7/28/2019 Bellah responds to his critics. http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/bellah-responds-to-his-critics 1/8 FIRST THINGS June/July 2013 A REPLY TO MY CRITICS Robert N. Bellah responds to Thomas Joseph White, Francesca Aran Murphy, and Paul Griffiths. erhaps it was inevitable in a symposium organized by FIRST THINGS that all three commentators fault my book for not taking the life, death, and Res- urrection of Jesus Christ as the center of my story, when the fact of the matter is that my book didn't reach chronologically to the life of Jesus. That's because Religion in Human Evolution, large as it is, is a fragment. I had originally intended to bring the book up to the present, but when in 2010 the manuscript had become so tall that it could almost tip over I real- ized that it must go to the publisher with the hope for another (inevitably smaller) book to complete what I had originally hoped to do. I rationalized this decision on the grounds that it did achieve, I hoped, one major point Robert N. Bellah is Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
A REPLY T O MY C R IT IC SRobert N. Bellah responds to Thomas Joseph White,
Francesca Aran Murphy, and Paul Griffiths.
erhaps it was inevitable ina symposium organized
by F I R S T T H I N G S that all
three com m entators fault my b ook for not tak ing the life, death, and Res-
urrection of Jesus Christ as the center of my story, when the fact of the
matter is that my book didn't reach chronologically to the life of Jesus.
That's because Religion in Hum an Evolution, large as it is, is a fragm ent.I had originally intended to bring the boo k u p to the present, but when in
201 0 the m anu script h ad becom e so tall that it could alm ost tip over I real-
ized tha t it m ust go to the publisher w ith the hope for an other (inevitably
smaller) book to com plete wh at I had originally hop ed to d o. I rationalized
this decision on the grounds that it did achieve, I hoped, one major point
Robert N. Bellah is Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.
that wascentral to my argument: By looking at wherereligion came from rather than where it was going,I could avoid what I thought w ere the major defectsof most previous efforts to account for the evolutionof religion—namely, determinism and reductionism.
It was precisely in an attem pt to defeat efforts to
reduce religion to deterministic and reductionist bio-logical causes that I undertook at my advanced agea fairly serious education in biology so that I couldshow that those accounts could not be substantiatedin biological terms. I was then also concerned toavoid sociological or economic determinism by show-ing instead that religion, from the earliest forms tothe great transformations of the Axial Age, had itsown inner dynamic and creativity, which made it im-possible to treat it as a "variable" determined by itssocial environment, however much it interacted w ithand responded to that environment.
So I wish my critics had focused more on what Idid do than on what I didn't do. But under the cir-cumstances, that was understandable. Theologianswill be theologians , I suppose.
Francesca Aran Murphy, in her emphasis onfreedom, comes closest to getting at what Iwas most trying to do in this book, and hercriticisms are off the mark only by a little.She and I share a great admiration for Johan
Huizinga's Homo Ludens, which has been central in
both of our lives. However, she sees Huizinga fol-lowing Plato when he, in the Laws, wrote that "manis made God's plaything, and tha t is the best part ofhim," but she does not see me doing so. Why does sheimagine that I don't affirm Plato as Huizinga does?Nothing in what follows the Plato quote in Religionin Human E volution indicates any disavowal on mypart. And the fairly long and largely ecstatic treat-ment of Plato in the chapter on Greece in the AxialAge would certainly suggest to most readers that Iam a Platonist.
She comes to her conclusion in part because else-
where in the book I quote Kant with approval andso must believe, as she thinks Kant does, that free-dom is purely negative, "freedom from," rather than"freedom for the fulfillment of our na tures ." But ofcourse , Kant specifically thinks of the freedom at thebasis of the categorical imperative as positive—thatis, the freedom to treat oneself and all others as endsin themselves, thus producing a "kingdom of ends,"which is the ideal society. Plato and Kant arrive attheir conclusions in very different ways, but both seefreedom as for something.
After largely agreeing with my argum ent. M urphy
writes, "It is quite impossible for an orthodox
Christian theologian to buy into Bellah's narrativetaken as a whole." That raises the question of what"Bellah's narrative as a whole" really is, somethingthat bedevils all the contributions to the sympo-sium (and preoccupied much of the discussion at theseminar last December as well). But for now, let's
leave aside "my narrative" and take up the issue ofwhat is and isn't possible for orthodox Christians.Murphy is attentive to my references to Huizingaand then to Plato, yet she ignores my reference toBlaise Pascal, who m akes a rather surprising appear-ance in a chapter on my very lukewarm account of"religious naturalism." There I quote him affirmingnot the God of the philosophers but God incarnatein Jesus Christ. Perhaps Pascal appears where hedoes to make a point not entirely incompatible with"orthodox Christian theology."
While I am honored by ThomasJoseph White's assertion thatReligion in Human Evolution is"the greatest work of liberal Prot-estant theology ever," I nonethe-
less would like to decline the honor. I wrote my bookas an example of one possible kind of contemporarysocial science, interdisciplinary even to the point ofincluding natural science along with social sciencesand the humanities. Still, I believe that all our cat-egories overlap, and so my book does not require
excluding revelation and metaphysics but is, on thecontrary, open to them in a variety of ways. A bookcan address topics of theological import without be-ing a book of theology.
That said, it is probably "liberal Protestant" thatgives me more trouble than "theology." I consider PaulTillich one of my three great teachers. I know he isoften categorized as a liberal Protestant, but he doesn'tfit. He was a critic no t only of liberal Protestantism (forjust the reason White cites: It had liquidated itself in tosecular humanism) but also of Protestantism itself. Hisbook The Protestant Era was first proposed as The
End of the Protestant Era?, but his publisher didn'twant a question mark in the title; he then titled it TheEnd of the Protestant Era, but Protestant friends feltthat seemed to suggest he was becoming Catholic, sohe ended up with the title we know.
Tillich's criticism of Protestantism itself, which wasvery deep and led to his feeling tha t he lived at the endof "the Protes tant era," was based on his understand-ing of Ch ristianity . He consistently affirmed "theProtestant principle," which is in essence prophetic re-ligion that calls everything on this ea rth into questionrelative to a transcendent conception of God. How-
ever, the Protestant principle also requires what he
called "Catholic subs tance," in the absence of whichthe Protestant principle turns into sheer criticism,which finally turns on itself and becomes nihilistic.Eor Tillich, the essence of Catholic substance is sacra-mentalism, and it isexactly tha t which P rotestantismabandoned. Eirst, orthodox Protestantism proclaimed
the Word and the Sacrament; then it became the Sac-rament through the Word; and then it became just theWord. Eor example, when Karl Barth said the Wordof God did not contain the sentence "Th ou shalt lightcandles," he m ade Tillich's point. Even more crushingwas T illich's claim that Protestant theology had aban-doned love as the central theological virtue in place ofthe all-consuming emphasis on faith.
For me, accepting Tillich's criticism of liberalProtestantism, and of Protestantism itself(though not the Protestant principle), meantthat I could only be a small-p protestant.Through my decades of involvement in the
Berkeley Graduate Theological Union, where I wasan adjunct professor from the time I first came toBerkeley in 1967, and especially owing to my closecollaboration with faculty and graduate studentsat the Jesuit School of the GTU, I lived in a heav-ily Ca tholic atmosphere even in so secular a place asBerkeley. Though I had been raised as a PresbyterianI ended up an Episcopalian, where liturgy and the Eu-charist in particular m et my need for a sacramental
religious prac tice. So I ended up a small-c catholic (orAnglo-Catholic) as well as a small-p protestant. Forall these reasons, I don't want to be called a liberalProtestant theologian, however great.
To the extent that I'll accept the honor of beingcalled a theologian, it's along the lines of what Til-lich himself described in a talk to the Harvard Over-seers of 1959. He said that all academic study in thehum anities, and especially in religion, must combinedetachment or distance with participation: "All de-tached knowledge remains hypothesis. It is prelimi-nary; but participation brings the subject matter into
us or us into it. Such participation produces the erosand the passion which inspire the teaching withoutdestroying the scientific soberness." In the empiricalcases I treat in my book, revelation and metaphysicsare not parked at the door.
On the con trary, several have significant existen-tial meaning to me. "Nothing is ever lost" becamemy mantra. In the case studies of my book I soughtthe passion of participation that Tillich rightly rec-ognized must complement detached analysis. Mytreatment of the biblical Hebrew prophets in mychapter on ancient Israel takes me back to my high
school church experience, when I first read them and
where they indelibly formed in me a social Christi-anity th at I have never abando ned. I especially iden-tify with Jeremiah, with his terrible burden of beingcalled by God, though he dearly wished God hadchosen someone else. Through much of my adult lifeI have been reading Plato and Aristotle, Aristotle
long before I read After Virtue, but with increasingunderstanding after that. I first read Confucius andMencius in classical Chinese in my first year in gradu-ate school, where I was combining a degree in sociol-ogy with East Asian languages. They have never leftme. In my research on ancient India, where I wascompletely a novice, I met the Buddha of the PaliCanon for the firs t time , despite my long fam iliaritywith Mahayana Buddhism in East Asia, where the"historical Buddha" is completely overshadowed bythe B odhisattvas. I was entranced with what I found:such wonderful, wise, and often amusing dialogues.
Even in the chapter on tribal religion, I noted howmuch the Australian Aborigines, especially as de-scribed by the Australian anthropologist W. E. H.Stanner, and the Navajo, as described by my own un-dergraduate teachers at H arvard , have meant to me.
S
o I don't entirely deny that there is theologyin my book—indeed, what would it be ifthere weren't? And perhaps White will in-sist that I'm being too ingenious in my use ofTillich to parry the liberal Protestant label.
I'm willing to concede that it's the theologian's pre-rogative to define theological categories. But I'd liketo challenge White's sociological assumptions abouttheological traditions .
He notes the irony of my remarkable achieve-ment of a liberal Protestant theology just at the mo-ment when liberal Protestantism is in eclipse. I thinkthat is more of an open question tha n he does. The"eclipse" may be due to the triumph of liberal Prot-estantism. By so invading secular humanist culturethat it lost its own distinction, it won, after all, bytransforming secular humanist culture itself. There
is more th an a little evidence that most Am ericans,for example, would assent to unmarked liberal Prot-estant beliefs more often than to unmarked ortho-dox alternatives, and that this would be true notonly for most mainline Protestants but also for mostCatholics and even most Evangelicals.
I joked in our seminar that liberal Protestantismhad died and been reborn ; it is called "religious stu-dies." Religious studies is not a homogeneous field,but I think there is more than a little truth in whatI said, and that the replacement of theology depart-ments with religious studies departments in most
to stay within the purview of this book, are all truemyths. They overlap with each other and with [thescientific myth], but even in their conflicts, which aresometimes serious, they are all worthy of belief, and Ifind it possible to believe in all of them in rather deepbut not exclusive ways."
I know that this opens me to the charge of relativ-ism from Griffiths (with which I will deal later),but it shows decisively that I have no mono-myth designed to replace all others. I criticizeand disavow the use of the modern cosmologi-
cal and evolutionary myth as an adequate religiousstory, and I certainly do not use it as "my story."To the extent that Griffiths thinks that I do, andMurphy and W hite seem to indicate that they agree,they have all failed to read carefully enough. So
when Murphy writes that as "an orthodox Ghristiantheologian" she "cannot buy into Beliah's narrativetaken as a whole," I wonder what narrative she istalking about. It is not my conscious intent to offersuch a narrative.
When I move beyond biology to the realm ofculture, I am leaving behind the scientific narrativethat "all educated people accept." I am developinginsights from Merlin Donald, Jerome Bruner, andothers to try to understand aspects of cultural evolu-tion. Here I move into contested territory, since somescholars think that the idea of evolution applies only
to biology and not to cu lture, and others believe thatcultural evolution is defensible but have a differentview from the one I adopted. I'm fully aware of thelack of scientific consensus on these issues. Still fur-ther, I am not so foolish as to imagine that the tw o is-sues I raise at the end of my conclusion—namely, thedanger of ecological catastrophe and the necessity ofsympathetic understanding of all human traditions—command anything like universal agreement. Here Iam doing exactly what Griffiths thinks I should bedoing: agreeing that "the metanarrative one has isone candidate among many." I am not offering one
more triumphalist m etanarrative.I find the charge bizarre. Triumphalist narratives
usually offer a final stage tha t is a "fulfillment" of allprevious stages. Yet the few hints I give about wherethe story I tell seems to be headed lead to exactly theopposite conclusion. I have profound doubts about themodern project itself, which has significant achieve-ments but seems headed toward self-destruction. Iargue that the theoretic, which modern culture tendsto exalt, is not the final culminating stage that candispense with everything before it. Yes, it is power-ful in some ways compared with its predecessors, the
mimetic and the mythic, but it is also vulnerable to
great dangers precisely when it becomes disembeddedfrom bodily practice and narrative.
Thus, when it comes to religion understood as"a conception of a general order of existence," asClifford Geer tz puts it, I prefer Plato's to tha t ofmodern science used as a religious myth. In fact, Ithink all the Axial myths are preferable to that lat-ter alternative. I believe in multiple metanarratives,in many histories arid many stories, and therefore Icanno t accurately be accused of asserting a single tri -umphalist story, and especially not the one modernscience has on offer. "M etanarratives don't brook ri-vals," Griffiths writes . His might not, but I find hatclaim a theoretical abstraction. As I show, duringthe Axial Age, world history did offer rivals—andit still does. One of the major points of my book isthat we should avoid using a triumphalist scientific
metanarrative by subsuming or resolving or domes-ticating this rivalry.
Griffiths takes up two positions that Ifind profoundly shocking. One is hiscasual acceptance of a future of massextinction for humans and probablymost multicellular life. He writes that
"major ex tinction events are a regular feature of ourplanet's life, with or without human involvement."Here he is simply wrong. All previous extinctionevents have been caused by physical occurrences such
as collisions with comets or meteorites or massivevolcanic eruptions. Only this one is caused by hu-mans, and only this one can humans do somethingabout. I though t Catholics were especially concernedabout life. How can Griffiths be so complacent aboutpassively accepting the death of millions, or billions,or very possibly all human lives?
I have recently reread Gaudium et Spes and notedthat, while it warns us against the illusion that flaw edhuman beings can bring about the Kingdom of Godon earth, we are not to use that as an excuse not todo all we can to bring our present world as close as
possible to that end. Human weakness is rejected asan excuse for inaction in the face of worldly evils.I am certain that humans can still do a lot to miti-gate the environmental disasters already beginning(how often in history has lower Manhattan beenunderwater?) but am not optimistic that we will acteffectively in time. In this case, Kant's "can" surelymeans "should," and I can't imagine Griffiths' com-placency in so serious a m atter.
The other thing that shocked me was Griffiths'horror at the idea of a world civil society, which hebelieves "would mean the end of the Church and, I
think, of most other religious traditions." Why on
earth w ould he think that a global civil society wouldmean the end of the Church? History suggests oth-erw isî. Freedom of religion is the very first commit-ment of civil society, going back to its origins in theeighteenth century. All the other freedoms that civilsociety requires, such as freedom of speech, of the
press, of association, and so forth, are extrapolationsfrom that one central freedom, the freedom of reli-gion. For a long time the Catholic Church supportedthe idiea of an established church and was doubtfulabout religious freedom, but several of the centraldocuments of Vatican II indicate a strong affirmationof religious freedom. A world civil society of the sort Ihope (as does a major s trand of modern Catholicism)will flour ish is therefore more likely to mean an endto religious persecution th an the end of religion.
Jürgen Habermas and others also support the ideaof a global civil society. We have a global economythat transcends and intimidates all nations, but wehave nothing above the nation-state to mitigate thedangers of the unconstrained use of national power,even for genocide. Further, nationalism is one ofthegreatest dangers in our w orld today, especially sincethe two most powerful nations in the world, theUnited States and C hina, are its two most national-ist. The idea of a war between China and the UnitedStates is not inconceivable as things are going at themom ent, but that would be disastrous and could leadto the same consequences as environmental disaster.
I n any event, a global civil society open to plu-ralism is already beginning to show its head. Iwas in China twice in 2011 and saw the hopeyoung intellectuals there had that such a devel-opment could mitigate the authoritarianism of
their own country and lead to a genuine engagementof China with the other leading nations of the earth.These young Chinese wanted a civil society with nostate ideology—not Marxism, not Confucianism—but rather the open discussion of all the alternatives,in which a chastened Confucianism would have a
voice, though only in dialogue with the traditionalreligions of Buddhism and Daoism, as well as withChristianity, a growing religion in China and thefaith, as these young intellectuals well knew, of manyChinese dissidents.
Whether it is an all-consuming "metanarrative" orthe supposed anti-Christian consequences of a worldcivil society, Criffiths consistently suspects that I amoffering some kind of mono-myth that would swal-low up everything else: "If Bellah's metanarra tive istrue, this Christian one must be false—because hisaccount requires Christians exactly not to offer this
narrative as a metanarrative." The non-relativistic
pluralism that I espouse is simply incomprehensibleto him, as it was to many of the symposium par-ticipants. When I recite the Nicene Creed in church Ithink I am asserting a metanarrative not so far fromhis, although he can't imagine that I could seriouslybelieve it. But I do . I wrote Religion in Human Evo-
lution not as a narrow professional undertaking butas a w ork of social science tha t I value existentially,because it tries to bring into clearer focus what rolereligion has in the development and flourishing ofthe human anim al. And I've studied Navajo religion,which evokes in me insights I cherish rather than a de-mand that I reject it as a competing "metanarra tive."
As I read Griffiths' commentary, I have to won-der, has he really read my book? The last thing I amarguing for is "generic sociological and historicalcategories, not theological ones, that [will] inform
the self-understanding of the citizens of the hoped-for world civil society." What I believe is exactly theopposite, as I affirm in the crucial quotation, fromThomas McC arthy, Haberm as' leading American in-terpreter, in the penultimate paragraph of my book:"The conceptual point is this: By their very nature,the universal cannot be actual without the particular ,nor the formal without the substantive, the abstractwithout the concrete, structure without c ontent."
And so it follows that "from our present per-spective, it is clear that the irreducible variety ofhermeneutic standpoints and practical orientations
informing interpretive endeavors, however well in-formed, will typically issue in a 'conflict of interpreta-tions' and thus call for a dialogue across differences."Our religious convictions will make vital contribu-tions to any world civil society that is fit for actualhuman beings.
G
riffiths finally find s my book pointless.Thankfully, the other commentators tosome degree seem to think that I suc-ceeded in fulfilling the two goals I set formyself. First, a serious look at the pres-
ent state of work in evolutionary biology shows that itby no means requires an absolutely determinist and re-ductionist view. M any leading biologists recognize thesentience, creativity, and participation of organisms intheir own evolution as being there from the beginningand believe that genetic mutation is only one part ofthe story, not its absolute foundation. Conserved coreprocesses are able to defend themselves from geneticchanges tha t would destroy them , while encouragingchanges that might enhance them. For these and oth-er related reasons, attempts to use biology to explainculture need not have grim reductionist consequences.
Second, in my chapters beg inning with trib al reli-gion right up to the Axial Age, I argue that religioninvolves a quest for comprehensive m eaning th at hasits own internal motivation. It occurs within andinteracts with other spheres of society and culture,but what it produces can never be reduced to thoseenvironing spheres. I reject the older, often taken-for-granted economic determinism in the long storyI tell, and I also reject the newer turn to power deter-minism tha t is so popular among the postmod ernists.Thus, in terms of both biological and cultural his-tory, I argue for freedom and creativity rather than
determinism and reductionism. This is surely of somehelp to those students of religion who already intuitthat to be the case, as Murphy suggests most of us do .
' Beyond that, I take every case on its own terms,affirming revelation and metaphysics where I findthem, and also the claim to the truth of their ownmetanarratives, which can never be subsumed into"my metanarrative." I believe there is truth in all ofthem, including the tribal ones. All of them deserveour respect. That does not mean all of them are to bebelieved as equally tru e, w hich I have never affirmed.But it- does mean we can learn from all of them . 13
THE LONG ROOM
Alive in the long, deep room of the s oul,
I feel, at 4 1 , absurdly old,
a burnt-out heap of blackened greenwood
oti the grate. And this despite the steady light
that fills this place and warms the burtiished floors,
the leather chairs, the paintings framed in gilt.
This despite the crystal sparking on the bar,
the shelves of boo ks like soldiers on pa rad e,and bottles of witie racked like mortar shells
against the walls.
And all these guests—good Lord!
They talk and talk, make toasts, and show their teeth.
They straighten steam-pressed pleats and smooth their ties,
ignoritig how the sun sweeps across the room,
each candlestick and champagne flute a gnomon
scything shadows down the hall.
The day goes cold.
Soon, the servants, funereal and neat,
will ghost about the room, closing doorsand shutters against the coming night, against
desire, ambition, and all those vistas
spread across the future's darkened landscape.
I've seen their kn ow ing lo oks, their fox-sly smiles.