Robert Bellah on Religion, Morality, and the Politics of Resentment
The premier sociologist of religion talks to AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen.
In a 1977 issue of the New York Review of Books, Robert Bellah and McGeorge Bundy exchanged letters in response to a book review that touched on the behavior of Harvard University during the McCarthy period. Bellah, the subject of this interview, is a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Bundy served as national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Bellah wrote that in 1954, when he was a Harvard graduate student, Bundy, who was then dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, threatened him with nonrenewal of his fellowship if he did not name his fellow undergraduate comrades in the Harvard student Communist Party. Bellah had been a party member as an undergraduate from 1947 to 1949. Bellah said he would talk about himself but not name names. The Federal Bureau of Investigation questioned him a few days after he was called to Bundy’s office, and he followed the course he had told Bundy he would.
In spring 1955, Bellah was put forward by the Department of Social Relations at Harvard for a junior appointment. Bundy told him that the Harvard Corporation would approve his appointment, with one caveat: if Bellah were called by any government investigating committee and failed to “cooperate fully,” his term appointment would not be renewed. Bellah decided to take a postdoctoral fellowship at the Islamic Institute at McGill University in Montreal. Two years later, Harvard offered Bellah another appointment without the provision attached to the 1955 offer, and he accepted.
Bundy replied in the New York Review of Books that he had never threatened Bellah’s fellowship and that he had urged Harvard to appoint him in 1955 without the qualifying provision. Rather than reply to Bundy with a further letter, Bellah asked the Harvard administration to release the documents about the events in question so that the truth could be known. He was told that it was Harvard’s policy not to release such information until fifty years after an incident had occurred.
In 2004, Bellah once again sought the documents, and the Harvard administration sent all that it said could be found. There was no record of the meeting with Bundy in 1954. However, correspondence between Bundy and Nathan Pusey, Harvard’s president, made it seem that Bundy had indeed wanted to make an unqualified appointment in 1955 but was turned down by the corporation. One new piece of evidence was a long letter by Talcott Parsons, chair of the Department of Social Relations and Bellah’s adviser, protesting the corporation’s action. This correspondence was sent with a cover letter of support from the chair of the Harvard chapter of the AAUP. All this was reported in another letter to the New York Review of Books published in the February 10, 2005, issue.
In its May 25, 2005, issue, the New York Review of Books published a letter from the psychologist Leon J. Kamin, who recounted even worse treatment from Harvard. He, too, went to Canada but returned some years later as chair of the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. It is obvious that we still have only a few rays of light on the subject of Harvard’s collaboration with McCarthyism—that history remains to be written. It was with reference to these two letters that this interview began.
Bowen: I was surprised to learn that you were blacklisted from teaching at Harvard in the 1950s, because Harvard had a reputation of somehow standing hard and firm against McCarthyism.
Bellah: I think we have to remember that the nation was in the grip of a classic paranoid hysteria. If you look at the actions of the AAUP or the American Civil Liberties Union during those years, they were not always praiseworthy.
Bowen: But the Harvard AAUP chapter came to your defense.
Bellah: Yes, it did. At least it added a cover letter to Talcott Parsons’s memo. And Talcott was active in the AAUP. So that’s true in that particular case. I would trust current Harvard faculty to do a perfectly fair job, but it’s probably beyond the capacity of any of the AAUP chapters or anyone to go back and review what happened in that period. And if someone did, he or she would, of course, have to look at not just Harvard’s record, but that of the academy nationwide. And there would be some good stories as well as bad stories.
Bowen: Let’s go back to the root cause of your being blacklisted. Happily, we can ask this question today without upsetting anyone: why did you join the Communist Party?
Bellah: The irony is that I’m a lifelong sociologist of religion. Religion has always been my preoccupation. I’m now a practicing Episcopalian, but I grew up as a Presbyterian in Los Angeles, where I attended a fairly liberal Presbyterian church. And then my mother became wedding director—this is a long way around, but you need it—at the First Congressional Church, which is a huge gothic structure near downtown Los Angeles. The pastor was very reactionary, but somehow, through not paying attention I suppose, he hired a divinity student from the University of Southern California to be the high school minister. And this guy was absolutely aflame with the social gospel and social criticism. He had us reading the great prophets. So, in a sense, I discovered Marxism late in high school. Also, living in a certain part of Los Angeles, we had a lot of European immigrants, mainly Jewish. They were very educated, and some of them were quite left wing. To me, Marxism was the promise that we could actually create the Kingdom of God on earth. Of course, from a Christian point of view, only God can bring the Kingdom of God. But there was an easy transition for me from a Christian commitment to social justice to a recognition that some people were doing something about it. The foolish part of it was that I never paid much attention to the Soviet Union. I saw what the people that I came to know in the party were doing in the United States, which at that time was well ahead of the civil rights movement—fighting for black equality and so on. I was very impressed with them as people. When I started at Harvard in spring 1947, after having spent a year and a half in the army, there were a lot of returned veterans who were more mature than the usual undergraduates. It was a very exciting time to be an undergraduate, because the level of conversation was so high. I was educated as much in the dining room as I was in the classroom. It was a remarkable group of people. And the other thing is, I was expelled from the party.
Bowen: Why?
Bellah: Our undergraduate party members were not exactly robots. We would go and get the Daily Worker, and we would die screaming of laughter. Well, the Communist Party does not have a high sense of humor. And eventually, the party itself conducted an internal witch hunt. This happens to groups that are under pressure. And it wanted to get rid of people who weren’t true believers. And so a lot of people in the Harvard party were expelled, including me.
Bowen: That was 1949?
Bellah: Late 1949, early 1950. It was right before the Korean War. In any case, I was always critical of the party but also excited by the very smart people in it. After all, some of the leading intellectuals of Europe were Communists.
Bowen: Were you studying Japanese history then?
Bellah: I began to specialize in East Asia about the time I left the party. Toward the end of my undergraduate career, I took East Asian civilization, taught by John Fairbank and Edwin Reischauer. And that converted me to this idea that for a sociologist, comparative work could be fascinating—particularly studying Japan, because its past paralleled what happened in Europe.
Bowen: After you published Tokugawa Religion in 1957, you wrote in an increasingly critical way about individualism in America. You wrote about opposing the Vietnam War, and you’ve written recently about the Iraq War. You’ve moved toward looking critically at the role of religion in the United States and U.S. foreign policy—the great fault lines in American society. You’ve become a sociologist of America as opposed to a Japanologist. As one who reads your work, I am thrilled that you’ve done this, because you bring a critical temperament to the discussion of important issues. Why the shift in scholarly focus? Was it the Vietnam War?
Bellah: What happened was that I wrote an essay called “Civil Religion in America” that was published in Daedalus in 1967. That single essay just propelled me into the public sphere. I began getting invitations to speak. The first couple of years, I would get questions I couldn’t answer. I’d say I didn’t know. I had to give myself an intense course in American studies. After all, as an undergraduate, I majored in social anthropology. As a graduate student in East Asian studies, I told Talcott Parsons, who got me to write the original essay, that I didn’t know anything about America—I said I was a Japan specialist. Talcott said to me, “Bob, you’re a sociologist. You can write about anything.” So I looked back in my files, and I found a talk I’d given in Japan right after Kennedy’s inaugural trying to explain to the Japanese why every presidential inaugural in history has mentioned God in spite of the fact that we have no established religion. Did you know that the first delegation of Shinto priests to visit America after the war was taken to Washington, D.C., and shown the Arlington Cemetery? Afterward, they came to Harvard and asked the difference between Arlington Cemetery and Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto shrine in Tokyo that commemorates Japan’s war dead. Nobody could give them an answer.
Bowen: When America goes to war, though, whether in Vietnam or Iraq, God goes with America, does it not?
Bellah: Oh, yes, no question. But what country doesn’t believe this? I’m working on ancient Greece right now. I mean, look at the Iliad.
Bowen: Sure. But there is a fundamentalist streak, is there not, in the tendency among American leaders to think the City on the Hill has special dispensation?
Bellah: Yes. I think you need to distinguish two strands in America that have gone side by side, but between which I think there is a deep tension. One is America as a great experiment in a new way of doing things that will influence the world by its model. That’s really the idea behind the City on the Hill. When Abraham Lincoln said that we were the last best hope of mankind, he meant that we had to create a society that would be a model. Now, the other side is military. For example, when George Bush says that we will not allow any other nation to challenge us militarily and we, in effect, dominate the world and everybody better do what we say or else, that’s the military side, America as conqueror. And both sides have religious backing.
Bowen: Is the imperial impulse as you describe it grounded in religion in some way?
Bellah: Sure it is. The chosen people.
Bowen: When America goes to war, civil liberties at home are sometimes compromised.
Bellah: Oh, this is happening big time right now with the USA Patriot Act.
Bowen: What about the war’s impact on the academy, looking at that first before its impact on the wider society?
Bellah: Of course, the irony here is that the one place in the United States where there’s almost total opposition to the Iraq War is the university. This drives the right-wing people nuts, and they want right-wing professors appointed and so on. We’re under attack from the outside, but I don’t see any repression of freedom to speak on the Iraq War inside the academy. In fact, a week hardly goes by in which there isn’t some forum at Berkeley about the Iraq War. Minister-activist William Sloan Coffin was here a couple of months ago. He asked us what the matter was with us. “Why aren’t you having teach-ins?” he asked. “Why aren’t the students striking? I mean, why is it so quiet around here?” So compared with the Vietnam War, it’s very quiet today. But I don’t see any repression of views opposing the war. For one thing, the war is deeply unpopular even outside the academy. I’m in despair about many things in this country: the craziness of a war begun with no idea of what the consequences would be and its implications for civil liberties. And I think that people in Middle Eastern studies are particularly vulnerable. Anyone who voices any criticism of Israel is denounced as anti-Semitic by people like conservative activist David Horowitz and so on. There are pressures, vulnerability, and, as always, schools that don’t have the kind of internal sense of identity and prestige that allows them to say to hell with outside pressure.
Bowen: You wrote an article for Academe five years ago that suggests that the academy itself is partly to blame for being vulnerable to these external influences. Is that a fair summation?
Bellah: If I remember rightly, I wrote about the marketization problem—major changes in American society that have to do with privatization and the market model. It isn’t only academia that is affected; it’s medicine, it’s law. It’s happened across the board. Public funding has declined—you know, state support for California higher education has dropped every year for the past twenty years—which means that the money has to come from somewhere else. And the more in debt you are to the private economic sector, the more money influences academic decision making. And that’s terrible. That’s external influence. It’s not quite the same thing as political influence because of a stand on something like Iraq or the Middle East.
Bowen: Which is the greater threat, marketization or politicization? Or do they go hand in hand?
Bellah: It’s hard to say which. At the moment, I think we’ve gotten in bed with corporations partly because government funding isn’t as big as it once was. So that’s sort of scarier. Of course, so is government interference with academic freedom. Corporations tend to want the studies they finance to come out in ways that would benefit them economically. And you’ve got to be very careful about that. And I think that is a major problem, because when state funding goes down, what are you going to do? I mean, I feel sorry for university presidents right now that they have to scrounge the money to keep the operation going.
Bowen: Do you think higher education is no longer the great democratizing equalizer that it once was?
Bellah: Oh, tell me about it. It’s so expensive to come to the University of California now. For a really bright poor kid, it’s very much in his or her interest to accept a scholarship from an Ivy League college, because such a student won’t be able to pay for UC Berkeley.
Bowen: And isn’t one of the other impacts the growing reliance on contingent faculty, not tenured faculty?
Bellah: Oh, that’s true everywhere, at both public and private schools.
Bowen: What should we do for a young professor who spent an awful lot of time getting that dissertation done only to discover that there’s no real full-time job or any chance of getting tenure?
Bellah: Roger, I spend a fair bit of my time holding the hands of people who have been itinerants for ten years and are facing the fact that they aren’t ever going to get a tenure-track job. And what are they going to do? Their whole life is devoted to their scholarship, and they can’t make a living or support their family.
Bowen: Are universities and higher education important to democracy in America?
Bellah: Of course, in principle, I think so. But this raises another issue, namely, the domination of a kind of technical professionalism to the point where professors are much more concerned about whether their colleagues in another state or country think they’re on the cutting edge of research, rather than about whether their lectures make any sense to the students. I think we fail the students at the dimension of meaning. Now, we’ve assumed the humanities are going to take care of that, but the humanities have their own internal wars. And they aren’t doing a very good job of it. Traditionally, social science has always had a moral dimension. You know, Michael Burawoy, who was president of the American Sociological Association, has been pushing public sociology. But that effort fights against how many articles one has published in review journals.
Bowen: Student access to higher education has been diminished; state support for public higher education is going down, forcing universities to look to the private market economy; faculty can’t get full-time jobs; and overspecialization reigns. What do these trends augur for the future for American democracy?
Bellah: I think the civic dimension of education is in bad shape. That’s tough, because we have friends on the right who would like to have their own form of civic education. But to just abandon the concern means we concede defeat. I mean, conservative activist and author William Bennett talks about virtue. Well, virtue is a very important thing, but it shouldn’t be left to William Bennett. He shouldn’t be the only one talking about it.
Bowen: Okay. You’re the expert on religion. The New York Times did a piece not long ago showing that 55 percent of all Americans believe that evolution is wrong. And of all identified registered Republicans, 68 percent do not believe in evolution. Now we have the president of the United States saying that right alongside evolution, we should be teaching intelligent design. Fundamentalism is alive and well in the United States. Your thoughts?
Bellah: I’m so baffled and in despair by this. It’s as if the Scopes trial is never over—we’re back in the 1920s. It’s unbelievable. And, again, it’s so depressing because you could not find anything like this in any other advanced country in the world. What has happened in this country?
Bowen: Let me ask the provocative question about the whole notion of faith, which invariably goes with religion and often seems to produce negative political consequences. Isn’t religion in some respects the enemy of the academy?
Bellah: No, of course not, because there is no such thing as religion. This is a plural phenomenon. And remember that Harvard, Yale, and probably three-quarters of all the private higher education institutions in the United States were established by religious communions. When in the early 1980s, the religious right first emerged on the scene, I would get calls from reporters at Time or Newsweek lamenting that religious people were getting into politics. They thought it was something totally new. I’d say, “Something totally new? Did you ever hear of Martin Luther King, Jr.?” There would be a silence. I mean, Martin Luther King believed. I believe. Religion has been here all along. It’s a question of what kind of religion.
Bowen: Let’s talk about fundamentalism, then.
Bellah: Fundamentalism, yes, has been around since the early twentieth century. It’s a unique phenomenon, and now it has spread worldwide. I think the Americans created it. It is a serious problem, but don’t equate religion with fundamentalism.
Bowen: Okay. It’s not religion that’s the enemy of the academy but fundamentalism. In 1924, a year before the Scopes trial, the president of the AAUP told the Association’s annual meeting that fundamentalism was the greatest threat to academic freedom in America. In 1927, two years after the Scopes trial, the AAUP created a special committee to take a close look at all the states that were passing laws forcing biology teachers to say that the world was created in six days—six twenty-four-hour days. So it does seem that eighty years later, we’re coming back full circle. So why does this strange phenomenon, peculiarly American, periodically resurrect itself?
Bellah: In general, I think you have to ask why fundamentalism is reappearing all over the world. And, of course, there’s no easy answer. But in a greatly oversimplified nutshell, I would say that modernization is enormously disruptive of human existence. And when people feel that their lives are being stood on end, the need for something simple, clear, and absolute is very great.
Bowen: Islamic fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists. We make no distinction.
Bellah: Hindu, as well. Hindu nationalism is very hostile to Indian Muslims. Remember, there are 100 million Indian Muslims. There’s a huge Muslim community in India whose members are now afraid. It’s interesting that East Asia doesn’t seem to have fundamentalism. Of course, there are ultra-right-wing nationalists in Japan, but they have a very small following. They really have no public appeal. Orthodox Communism in China is a kind of fundamentalism, but it has no popular support. I think that fundamentalism in the United States is linked to globalization. During the first several decades after World War II, a whole generation of blue-collar people were lifted up. They bought homes in suburbia. They had well-paying jobs. Their wives didn’t have to work if they didn’t want to. They had health insurance. They had retirement benefits. Between 1970 and 1980, the compact between industry and labor started to come apart, partly because the economy was shifting from the old assembly line into new kinds of production. A whole sector of our population began to find itself economically marginalized at the same time that we had calls for equality for blacks, women, and gays. Men were losing their jobs; their wives were making more money than they. They were feeling emasculated and marginalized. And people who for generations voted Democratic are now voting solidly Republican, especially this social group. These people are peculiarly vulnerable to the fundamentalist message. They can say that blacks are getting the jobs that they should have. It’s feminism. It’s gays who make twice as much money as they do. It’s the politics of resentment cloaked in the politics of moral outrage. I don’t say that’s the whole story, but the change in American life, the vulnerability, leads people to vote so dramatically against their self-interest.
Bowen: You’ve suggested in some of your writings that America is suffering from a decline in associational living, and Americans are “bowling alone.” Is fundamentalism the antidote then? [“Bowling alone” refers to a phenomenon Harvard public policy professor Robert Putnam addressed in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.]
Bellah: No doubt that is true. While more traditional mainline religious groups encourage their members to belong to civic organizations, fundamentalists tend to limit themselves to just their one group. Fundamentalism doesn’t pull you into society. It makes you part of a group that feels abused and alienated from society. So it doesn’t contribute to the civic network that a vital democracy needs, though it may, as you suggest, give comfort to people who otherwise would feel even more isolated. It doesn’t, by the way, protect them. Their divorce rate is as high as the secularists. I mean, they are still vulnerable to all the disruptive pressures of our society.
Bowen: I’ve got to ask you about academic freedom as a way of closing this interview. You’ve been a member of the AAUP for a long time.
Bellah: Yes. Most of my life.
Bowen: Why?
Bellah: Well, I believe in what it stands for. You know, I believe in labor unions. And the AAUP is our equivalent. It’s our way of showing solidarity with our fellow workers. And it’s a way to work to keep the campus free of external and internal corruption. If you look at the cases the AAUP has investigated, they often involve tyrannical presidents or deans.
Bowen: What explains the fact that younger faculty members across America do not seem to share those views?
Bellah: Do they not share the views, or is it just that they don’t get involved?
Bowen: They may share the views, but they’re not members of the AAUP.
Bellah: Yes. That breaks my heart, because their failure to join is part of the whole “bowling alone” syndrome in which people are not joining anything. And I don’t know why. I really don’t. It baffles me.
Bowen: Well, we can stay home now, watch videos on our television set, work at our computer, and take classes online. We can avoid socialization in much of our lives. And one of my concerns is that the younger generation is moving in a direction that simply reaffirms “bowling alone.”
Bellah: Well, I’m seventy-eight. Don’t talk to me. No, it would be so easy to take a few dollars out of your paycheck and join the AAUP. I mean, why would one not want to support such an organization? I can’t understand—it’s beyond me.
Bowen: UC Berkeley has always been one of the chapter standouts for the AAUP. You’ve always had strong shared governance.
Bellah: Part of it is having the self-respect of “we don’t need to give in to anybody.” We know who we are. We’re committed to academic freedom. And we certainly want to be part of this. So it’s a combination of the culture and our distinction as a university, I think.
Bowen: That’s a great note to end on. Thank you very much.
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