How Robert Bellah (1927-2013) Changed the Study of Religion

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August 1, 2013
By Mark Juergensmeyer
Professor of Sociology and Director of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

When the great sociologist of religion, Robert Bellah, died suddenly this week he was in the midst of writing the book that was meant to be the successor to his massive and magisterial Religion in Human Evolution. That book started with the Big Bang and ended with the Axial Age in the 6th century BCE. Although it covered much—the emergence of human culture and society in the evolution of the human species—there were still some significant changes in the social shape of religiosity in the last 2500 years that remained to be explored.

What the next book would focus on, Bellah told me, were the remarkable developments of the 16th through the 18th century that in Europe included the Reformation and the Enlightenment. This was a moment of anti-authoritarian popularism in society that resulted in a new social form of religiosity, a communitarian spirit that transformed Christianity and gave rise to a whole new protestant movement.

At the same time, similar movements were emerging in other traditions in other parts of the world. In India, for example, bhakti movements of social rebellion were erupting throughout the subcontinent, eschewing Brahmanical authority for the fellowship of devotees of a new breed of eclectic saints and teachers who could be outcastes, blind, female, or partly Muslim. Elsewhere in Asia, what has been called a “Protestant Buddhism” was appealing to the masses in the way that a more orthodox clerical order could never do.

What Bellah was exploring in these two books—one recently published and the other, alas, eternally to be unfinished—was a new subject of religious studies: global religion. This is a field of study that tries to show the connection between seemingly disparate forms of religiosity around the world and forces of globalization that effect societies virtually everywhere on the planet.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/7229/how_robert_bellah__1927_2013__changed_the_study_of_religion/

http://www.robertbellah.com/