Robert Bellah, the Sociologist of American Religion Who Went against the Secular Grain

At a time when the social sciences were increasingly indifferent or even hostile to religion, the American sociologist Robert Bellah—who died ten years ago—was intensely focused on the role of ritual and belief in shaping human life. Perhaps the most prominent scholar in his field during the 1960s and 70s, Bellah is best known for his analyses of what he called the “American civil religion.” He was, in Matthew Rose’s estimation, the last great thinker of the religious left, and his admirers included liberal politicians like Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter as well as the conservative Catholic thinkers Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak. Rose writes: