Civil Religion in Robert Bellah (1927–)

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-189
Author(s):  
Roberto Cipriani ◽  
Laura Ferrarotti
Keyword(s):  
Civil Religion ◽  
Robert Bellah

Refusal to Mourn

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Runions
Keyword(s):  
American Politics ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
American People ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
The Us ◽  
Robert Bellah

In her recent book Precarious Life, Judith Butler points out that not more than ten days after 9/11, on 20 September 2001, George W. Bush urged the American people to put aside their grief; she suggests that such a refusal to mourn leads to a kind of national melancholia. Using psychoanalytic theory on melancholia, this article diagnoses causes and effects of such national melancholia. Further, it considers how a refusal to mourn in prophetic and apocalyptic texts and their interpretations operates within mainstream US American politics like the encrypted loss of the melancholic, thus creating the narcissism, guilt, and aggression that sustain the pervasive disavowal of loss in the contemporary moment. This article explore the ways in which the texts of Ezekiel, Micah, Revelation, and their interpreters exhibit the guilt and aggression of melancholia, in describing Israel as an unfaithful and wicked woman whose pain should not be mourned. These melancholic patterns are inherited by both by contemporary apocalyptic discourses and by the discourse of what Robert Bellah calls ‘American civil religion’, in which the US is the new Christian Israel; thus they help to position the public to accept and perpetuate the violence of war, and not to mourn it.

scholarly journals Postures of Piety and Protest: American Civil Religion and the Politics of Kneeling in the NFL

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 449
Author(s):  
Jeremy Sabella
Keyword(s):  
Civil Religion ◽  
American Football ◽  
Spectator Sports ◽  
Public Controversy ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
American Values ◽  
Robert Bellah ◽  
Football Field

Over the past ten years, athletes Tim Tebow and Colin Kaepernick have become famous for kneeling on the NFL football field. However, public reactions to these gestures varied significantly: Tebow’s kneeling spawned a lightly mocking but overall flattering meme, while Kaepernick’s stoked public controversy and derailed his NFL career. In order to interrogate these divergent responses, this article places the work of sociologist Robert Bellah and philosopher Michel Foucault in dialogue. It argues that spectator sports are a crucial space for the negotiation and contestation of American identity, or, in Bellah’s terms, civil religion. It then draws on philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of the docile body to explore the rationales behind and cultural reactions to the kneeling posture. I argue that Tebow and Kaepernick advance divergent civil religious visions within the “politics of the sacred” being negotiated in American life. In this process of negotiation, American football emerges as both a space for the public cultivation of docile bodies and a crucial forum for reassessing American values and practices.

scholarly journals “Civil Religion” and Confucianism: Japan's Past, China's Present, and the Current Boom in Scholarship on Confucianism

2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kiri Paramore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Republican China ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Confucian Values ◽  
History Of ◽  
Confucian Philosophy ◽  
Robert Bellah

This article employs the history of Confucianism in modern Japan to critique current scholarship on the resurgence of Confucianism in contemporary China. It argues that current scholarship employs modernist formulations of Confucianism that originated in Japan's twentieth-century confrontation with Republican China, without understanding the inherent nationalist applications of these formulations. Current scholarly approaches to Confucianism trace a history through Japanese-influenced U.S. scholars of the mid-twentieth century like Robert Bellah to Japanese imperialist and Chinese Republican nationalist scholarship of the early twentieth century. This scholarship employed new individualistic and modernist visions of religion and philosophy to isolate fields of “Confucian values” or “Confucian philosophy” apart from the realities of social practice and tradition, transforming Confucianism into a purely intellectualized “empty box” ripe to be filled with cultural nationalist content. This article contends that current scholarship, by continuing this modernist approach, may unwittingly facilitate similar nationalist exploitations of Confucianism.

Robert Bellah (1927-2013): Civil Religion

2017 ◽  
pp. 199-204
Author(s):  
Roberto Cipriani ◽  
Laura Ferrarotti ◽  
Howard G. Schneiderman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Religion ◽  
Robert Bellah

Sanctities, Blasphemies and the (Jewish) Nation

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-216
Author(s):  
Chaim Noy
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Orthodox Jews ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Robert Bellah ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The One ◽  
Modes Of Interaction

In this article I rematerialize discourse that is articulated in the shape of commemorative visitor book entries, in a national-military commemoration site in Jerusalem, Israel. The materiality and communicative affordances of the commemorative visitor book, the physical environment in which it is situated and which grants it meaning, and the modes of interaction and inscription that it affords are examined. Located in a densely symbolic national commemoration site, the impressively looking book does not merely capture visitors' reflections. Instead, it serves as a device that allows participation in a collective-national rite. While seemingly designated as a visitor book, the discursive device functions performatively as a portal or interface between visitors, on the one side, and the nation and the dead and living soldieries, on the other side. Expectedly, the inscriptions that populate the book's pages are instances of iconic discourse (texts with graphic additions of sorts), that embody one of the heightened ideological and experiential moments of "civil religion" (Robert Bellah). They illustrate the resources used by nationalism in establishing sacred contexts and rituals. Also, they illustrate how different discourses of sanctity (and profanity), are juxtaposed on the same (Jewish) space. Specifically, while local Israeli sightseers present their appreciation for and participation in commemoration of the nation-state in terms of "civil religion," most of the international tourists, who are mostly north American Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews, perform their notions of sanctity and sacredness in messianic and primordial terms, which look through or beyond the nation state.

American Civil Religion—and Others

Worldview ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (10) ◽  
pp. 13-19
Author(s):  
Frederick O. Bonkovsky
Keyword(s):  
Civil Religion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Social Patterns ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
Robert Bellah ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Self Examination ◽  
Martin Marty

A happy result of the Bicentennial can be increased self-knowledge. The danger, however, is that one may focus too exclusively on the United States, thus magnifying out of proportion both our virtues and our faults.Such distortion is evident in the current discussion of American civil religion. The turmoil of the late sixties and the self-examination of the seventies have encouraged consideration of the civil beliefs and practices widely shared by Americans. Robert Bellah, Will Herberg, Martin Marty, and Sidney Mead are among those who have recently written on the subject. Too often learned commentators have failed to note that American civil religion is an expression of general social patterns. It is therefore useful to take a look at non-American civil religions in several traditional and revolutionary societies.

scholarly journals Why the Covenant Worked: On the Institutional Foundations of the American Civil Religion

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 350
Author(s):  
John W. Compton
Keyword(s):  
Civil Religion ◽  
National Council ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
Robert Bellah ◽  
State And Local ◽  
National Council Of Churches ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Institutional Foundations

Scholars of American civil religion (ACR) have paid insufficient attention to the micro-level processes through which civil religious ideas have historically influenced beliefs and behavior. We know little about what makes such appeals meaningful to average Americans (assuming they are meaningful); nor do we know much about the mechanisms through which abstract religious themes and imagery come to be associated with specific policy aims, or what Robert Bellah called “national goals.” This article argues that a renewed focus on the relationship between civil religion and organized religion can help fill this gap in the literature. More specifically, I draw attention to three mainline Protestant institutions that for much of the twentieth-century were instrumental both in cultivating respect for the national civic faith and in connecting its abstract ideals to concrete reform programs: namely, the clergy, the state and local church councils, and the policy-oriented departments of the National Council of Churches (NCC). Finally, I argue that a fresh look at the relationship between civil religion and “church religion” sheds new light on the (arguably) diminished role of civil religious appeals in the present. If, as Bellah claimed in his later writings, ACR appeals have lost much of their power to motivate support for shared national goals, it is at least in part because the formal religious networks through which they once were transmitted and interpreted have largely collapsed.

Reviving the Civil Religious Tradition

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip S. Gorski
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Religious Rhetoric ◽  
Religious Nationalism ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
Robert Bellah ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Prophetic Religion

Philip S. Gorski’s chapter provides historical context for progressive religious groups’ use of civil religious rhetoric. Through an analysis of Barack Obama’s efforts to resurrect the civil religious tradition during his two campaigns and terms as president, this chapter revisits and reconstructs the vision of American civil religion that was originally advanced by Robert Bellah in 1967. The chapter shows that the American civil religion is woven out of two main threads: the prophetic religion of the Hebrew Bible and an Anglo-American version of civic republicanism. It also distinguishes the civil religious tradition from its two main rivals: religious nationalism and radical secularism.

scholarly journals Robert Bellah - en stor sociolog

2013 ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Lene Kühle
Keyword(s):  
Civil Religion ◽  
English Abstract ◽  
Specific Study ◽  
Men I ◽  
Robert Bellah

English abstract: Bellah, who died in 2013, was a grand sociologist. His name is often connected to the concept civil religion, a concept introduced by Bellah in a 1967-article. During the 1970’s Bellah revised his thinking on civil religion, but he was unsuccessful in finding resonance for it. The legacy of Bellah is therefore not so much to be found within the specific study of civil religion. His legacy lies in his engagement with connecting mainstream sociology with the Humanities.Dansk resumé: Robert N. Bellah, som døde i 2013, var en stor sociolog. Hans navn forbindes i høj grad med begrebet civilreligion, som Bellah introducerer i en artikel fra 1967. Bellah reviderede i løbet af 1970’erne sin tænkning om amerikansk civilreligion, men de nye forståelser vandt til Bellahs store frustration ingen genklang. Den arv, som Bellah efterlader sig, består derfor kun i mindre grad af forståelsen af civilreligion, men i højere grad af hans varige engagement i at forbinde mainstream-sociologi med kulturvidenskab.

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