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.

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.