Robert Bellah, RIP

As noted here in a tribute by Kieran Healy, the eminent sociologist Robert Bellah died last week. Bellah's most recent book, Religion in Human Evolution, was the subject of an interesting First Things symposium, including some tough criticism from Paul Griffiths and the faint praise from Thomas Joseph White that Bellah's book is "arguably the greatest work of liberal Protestant theology ever." But as Healy notes, Bellah's enduring intellectual influence was in his articulation of the idea of "civil religion" in American public life and--more profoundly, I think--in Habits of the Heart, which still often seems fresh and insightful almost three decades on. Along with such modern classics as Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue and Charles Taylor's The Sources of the Self, Habits of the Heart began the reappropriation of what was (reductively then) styled "communitarianism" but, at its best, was a grand (and Catholic) alternative to the torpor of 1970s liberal political theory. Here is a lovely post by Margarita Mooney on a recent conversation with Bellah, including this bit of reflection from her:

How do we recover a vision of the common good? Bellah told me he had just started reading Catholic teachings on human rights and the common good, beginning with one of the foundational documents of Vatican II, Gaudium et spes. Bellah was “utterly blown away” by the Gaudium et spes’s unflinching defense of human dignity combined with a robust vision of social justice. It’s hard, Bellah said, to avoid an individualistic or utilitarian vision of human rights, but Guadium et spes articulates how human rights and the common good reinforce each other. What do I think of Benedict XVI’s social encyclical Caritas in veritate, Bellah asked me?

Since I had previously read numerous of Benedict XVI’s books on Christology, theology, and secularization, I was already familiar with various themes of his thought which appear in Caritas in veritate: that truth is objective rather than relative, and that virtue must be both in the heart and in action. As such, the church’s mission of charity can never be private; the church’s mission of charity is public—it is oriented to the greater good of all, regardless of religious creed. Hence, the state and church are inter-dependent in their work for the common good, something that is hard for people to understand if they think religion must only be a private matter.