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Habits has sometimes been interpreted as arguing that individualism and group loyalty or solidarity are kind of zero-sum situations—the more of one, the less of the other. That was never our intention. We believe that a radically atomized individual is a weak individual, not a strong individual.

Habits emphasizes the need for a moral language that encompasses social commitments as well as individual concerns. Let's draw that out: What difference does it make that people lack a language to talk about their commitment to things and persons beyond themselves?

We are essentially arguing that many of the people we interviewed for Habits are living lives that involve much concern for other people. But each of them in one way or another has problems with how to express that in any way other than language such as "it meets my needs" or "it happens to be my current priority" or "I'm into that."

Now, I sense that even if the moral practices are better than the language, the practices will be endangered if we don't know how to explain them. When we have to express everything that's loving and caring and socially responsible in terms of "what it does for me," that begins to undercut the very nature of those practices.

Therefore, it's important to recover a way of speaking that doesn't just immediately, any time any value question is raised, say, "That's just up to individuals and whatever they feel." Of course, many Americans talk that way because they possess the virtue of tolerance. They don't want to reject everybody who isn't exactly like them. But the ability to have a broad, sympathetic understanding of diversity does not require us to give up all objective moral judgment. And we tend, in America, to make that equation: If you accept other people, then you can't come to any conclusions at all about how they're behaving. Our moral practices are being stunted by a constricted moral language.

This article originally appeared in the February 3, 1989 issue of Christianity Today.

Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Also appearing on our site today:

Prophetic Habits of a Sociologist's Heart | Robert Bellah's career shows the promise, and limits, of the scholarship he made so accessible to the church.

Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, and Self is available at Amazon.com. Habits of the Heart is available at Christianbook.com.

The Hartford Institute for Religion Research's Robert Bellah site features a biography, publications, and a complete up-to-date bibliography, as well as several of his articles, lectures and interviews.

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July (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46