Robert Bellah, Sociologist of Religion Who Mapped the American Soul, Dies at 86

Last updated on: August 8, 2013 at 3:58 pm by Guest Contributor

Robert Bellah, Sociologist of Religion Who Mapped the American Soul, Dies at 86 2013-08-08T15:58:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Robert N. Bellah, a distinguished sociologist of religion who sought nothing less than to map the American soul, in both the sacred and secular senses of the word, died on July 30 in Oakland, Calif. He was 86.

His death, from complications of recent heart surgery, was announced by the University of California, Berkeley, where he was the Elliott professor emeritus of sociology.

Throughout his work, Professor Bellah was concerned with the ways in which faith shapes, and is shaped by, American civic life. He was widely credited with helping usher the study of religion — a historically marginalized subject in the social sciences — into the sociological fold.

“Modern America has a soul, not only a body, and Bellah probed that soul more deeply and subtly than anyone in his field or his time,” Steven M. Tipton, a professor in the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, wrote in an e-mail on Monday.

Professor Bellah’s best-known books include “The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial” (1975), “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life” (1985) and “Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age” (2011).

“He was a major moral philosopher of modernity,” said Ann Swidler, a professor of sociology at Berkeley and, with Professor Tipton, one of the authors of “Habits of the Heart.” “He was interested in the way in which our humanity was grounded in very primitive aspects of ourselves — our need to think in terms of myth, narrative, the stories we tell about who we are as a people — and in our capacity for rational thought.”

Professor Bellah, who was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Bill Clinton in 2000, came to wide attention in 1967 with a seminal article, “Civil Religion in America.”

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