Blurring the Boundary Line. The Origins and Fate of Robert N. Bellah’s Symbolic Realism

A student of Talcott Parsons at Harvard, Robert Bellah made his debut in the mid-1950s as a specialist in Japanese religion and a general theorist, working squarely within the twin frameworks of functionalism and modernization theory. Around 1965, however, he abandoned Parsonian terminology and championed a radical approach to the study of religion, which he termed “symbolic realism.” In the autobiographical introduction to his collection of essays, Beyond Belief (1970), Bellah explained his intellectual shift as the result of a personal coupure, born of the influence of late-1960s counterculture and of his disillusionment with American political life. In this paper I complement Bellah’s autobiographical explanation, showing the structural and intellectual roots of “symbolic realism” and its meaning within the disciplinary and inter-disciplinary context. After a reconstruction of the state of American sociology of religion in the 1950s-1960s, I map Bellah’s theoretical trajectory and show his deep intellectual relationships with “interpretive social scientists.” I also advance some tentative explanations of the failure of symbolic realism as a paradigm shift for the sociology of religion, briefly comparing Bellah’s stances with the coeval work of another interpretive social scientist, Peter L. Berger.