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"Inside every social scientist," the sardonic wisdom runs, "is a prophet busting to get out." A recent collection of essays honoring sociologist Robert Bellah underscores how useful sociology can be for genuinely prophetic Christian leadership.

Bellah is perhaps best known among readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY as the lead author of the widely read Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Harper & Row, 1985). Now his four coauthors from that book—Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton—have edited a volume of essays inspired by the sweep of Bellah's career. Among the many distinguished contributors are the scholar of contemporary religion Harvey Cox, theologian Stanley Hauerwas, historian Albert Raboteau, philosopher Charles Taylor, and sociologist Robert Wuthnow. The authors' range of disciplines and interests represent the broad impact of Bellah's work.

Indeed, Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, and Self (University of California Press, 2002) covers some unexpected territory—beginning with Bellah's Harvard doctoral dissertation on the historical sociology of Japan. Yet throughout his work, Bellah has been fascinated by one topic: the symbols by which people understand themselves and their world. He has come to understand these symbols as growing primarily out of religious traditions. And he has studied them as they metamorphose by their interaction with other traditions (such as alternative religions and philosophies) and with social forces (such as economic, military, and political realities).

From this concern emerged his most famous essay, "Civil Religion in America," published in 1967. In it he coined that now-canonical term for the peculiar combination of Christian and secular ideals around which America publicly convenes and to which American politicians routinely gesture. From this emerged his most famous book, which traced the central "habits of the heart" of contemporary Americans.

In the epilogue of Meaning and Modernity, Bellah says that his mainline Protestant upbringing imbued him with a "prophetic Christianity." When he found that tradition insufficiently "up-to-date" and "scientific," he moved on to Marxism for a time. From there, he absorbed the highly abstract sociology of his mentor, Harvard professor Talcott Parsons. As his career progressed, he felt an increasing allegiance to and concern for Christianity as a vital reservoir of ideas, values, and allegiances necessary for the rescue of modern (and postmodern) humanity from the world we have made. The sociologist in Robert Bellah has prompted the prophet in Robert Bellah to call the church to faithfulness in order to secure its own, and the world's, salvation.

Bellah is perhaps most deeply worried about the extent to which Americans have become ethically individualistic at a time when social forces combine to press modern people at once into more individualized and yet also more conformist ways of living. Like Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, he laments the decline of institutions and practices that stand between the individual, or perhaps the individual family, and the conglomerate power of major corporations and high-level governments.

When the church itself "sells God" as just another commodity in the marketplace of leisure activities, and when the church itself blesses America as something akin to the kingdom of God on Earth, then the church ceases to offer a distinctive contribution to American public life. The Christian church thus joins the neighborhood, the civic club, the political party, and the labor union as just another attenuated "intermediate institution" that no longer puts up much of a fight against the dominant powers of the day.

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July 8 2002, Vol. 46, No. 8