Robert Bellah, Sociologist of Religion Who Mapped the American Soul, Dies at 86 - NYTim... - 0 views
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“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.”
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describes the pervasive presence in American life of what Professor Bellah called a “civil religion” — a tradition, woven almost imperceptibly into the fabric of the national culture, that is neither church nor state but rather a link between the two. It involves, he argued, “a set of beliefs, symbols and rituals” that originated at the nation’s birth and endures to the present day.
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“It’s a complicated relationship between politics and religion,”
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