most Americans. While younger Americans are more favorable toward atheists than their elders, on average they still view them negatively. Like attitudes toward Muslims, the negative perception of atheists can be explained by the simple fact that very few Americans know a self-described atheist. There just are not that many atheists to go around, although the creeping secularism in American society suggests that their ranks are growing.

Just as growing acceptance of Muslims is not a given, neither should we assume the inevitability of full inclusion for non-religious Americans, whether atheists or not. Mutual tolerance would suffer if heated rhetoric about the “other side” were to separate Americans into religious and secular bunkers. In American Grace, the basic story is that while our politics may be polarized along religious lines, our personal relationships are not. If polarization at the personal level were to replicate the polarization of our politics, hostility would replace acceptance.

How likely is it that America fractures along religious lines? Notwithstanding the alternative scenarios we have described, we are optimistic enough to think that, in time, Mormons, Muslims, and atheists will be fully accepted into the mainstream of American society. But likely is not the same as inevitable.

Which brings us back to public sociology. While our primary objective has been description and explanation of the state of religion in today’s America, we are also willing to offer a prescription. It is our hope that Americans continue to forge interlocking personal relationships across religious—and non-religious—lines. If American Grace nudges its readers toward building more such bridges, so much the better. A house divided cannot stand, no matter our national DNA.

In seven immensely rich and learned chapters Bellah traces the changing forms the production of meaning takes on from tribal to archaic to axial societies. Combining a modified Piagetian model of child development with Merlin Donald’s scheme of cultural evolution, Bellah’s account proposes three stages of development: the tribal mimetic culture, the archaic mythic culture, and the axial theoretic culture. The seven chapters are meant to prove that this scheme is indeed useful, justified, and enlightening. Even if that were not the case, they are all worth reading, especially the four on the axial age in Israel, Greece, China, and India.

Although Bellah claims that this is not a sequence of moral betterment or progress, but only one of expanding capacities, he remains true to his own work over the last half-century as a moralist. In the end, the importance of the axial age lies in the possibility of a universal ethics as well as the emergence of social criticism through either science or utopianism. The axial age in all its varieties lays the foundation for “fundamental human equality” and respect for all human beings. It is hard to imagine that this means for Bellah only an expansion of capacities. However, contrary to approaches that ascribe all these achievements only to the West, Bellah tries to demonstrate that all axial civilizations share them in their own ways.

If the central topic of this book is religion indeed, one cannot avoid asking how Bellah defines it. Ignoring much of the recent debates on the concept of religion, Bellah settles for a somewhat diluted Durkheimian definition, understanding the religious as the other reality that transcends ordinary life. Of course, such a broad notion expands the scope of the book to the study of general modes of consciousness and of worldviews. A narrower definition of religion might have focused on the development of systems of religious thought as they have been institutionalized and expressed in religious practices. But this is not what Bellah chose to do, and here I beg to differ with Richard Madsen’s reading. Although Bellah repeatedly acknowledges the importance of practices, he certainly devotes many more pages to an analysis of philosophies and worldviews than rituals.

Alan Wolfe, in his review, has insightfully noticed Religion in Human Evolution reads at times like a conversation with the late Clifford Geertz. Having been criticized by Geertz after his Chicago lecture in 1963 on “Religious Evolution”(later published in 1964), Bellah tries to persuade Geertz ex post that his criticism was based on a misunderstanding. His evolutionism does not imply any value judgments or ideas of progress, Bellah claims. We do not become superior human beings; only our cognitive capacities expand. One could accept that explanation were there not the celebration of axial consciousness in terms of universal ethics, human equality, and potential for criticism mentioned above and especially the unfortunate parallelism between ontogeny and phylogeny. If “the child” develops in three stages parallel to human evolution, then tribal societies are lagging behind in full development. This seems to imply that adults of tribal societies think like small children in modern societies, and one wonders what “child development” means in tribal societies.

But the problems go even further. Bellah assures us several times that “nothing gets lost,” which means earlier modes of thought don’t disappear, but become integrated in the next phases in good Hegelian fashion. If this is true, what do the often-repeated passages in Bellah’s book, in which he confesses that we have so much to learn from tribal and other societies, actually mean? Moreover, if the axial consciousness of critical thought is widely limited to “intellectuals,” then certain groups and categories of people have not acquired it, which implicitly adds a class and gender dimension to his thesis. I am sure that this is not what Bellah intends to argue, but it is implied in his approach whether or not he wants it.

Like Geertz, I have never been fond of the concept of evolution when applied to human cultures. Bellah is, of course, correct when he insists on the concept of evolution related to the biological emergence of homo sapiens. But to expand it to cultural history causes trouble. Once homo sapiens has evolved, we are dealing with developments within one species not with a further evolution of higher forms of homo sapiens or even of a new species. Either humans are one species “from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age” and beyond, or a Nietzschean “Superman” (“Übermensch”) is indeed a future possibility. In my mind, there exist only humans, who are all equally human.

Of course, I have no doubt that Bellah shares this view morally and he seems to be aware, at least intuitively, that merging biological and cultural evolution creates dangers. Therefore, he tries repeatedly to proactively avert such criticisms. However, it is not Bellah’s own ethos that is at stake here but the concepts he chooses and their (potential) implications. In my mind, there is no need to frame his narrative in terms of evolution; not much would change if he called it development or history.

Superficially Bellah’s opus magnum looks like a synthesis between Durkheim’s “Elementary Forms of the Religious Life” and Max Weber’s “Economic Ethics of the World Religions.” However, one would not do justice to Bellah, Durkheim, or Weber if one reduced this book to such a synthesis. Obviously Durkheim has always been closer to Bellah’s heart than Weber. And in many respects he elaborates a Durkheimian position here. They both share an evolutionary perspective and an understanding of religion that goes beyond most common definitions. For Durkheim it is the sacralization of moral and cognitive principles without which social life would be impossible. For Bellah it is—somewhat more vaguely—a reality beyond the ordinary. Durkheim is also much more systematic in his analysis of beliefs and ritual practices than Bellah, whereas Bellah pays closer attention to changes in religious thought over time. But both are more interested in commonalities than differences, although they do not ignore them. For Durkheim the ideal society is a necessary part of any society; for Bellah, if I am not misinterpreting here, this instead seems to represent an achievement of the axial age.

With regard to Weber, Bellah obviously shares his fascination with the civilizations of ancient Israel, China, and India. Weber’s historicist approach places analytic emphasis on how and to what extent religions affected developmental trajectories of different civilizations. What Karl Jaspers, the admirer of Weber, called the “axial age” is pretty much his reinterpretation and further exposition of Weber’s studies. But Weber asked rather precise sociological questions: who were the carriers of different religious traditions, what attitudes towards the world informed their thinking and acting, and which directions did rationalization processes take in various civilizations? Moreover, did the ethos of religious virtuosi more-or-less remain an elite phenomenon or did it “trickle down” to also shape the ethos of the “masses?”

Bellah focuses on similar axial breakthroughs, but shifts the emphasis. Both perspectives are equally legitimate and interesting. I am also not sure which one is more “modern,” since the concept of “multiple modernities,” for example, successfully combines both. Contrary to Bellah’s claim, shared by many Anglo-Saxon readers, Weber did not measure all religions against ascetic Protestantism and find them wanting. Instead, referring to these grand civilizations and religious traditions, he warned us to keep our petty comments and value judgments to ourselves, as we should in the face of an ocean or majestic mountains. Unfortunately, this rather remarkable statement was somewhat spoiled by Parsons who translated the German “erschüttert” not as “deeply moved” as it should in this context, but as “appalled.”

Be that as it may, with Religion in Human Evolution Robert Bellah has given us a marvelous book written with the wisdom of age as well as youthful enthusiasm. Having discovered the importance of play in human evolution rather late in the writing process, Bellah nevertheless must have internalized it much earlier. All these rich chapters on ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India convey a certain playfulness and intellectual joy, which carry his narrative often beyond the needs of his argument, but stimulate and enrich the reader immensely.

Bellah’s initial account of “Religious Evolution” in 1964 draws on biblical sacred history, mediated by Hegelian historicism threaded through Durkheim, Weber, and Marx. It shows how religion is enacted in cultural, social, personal, and bodily forms that unfold in history, and cannot be grasped outside it. Cultural symbols and beliefs, social practices and institutions, personal habits and attitudes, embodied disciplines and expressions all interpenetrate in constituting religion. Each exercises a degree of autonomy in their interaction that makes it irreducible to any one of the others. They mutually constitute each other through history, and religion is historically constituted through all the dimensions of human action.

Religious rejection of the world emerges in the first millennium BCE in Israel, Greece, India, and China at the core of every historic salvation religion, defining the Weberian axis of religious evolution in Bellah’s original formulation. Renouncing the world represented within the framework of cosmological dualism crystallizes an otherworldly true self, or Buddhist non-self, deeper than the flux of everyday experience, facing a reality over against itself. It holds up an overarching ethical aim and stance, unified into a whole way of life, to answer the question of what we must do to be saved. Conversely, the collapse of cosmological dualism and world rejection marks modern modes of religious symbolization, action, and organization within complex societies shaped by institutional differentiation and cultural pluralism. Modern world acceptance features a multiplex monist worldview centered on a multidimensional self. Each person is responsible for critically self-conscious and conscientious participation in the process of religious symbolization itself, shared among a modern priesthood of all believers no longer bound by obligations of doctrinal orthodoxy imposed by the tutelary authority of state-established religion.

But since religion is centrally the narrative self-interpretation and ritual enactment of all human cultures, Bellah argues, the whole of the history of religion is our own. We remain deeply embedded in it, from tribal peoples to the present. This holds true even when—especially when—we think of religion in peculiarly modern Western terms as primarily private beliefs held by individuals and voluntary associations made up of like-minded believers or spiritual seekers. Religion is a dimension of the whole of life in pre-modern societies, shifting shape as social and cultural complexity evolve together. World-rejecting religious symbols, rites, and congregational communities break through the cosmological and moral unity of archaic and tribal societies in tandem with their political and economic structures. But we need to understand tribal and then archaic religions and societies in their own terms to grasp how such salvific breakthroughs carry the whole of human cultural and religious history into modern world-acceptance. This includes the early modern Protestant patterning of American modernity, grounded in convictions of individual free conscience, conversion, providence, and covenant permuted into ideals of individual free choice, revolution, progress and constitution.

The central insight that stages of religious evolution co-exist and interact with one another is crucial in interpreting the global demographic facts that the world has never numbered more not-so-modern members of the historic salvation religions than it does today, including the fact that one-third of the world’s population is now Christian, and one-third of those Christians live in former colonies. The insight that the earlier stages of religious evolution continue to co-exist with and within later ones also reveals the peculiarly modern anti-modern nature of many contemporary “traditional” or “fundamentalist” movements, including the early modern rationalist faith in Newtonian laws and Baconian experiments that biblical literalists marshal to defend “absolute values” against the “relativism” of late modern historicism and culturalism.

“Nothing is ever lost” in the whole of religious evolution, and Bellah has deepened its conception over the course of his work, culminating in Religion in Human Evolution. It incorporates developmental and evolutionary psychology to chart the evolution of human consciousness through its mimetic, mythic, and theoretic stages, beginning with our biological history as a species that gives rise to culture and then co-evolves with it. For most of a million years before members of the genus Homo began speaking in sentences, they communicated and expressed themselves through their bodies. Through mimetic movement, gesture, and example, they learned to make meaning as well as tools. Through sharing the rhythmic action of “keeping together in time” at the root of ritual, they composed the harmonies of moral community as well as the survival strategies of social solidarity, as Durkheim observed. Endless interaction rituals continue to orchestrate everyday life today, from greetings to good-byes, and formal rites of passage continue to mark the movement of generations from birth to death.

For most of the tens of thousands of years since humans became fully linguistical, religiously inspired and morally charged narrative in the form of myth ruled human consciousness without conceptual challenge, Bellah stresses, and the most encompassing forms of cultural self- understanding today continue to unfold as mythic narrative. They tell the story of uniquely individual selves in culturally common genres. We get to know ourselves and each other by sharing our stories. We grasp the multiple meanings of modern social membership by learning the stories that define our families, communities, and nations. Literacy turns practical theoretic consciousness toward more critical questioning of myth in both the logical and lexical terms of second-order “thinking about thinking” at the heart of the axial breakthroughs. But theories do not replace stories as the source and substance of the spheres of ethics, politics, or religion, and none of these spheres has been reborn within the bounds of reason alone. Narrative is the way we understand our lives, criticized and clarified by rational argument, to be sure, but also revealing in its own rational way that “reason” itself has a long history with multiple meanings and practical differences.

Thus Religion in Human Evolution combines biological, social, and cultural evolution into the deep history of religion at the center of the human story which runs all the way back, and all the way through to the present. It shows religion shaping the social order, and being reshaped as society becomes more complex. Relatively egalitarian forager tribes give way to more hierarchical chiefdoms and archaic kingships, which call for new forms of symbolization and moral enactment to make sense of their growing division of labor, wealth, and power. Theoretic culture emerges to question mythic narratives, at once rejecting and reorganizing them to create new rites and myths, and challenging their particular authority in the name of spiritual and ethical universalism.

Religion in Human Evolution ends with the axial age, but it situates modernity within the history of the human species. It reframes the story of how theoretic culture becomes partially disembedded from mimetic and mythic meaning to give rise to the achievements and predicaments of modernity. By asking what our deep past can tell us about the kind of life human beings have imagined was worth living, Bellah illuminates the often implicit worldviews we hold and contest in the modern world. He points toward the critical reappropriation of their underlying mimetic and mythic dimensions in an ongoing dialectic with our theoretical understanding to find common ground on questions of our common good, including the future of the environment, the justice of the economy, and the possibilities for peace in the world we share.

The diverse forms of popular nationalism with religious roots evident among multiple modernities emerging around the world today tie into the dialectical interplay of civil religion and public theologies, as Bellah has conceived it over the course of his work on faith in public. It develops a central conception of ongoing moral argument, civic debate, and social reform in representative polities ordered in common by diverse constituencies thinking and acting within cultures conceived as dramatic conversations, for example, in Habits of the Heart and The Good Society. These moral dramas are made up of many voices contesting the construal of multiple traditions and remaking them together by the inspiring force of enacting good examples as well as the persuasive force of giving good reasons. This contrasts with state-centered views of civil religion celebrating an ostensibly universal moral consensus in support of the state’s compulsory legal authority.

“Can We Imagine a Global Civil Religion?” asks Bellah in a 2007 lecture that defines the direction of his ongoing inquiry into the modern project in the light of human evolution. He answers the question of its title by distinguishing between the impossibility of a global civil religion, and the necessity of strengthening global civil society to create a world order coherent enough to engage the grave problems of global warming, military-political strife, and economic inequality that interdependent nations now face. Any actual civil society will have a religious dimension, Bellah observes, not only a legal and ethical framework, but some notion that it fits the nature of ultimate reality. In fact, religion-like values carried by an emerging global market culture may worsen international problems, and place greater weight on the actual beginnings of world governance evident in world law and economic regulation today. The nation-state itself, and the principled independence of the market from the state, have arisen as cultural forms and institutional arrangements transmitted around the world over the past few centuries. So have popular sovereignty and the public sphere of civil society, even where ideals of universal human rights, democratic elections, and the formation of public opinion freed from the state and the market are honored in principle but not in practice. Nationalism itself has always been an international phenomenon inspired by the right of every people to self-government and by the responsibility they share for their common fate.

Today global market ideologies and practices threaten the capacity of nations to carry out the responsibilities inherent in their ideals of common membership, Bellah argues by reference to Jürgen Habermas on “the postnational constellation,” including responsibility for their least advantaged citizens through sustaining fair wages and taxes as well as public provision. What are the moral and religious resources we need to think about membership in global civil society profoundly enough to balance the autonomy of nation-states and check the power of global markets? The religious roots of global ethics of human rights lead Bellah to ask if the world’s religions can mobilize their deepest commitments to universal neighbor-love and mutual recognition to give genuine institutional force to human rights regimes. Can they help turn ideals of world citizenship into practical willingness to share responsibility for the world of which we are citizens instead of trying to transform the world into the naturalized image of our own nation? Religious motivation is needed to turn the beginnings of world law and the growth of global ethics into effective forms of global solidarity and governance. Religious insight is needed for us to recognize the primacy of the world instead of trying to force the world to recognize our primacy as a nation.

The nationalist aspirations and religious convictions of other peoples who want to govern themselves and worship as they please, and as they must, require our respect. They also require our recognition of the social and cultural diversity of these peoples. For such recognition is essential to justify our respect by grounding it in our common vision of the dignity and equality of all human beings and their rights to self-government. Such recognition is no less essential to guide our aim to realize these rights in a just and peaceful world of independent, equal, and self-governing states. That world, still struggling to be born, embodies ideals at the center of distinctive yet overlapping forms of civil religion emerging around the globe, and it marks the contested core of an ongoing argument among diverse public theologies and philosophies seeking to shape the world to come.

That is another way of saying that what took Bellah thirteen years to assimilate makes for demanding reading, however pellucid his exposition, and I wonder whether the people who need to take the argument on board are going to make the effort, let alone the average undergraduate. Bellah puts forward the argument that it is the active organism that is most crucial to biological evolution not the genes, yet I doubt whether those biologists who stress the ‘selfish gene’ will have either the stamina or the interest to engage with Bellah’s whole wide-ranging argument.

A related point is that we live in fairly distinct research communities, even within sociology. I have spent half a century on secularisation and a quarter of a century on Pentecostalism, and that gives me some purchase on another wide-ranging landmark study, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.  It also brings me into contact with ‘the axial age’ as a governing frame both for contemporary religion and processes of secularisation. But the axial age that provides the point where I begin is where Bellah ends. For my own purposes, which are in principle quite wide ranging enough, I have to get a grip on debates on modernity and alternative modernities, on religion and industrialism, on rival views of the Enlightenment, on fresh assessments of early modernity and the Reformation. Like Bellah I am beholden to scholars in other disciplines, but they are constantly revising previous certainties. The onward march of successive movements of revision and the revisiting of old sites seemingly abandoned, is difficult enough to cope with, without engaging in universal history or what Bellah calls ‘deep’ (pre-historic) history. And yet I have no doubt this kind of work has to be done, and Bellah has gone about his task in a truly impressive piece of universal scholarship.

Reading his text reminds me there are remarkable differences even between closely linked research communities like the British and the North American. If one is writing about evolution in the British tradition one inevitably refers to Herbert Spencer, and Bellah does indeed make some cursory reference to Spencer, but as a young scholar I was exposed to an evolutionary tradition in the work of Hobhouse and Ginsberg that has seemingly disappeared without trace. Who now reads Hobhouse’s Morals in Evolution of 1906? Perhaps these vast tracts of previous pioneering work remain unvisited because sociology has no disciplinary boundaries.

I find what Bellah has to say about pre-human evolution immensely interesting, but exactly what difference does the postulated carry-over into cultural development make when it comes to the way we frame problems in general sociology? For example I re-read W. G. Runciman on The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection as part of my engagement with Bellah,  and I am sufficiently impressed by Runciman’s argument to suppose that there are serious donations derived from biological evolution that bear on cultural development, like domination and aggression, empathy and cooperation. Indeed, Bellah says something very similar. But these generalised donations correspond, if loosely, to what sociologists have long postulated about the prerequisites of society as such, for example some system of authority and some system of defence/attack, and some arrangements to stop things falling apart. In short we are not being told anything we did not know before. Runciman uses the language of selection and survival in discussing issues relating to the rise of Christianity but what he says translates back into standard sociological parlance without remainder. In principle nothing has changed and my understanding of the rise and success of Christianity is only advanced because Runciman happens to be a wide-ranging scholar who knows a lot about it.

I am suggesting that the fairy lights of biological terminology add nothing in principle to the modalities of sociological understanding. I notice that Bellah says he has gained insights from the biological approach and cognitive science but I suspect these insights make little serious difference to how he, and by extension we, frame, pursue and solve sociological problems. Unlike Runciman, Bellah does not convert his cultural sociology about hunter/gatherers, tribal societies, archaic civilisations etc into the language of memes and selection. I find that significant, because I would expect a book that explores the carry-over of the biological into the cultural and the social to be replete with the language and mechanisms of evolution.

Perhaps Bellah has reservations about the approach of Runciman, though the relevant footnote on page 681 is scrupulously neutral. Yet I do know he has reservations about the kind of biologistic approach found in Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct. There is a palpable difference in approach between what one finds in Wade and any sociology of religion engaged in by me and my colleagues. There is first of all a language of function and dysfunction in Wade that I frankly find slippery and obfuscating when applied to culture and specifically when applied to religion, though obviously there are those who use a version of functionalist language in ‘normal’ social science and anthropology.  My problem with any strong notion of a ‘faith instinct’ is simply that the evidence I survey with regard to secularisation makes such a notion unintelligible. I am engaged in tracing variations in faith over time and space and relating them to variables not to constants. I might as well try relating war to the constant of original sin or relating faith to our God-given desire to find our rest in Him, as deploy a biologically donated constant. If ‘faith’ in Holland drops catastrophically from 1965 to now, and particular groups in northern Holland have long been alienated from religion, are such changes to be ascribed to a decline in, or a lack of, the faith instinct? How does it come about that the faith instinct flourishes on one side of the Oder-Neisse and droops and dies on the other?  Richard Dawkins is fond of pointing out that what we believe and whether we believe depends on where we were born and our socialisation: hence the need to stop parents abusing children by socialising them in faith. But how is all this to be made compatible with a biological given? How indeed is condemnation of religion compatible with biological inevitabilities?

I will make just one point about function and dysfunction, to which incidentally Bellah makes an important contribution by deploying Huizinga and relating religion to imaginative play. Indeed, in relation to play Bellah brings out the problem I am alluding to by discussing the functionality of the non-functional.  I would prefer to introduce language from economics to talk about religion, notably cost. Universalism is a ‘gain’ that involves a cost in conflict, just as social solidarity exacts a cost in terms of conflict with ‘the other’. Universalism is not so much dysfunctional: it simply has inherent costs. So has the very idea of truth, because it implies falsehood and the need to propagate truth at the expense of falsehood as, for example, Ikhnaten did when he closed the temples. Again, to take an example in Bellah, when the Israelites devised a written text to embody their Covenant with God, the creation of a text was ‘functional’ because it enabled them to survive anywhere and everywhere. A text also generates thought and intellection because you have to devise a hermeneutic to get round awkward provisions inappropriate to new circumstances. So a text is multi-functional by facilitating movement and intellectual ingenuity. But a text is at the same time dysfunctional precisely because the stability it confers is over-stabilised when you want to ‘move on’. I would prefer to put these gains and losses in the straightforward language of costs and benefits.

I turn finally to a central issue raised by Bellah: the continuing and ineluctable relevance of narrative, and its accompanying rituals, to all our attempts at individual and social self-definition. In terms of the emergence of ‘the theoretic’ identified as the final stage in a sequence from the episodic to the mimetic and the symbolic/narrative, ‘nothing is ever lost’. We are not dealing in supersession but successive enrichments of capacities. The theoretic is presaged in ‘opportunistic science’, rational in the sense that early astronomy and mathematics were rational, whereas theory proper represents thinking about thinking. Bellah’s central and most controversial contention here is that the theoretic mode carries forward all the previous modes, and that narrativity, which likewise carries them all forward, remains a permanent presence in our self understanding. The theoretic itself began in a Platonic narrative partly replacing the Homeric, and we today tell a story about its development that runs from the initial stages in Greece to developments in medieval Europe that presaged the Renaissance, the early modernity of the seventeenth century, the Enlightenment, and in the context of evolution it is interesting that we constantly recite the story of Darwin. One might even say that when it comes to the Founders ‘nothing is ever lost’ and the university itself is a succession embodied in a procession, quite literally.

Bellah’s account of the axial age is weighted to the Indian and the Chinese breakthroughs, but for the purposes of grasping the continuing role of narrativity it may be easier to think in terms of all the consequences that have stemmed from the particular breakthrough that occurred in Israel. For example, the Word as embodied in a text and based on a covenant rooted in love and justice, faithfulness and judgement, underpinned ethical prophecy, and eventually made possible the emergence of the synagogue as an ethical congregation capable of surviving anywhere. God was not argued for theoretically as though he were an ‘ism’ but argued over in a forensic rhetoric of cross-examination capable of raising the issue of theodicy. The long term consequences of the social invention of the synagogue are the Church and the Umma, as well as the USA and Marxism, not to mention the versions of the Promised Land embodied in all the narratives of nationalism. The modalities of modern consciousness are replete with the stories we tell ourselves about how ‘we’ became who we are, how we got where we are, and where we are going. Religion as narrative is concerned with transformation scenes conceived on the social margins by footloose people that are then incorporated in structures of power so that the transforming vision is again taken up on the margins in order to speak truth to power once again.

I have telescoped, glossed and simplified Bellah in order to bring out a central message that seems to me as true as it is controversial.  ‘We’ are inveterate story tellers as well as theoreticians. ‘Nothing is ever lost’. Moreover, the platforms in consciousness from which we formulate our visions of how we might be, and how the world might be, were set up in the axial age. As ever in Bellah, his rigorous commitment to objectivity emits a normative aura: it is not a matter of putting stories behind us as childish but of telling the best stories to frame our collective existence.

This emphasis on practice leads to a different style of exposition than Weber’s. Much more than Weber’s (or Durkheim’s or Parsons’), Bellah’s expository style is dominated by narrative. Religion in Human Evolution is a grand story, what Bellah calls a “deep history,” that extends all the way from the Big Bang to the axial age (with suggestive implications as to how the story will unfold in modern times). This leads to a much more fluid account of the origin and development of religions than Weber’s. In Bellah’s telling, religious practices emerge gradually over centuries, in constant interaction with social and political transformations. A good example is his account of the slow and tension-filled development of monotheism in ancient Israel. Weber tends to construct large ideal-typical constellations of ideas and then connect them with class structures and political processes. The effect is to freeze big chunks of historical time and to show how ideas and social structures are interrelated within those chunks, rather than to amalgamate meanings and social processes in the flow of history. Bellah’s privileging of process over structure through narrative makes his work more congenial to the academic currents of this new century.

Another important difference between Bellah and Weber is that Bellah is more inclined to emphasize similarities rather than differences between the great religious traditions. On the one hand, Bellah repeatedly emphasizes that the major religious traditions are different, they ask different questions about life, they arise out of different historical experiences, they are shaped by all the particularities of their origins. Nonetheless, Bellah goes to great lengths to argue that the great traditions of the axial age (precisely those which Weber spent most of his career exploring) share in common certain aspirations to transcendence. The historical, archeological, and textual evidence about the life world of those times contained great ambiguities in Weber’s time and many of these have not been cleared up in the past century. But Weber tends to spin the ambiguous evidence in favor of contrast between the traditions, while Bellah spins it in favor of an emphasis on commonalities. An example is their treatment of ancient China. Weber saw Confucianism and Taoism as religions/philosophies of adaptation to the world that lacked the sense of transcendence that could eventually produce the inner-worldly asceticism of Western Protestantism. Bellah on the other hand, assuredly does see an important aspiration to transcendence in Confucius and in other major philosophers of China’s Warring States Period. But he clearly admits that there are some respected Sinologists who do not see that transcendence. There are ambiguities in the evidence and respected experts on both sides. Bellah stands with the side of transcendence, but Weber could have made a case for the other side.

Part of this difference is connected with their style of exposition. Weber’s ideal types are built around distinctions. Bellah’s narrative style pulls phenomena together. But the difference is also linked to the differences in the grand meta-narratives than underpin each project. Weber’s story is about the rise of capitalism out of the religious traditions of the West, and his work on comparative religions is structured to show that capitalism could not have arisen initially in societies with different religious traditions. Bellah’s narrative rejects the “Rise of the West” story. Rather, he is concerned with parallel developments of human cultural creativity across the whole breadth of the human species.

Bellah’s more ecumenical story better resonates with the ethos of the twenty-first century. Intellectuals in both the west and the rest have discredited any reason for triumphalism about the rise of Euro-America. Meanwhile we are all faced with the urgent political necessity of finding commonalities in the human condition that might help us avoid planetary catastrophe.

Bellah’s account also evokes the pathos of our current condition. In the history of sociology, one can trace a long arc from optimism to pessimism: Comte thought that positive science would create a better world for all; Marx envisioned a brutal revolutionary struggle leading eventually to the promised land of communism; Weber put us in an iron cage; Bellah ends his deep history by evoking the possible extinction of the human species.

This pessimistic pathos is also congruent with the mood of the times. In an era when global capitalism is tearing itself apart while socialism presents no viable alternative, and when the world seems powerless to avert global warming and other ecological catastrophes, the extinction of our species seems for the first time possible, even if we hope not probable. The mood is dark, and will remain so for a long time. Just as earlier generations were drawn not only to Weber’s luminescent brilliance but also to the dark shadows in his portrayal of a spirit-stifling rationalization, so may future generations be both inspired by Bellah’s conceptual brilliance and strangely attracted to his darker thoughts about the fatal flaws in our modernity.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.
—Steven Weinberg

When an interviewer for the Atlantic Monthly blog asked me “What prompted you to write this book?” I apparently replied, “Deep desire to know everything: what the universe is and where we are in it.” I don’t deny that I said it—it’s just that I would have thought I would have given a more pedestrian reply, because I am a sociologist, with a Ph.D. in my discipline and some 40 years experience as a professor at Harvard and Berkeley. And I am quite aware that early in the last century Max Weber, in a famous 1918 talk called “Science as a Vocation,” warned that “science has entered a phase of specialization previously unknown and this will forever remain the case.” It does seem that he didn’t apply this dictum to himself, but he was talking about the future when huge projects like his own would no longer be possible. So what is this “deep desire to know everything” in a world of super-specialization? When I look at books like Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct, Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. and Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, recent books that might seem parallel to my own new book, I can only say Weber was right—these books should not have been written, or, to be charitable, they may be good journalism but they are not serious contributions to understanding.

Weber was certainly right that we are in a world of specialization, and dangerously close to the point where specialized work is only intelligible to other specialists. A few years ago a study found that over half of sociology professors couldn’t understand many articles in the ASR or the AJS. Are we living in a world of ever increasing knowledge and ever declining meaning? In the end all that specialized knowledge has to be put together again if it is to be of use. Yet, as I have suggested many of the books that purport to give the big picture are shockingly shallow, based on tertiary sources that only repeat tired clichés or on novel claims that have not been adequately evaluated. We have an enormous “external memory,” as Merlin Donald calls it. It is potentially part of our very selves if we know how to access it. But therein lies our problem.

I’m sure there will be some who will gladly throw my book on the same heap as those I have criticized, but I will try to show a third way, a way that could possibly overcome the split between knowledge and meaning. This way would be to take Weber seriously about specialization but to follow him in not giving up the search for the big picture. What that means is to try to learn a lot about quite a few things. We have more information available about biological and cultural evolution than anyone has ever had before. We have resources to access that knowledge, but it cannot be done quickly or on the cheap. The resources we now have, and I very much mean the web but also e-mail, and books, ever new books, allow us to become quasi-specialists in at least several fields.

It is now possible not only to find out a lot about many areas, but to find out if the real specialists  think you are crazy or not. Some of these are people in the academic world one happens to know—for example the greatest specialist on Shang China in the world, David Keightley, Professor of Chinese history at Berkeley and an old friend, went over my section on Shang China with a fine-toothed comb and saved me from serious mistakes. I had read Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species when it first came out in 1997 and had been very impressed by it, but when I realized over 10 years later that he actually teaches at Berkeley I went to hear him lecture and got acquainted. He and his group were especially helpful in reading my chapter on religion and evolution, giving me some advice, but telling me I was on the right track.

But when it is a field where you know no congenial specialist, you can make friends on the web. Since I wanted to situate religious evolution in the deep biological past I had to learn a lot of biology—rather late in life to say the least. Stephen Jay Gould’s enormous The Structure of Evolutionary Theory of 2002 was a marvelous introduction to many things for me, but Gould was already dead by the time I got to his book. It turned out that animal play was going to be quite important in my argument and the greatest specialist on that subject, Gordon Burghardt, whose splendid book The Genesis of Animal Play would be invaluable to me, is alive and well at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. I have never met him in person but to this day we have a continuing e-mail friendship and, as I note in Chapter 2, Religion and Evolution, he made many suggestions to me about what I wanted to say about play. Equally important for my whole argument is the evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald, whom I have met but who has been especially helpful with e-mail comments. For early Greece Ian Morris, the historian and archaeologist of ancient Greece, but also the author of the stunning and breathtakingly ambitious new book, Why the West Rules—For Now, gave me several pages of single-spaced comments on my chapter on ancient Greece, and since he is at Stanford we did meet for coffee once when he was in Berkeley. Michael Witzel, a Sanskritist at Harvard and a great historian of early India was equally helpful with many pages of comments on my ancient India chapter, where of all the four axial cases I had most to learn, but we have never met in person.

Of course there are people who will turn you down—I have had my share. But what is more surprising is how many busy, productive scholars will help, especially if your questions indicate that you have already prepared yourself in the field. Becoming a quasi-specialist in several fields takes time, but becoming a super-specialist in one field also takes a lot of time. And what are all those juicy monographs waiting for if no one is going to take them seriously enough to show their theoretical and comparative importance? I have 12 case studies in my book, several of the axial age chapters being long enough to be small books in themselves, but I have one case of tribal religion, the Kalapalo of the Amazon Basin, about which there exist exactly two books of only one anthropologist, Ellen Basso of the University of Arizona. I know as much as anyone knows about the Kalapalo, except for Ellen Basso and the members of the tribe itself. But even for my other two tribal cases, the Australian Aborigines (though I did focus on a Central Australian group, the Walbiri), and the Navajo, there are thousands of publications.

So from early on in my book I had to develop strategies that would give me more than superficial knowledge without taking over the rest of my life. Obviously you have to use the best of the most recent books, and if possible, as in the case of the Navajo, consult specialists (and I started out studying the Navajo for my undergraduate honors thesis, Apache Kinship Systems, over 60 years ago). Without any guidance the amount of material available on any one case is overwhelming. Even finding the best recent secondary works often requires help or maybe luck and you also need to look at the classic secondary works. And you can’t just rely on secondary work where good translations are available as they usually are for most cases (Shang China being a notable exception). There you have to find out which are the most reliable, also not an easy task. It is claimed that the Daodejing is the most translated book in the world, but 99% of those translations are worthless. You need to find the reliable ones. When working on ancient China I regularly used five translations of the Confucian Analects because they had different virtues. It also helps to know enough Chinese to check key terms in the translations against the Chinese original. I don’t mean to discourage scholars from pursuing similar studies; I’m just trying to describe what is involved in serious comparative work.

But of course, if you are a sociologist, you are doing more than describing fascinating cases, though you have to do a lot of that as Weber and Durkheim already showed us; you have to have a theory, maybe a multi-stranded theory, since so much is going on in each case and there is no simple one fits all formula. Before discussing my theoretical resources let me give you another example of the kind of work I did in my new book: one of the finest books ever written by an American sociologist is Randall Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophies, a book even longer than mine. And Collins is not just talking about Classical Greek and modern European philosophy—he includes Islamic, Indian, Chinese and even Japanese philosophy. I may think he is sometimes wrong but I never think he is stupid. How he read so much while carrying a full teaching load staggers me. I had to retire to write my book, even though retirement is not so retired as you might think. And Collins’ approach is theoretical all the way through. He uses his micro theory of interaction ritual chains amazingly well to understand the macro development of philosophy in a variety of very different traditions. I might have added Collins’s interaction ritual chains to my theoretical took kit, but I have to admit that I didn’t read every last word of this great book until after I had finished my own.

So let me just list some of my theoretical frameworks and address them as thoroughly as I can here.

I start with Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion in his “Religion as a Cultural System,” which I should give in my abbreviated version to clarify what I mean and don’t mean by religion: “Religion is a system of symbols which, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations that make sense in terms of an idea of a general order of existence.”  I should point out that neither Cliff nor I use the terms gods or God. What Geertz meant by a cultural system is very dependent on his reading of Alfred Schutz, particularly his paper on multiple realities or multiple worlds, terms which Schutz took from William James. Besides what Schutz called the paramount reality, the world of daily life, what Weber called “the everyday,” Schutz distinguished the world of science, the world of religion, and the world of art.

After describing what kind of multiple reality religion is, I wanted to look at the major forms of religious representation, the ways in which people engage in religious action and religious thought. Here I turned to the field of child development, not to look at the ways in which children become religious, though some have worked on that, but to look at the way infants and then children acquire the various capacities to relate to the world. Here was another big field to master, but one in which I have long been interested—especially the work of Jerome Bruner, one of my teachers in graduate school, who is the most important cultural psychologist still living and whose categories for the cognitive development of the child turned out to be remarkably relevant for my purposes. Bruner, himself adapting ideas from Piaget, sees the child as moving from enactive to symbolic to conceptual representations. I prefaced these with the idea of unitive events rooted in the original unity of mother and child but emerging later as religious experiences, usefully described by Alison Gopnik of UC Berkeley’s psychology department in her recent book The Philosophical Baby. So Piaget, Bruner, and Gopnik were my anchors but I looked at a lot of other things as well, particularly the work that links cognitive development in human children with comparable development in the great apes and other mammals.

The major stages of ontogeny turn out to parallel the major stages of phylogeny as described by Merlin Donald in Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Donald prefaces his three stages by referring to episodic culture which we share with other higher mammals and that I see as analogous to unitive events in ontogeny.

I should note that in both Bruner and Donald stages are never left behind, but are reconfigured in new contexts when subsequent stages emerge, leading to my general rule that “nothing is ever lost,” by which I don’t mean cultural content which is all too easily lost (most of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, for example) but the cultural capacities themselves, which never lose their essential and indispensible nature. Donald’s three stages are mimetic, mythic, and theoretic, paralleling Bruner’s enactive, symbolic, and conceptual.

I want to describe what Merlin Donald means by mimetic culture because it makes intelligible what happened during a long period of human evolution, most likely the period between the appearance of Homo erectus, 1.8 million years ago, and the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens, during the last two or three hundred thousand years. Mimetic culture involves a kind of bodily communication more elaborate than anything comparable among the other great apes, lacking language but probably involving spoken or sung communication, what some evolutionary musicologists call musilanguage. Mimetic communication almost certainly led to ritual, though as yet without myth, which requires language capacities that were lacking.

In modeling the society itself as well as its constituent roles, mimetic culture provided the necessary resources for moving beyond the rather anarchic chimpanzee band to a larger group capable of controlling in-group aggression such that pair bonding and same-sex solidarity in various contexts could result. In-group solidarity did not mean these mimetic-culture based societies were peaceful. There is every reason to believe that they were not, that there was endemic conflict between groups and probably in-group aggression was only relatively successfully controlled.

The limitations of mimetic culture are evident. Donald writes:

Mimesis is thus a much more limited form of representation than symbolic language; it is slow moving, ambiguous, and very restricted in its subject matter. Episodic event registration continues to serve as the raw material of higher cognition in mimetic culture, but rather than serving as the peak of the cognitive hierarchy, it performs a subsidiary role. The highest level of processing in the mimetically skilled brain is no longer the analysis and breakdown of perceptual events; it is the modeling of these events in self-initiated motor acts. The consequence, on a larger scale, was a culture that could model its episodic predecessors.

It is well to remember that we humans are never very far from basic mammalian episodic consciousness, the awareness of the event we are in. Mimetic culture is an event about an event. Narrative, which is at the heart of linguistic culture is basically an account of a string of events, organized hierarchically into larger event units. But the moment when our predecessors first stepped outside episodic consciousness, looked at it and what was before, around, and would be after it, was a historic moment of the highest possible importance. Other higher mammals, although they are social, are more tightly locked each in their own consciousness. They are, as Donald says, almost solipsists. But humans, once mimetic culture had evolved, could participate in—could share—the contents of other minds. We could learn, be taught, and did not have to discover almost everything for ourselves. Mimetic culture was limited and conservative; it lacked the potential for explosive growth that language would make possible. But it was the indispensable step without which language would never have evolved.

Further, mimesis is, though in many respects less efficient than language, indispensable in its own sphere. As Donald writes, mimesis “serves different functions and is still far more efficient than language in diffusing certain kinds of knowledge; for instance, it is still supreme in the realm of modeling social roles, communicating emotions, and transmitting rudimentary skills.”  Maybe not just rudimentary skills, for mimesis is basic for the teaching of quite complex skills in such fields as athletics, dance, and possibly other arts. Finally mimesis remains indispensable in “the collective modeling and, hence, the structuring” of human society itself. That is what ritual does, and if Randall Collins is right, it is micro-ritual moments that make our lives bearable whenever we interact with others.

So far I have been talking mainly about where religion came from so I must say a little about where it was going. Where it was going was toward language, what Donald calls mythic culture, and beyond that theory, though it would take a long time to get there. But remember we are still in the world of egalitarian foragers. Most of my book deals with hierarchical class societies, yet they all derive from egalitarian forager societies. That’s where it all begins and that is where our most basic capacities were formed.

We are so fascinated with ourselves as language users that we think discovering the origin of language is the key to understanding human evolution. It is one of the great virtues of Merlin Donald’s work that he takes culture—the ability to escape our solipsism and connect with a larger shared consciousness—as the key to what makes us unique. It is in this context that his idea that language “piggybacks” on culture makes sense. Language acquisition in the individual is social: even if there were such a thing as a language module, which neither Donald nor I for a minute believe, it could only become operative in a socially provided linguistic context. Isolated children do not learn spontaneously to speak. Jerome Bruner, as Donald reminds us, has shown convincingly that language learning requires an external support system, a linguistic milieu, to be effective. The question is, what was the “external support system” that made language possible in the first place? My answer would be ritual, which provides the security, intensity, and redundancy without which language would not emerge. Donald writes:

Linguistic universals spring from the context in which real-world languages are learned and, more important, in which they evolved. Like any other set of conventions, linguistic conventions are shaped by the situations in which they originated. They have mimetic origins. Thus, once we change our paradigm, the features of universal grammar emerge smoothly from a close analysis of gesture, mime, and imitative behavior. The “language instinct” exists, but it is a domain-general instinct for mimesis and collectivity, impelled by a deep drive for conceptual clarification.

But why this drive toward conceptual clarification? Donald suggests that there was a need for a more coherent representation of the world than was possible through mimesis. “Therefore,” he writes, “the possibility must be entertained that the primary human adaptation was not language qua language but rather integrative, initially mythical, thought. Modern humans developed language in response to pressure to improve their conceptual apparatus, not vice versa.”  Myth is a profoundly ambiguous word, so it would be well to be clear what Donald means by it:

[M]ythical thought, in our terms, might be regarded as a unified, collectively held system of explanatory and regulatory metaphors. The mind has expanded its reach beyond the episodic perception of events, beyond the mimetic reconstruction of episodes, to a comprehensive modeling of the entire human universe. Causal explanation, prediction, control—myth constitutes an attempt at all three, and every aspect of life is permeated by myth.

It is because of, in a sense, the primacy of myth over language that Donald calls the stage after mimetic culture, mythic culture.

Donald, in emphasizing the cognitive role of myth, approaches the view of Claude Levi-Strauss, the anthropologist who, more than any other, has emphasized the intellectual function of myth. Levi-Strauss, nonetheless, does not think of myth as a form of science, or a primitive precursor of it, but as having a different cognitive function:

To say that a way of thinking [myth] is disinterested and that it is an intellectual way of thinking does not mean at all that it is equal to scientific thinking. . . It remains different because its aim is to reach by the shortest possible means a general understanding of the universe—and not only a general but a total understanding. That is, it is a way of thinking which must imply that if you don’t understand everything, you can’t explain anything.

That is a view of myth that would indeed see it as “impelled by a deep drive for conceptual clarification.”  So Aristotle was not wrong when he wrote the first sentence of his Metaphysics: “All humans by nature desire to know.”  And what did Aristotle want to know? Everything. But for him it wasn’t myth but theory that would get us there, and we can see how well we are doing with that right now by looking at the institution in which most readers of this blog are presently situated:  the university.