Robert Bellah
| Robert Neelly Bellah | |
|---|---|
Bellah in 2008
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| Born | February 23, 1927 Altus, Oklahoma |
| Died | July 30, 2013 (aged 86) Oakland, California |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Occupation | Sociologist Book author |
| Children | Jennifer Bellah Maguire Hally Bellah-Guther deceased Thomasin Bellah deceased Abigail Bellah |
Robert Neelly Bellah (February 23, 1927 – July 30, 2013) was an American sociologist, and the Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion.
Bellah received a BA in social anthropology from Harvard College in 1950. His undergraduate honors thesis was titled “Apache Kinship Systems,” and won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize. It was later published in 1952.
He graduated from Harvard in a joint sociology and Far East languages program, with Talcott Parsons and John Pelzel as his advisors, respectively. Bellah first encountered the work of Talcott Parsons as an undergraduate when his senior honors thesis advisor was David Aberle, a former student of Parsons. Parsons was specially interested in Bellah's concept of religious evolution and the concept of "Civil Religion." They remained intellectual friends until Parsons' death in 1979. He received his PhD in 1955. His doctoral dissertation was titled Tokugawa Religion and was an extension of Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis to Japan. It was published in 1957.
While an undergraduate at Harvard, he was a member of the Communist Party USA in 1947–1949 and a chairman of the John Reed Club, "a recognized student organization concerned with the study of Marxism". During the summer of 1954, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard McGeorge Bundy, who later served as a national security adviser to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, threatened to withdraw Bellah's graduate student fellowship if he did not provide the names of his former club associates. Bellah was also interrogated by the Boston office of the FBI with the same purpose. As a result, Bellah and his family spent two years in Canada, where he was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at the Islamic Institute in McGill University in Montreal. He returned to Harvard after McCarthyism declined due to the death of its main instigator senator Joseph McCarthy. Bellah afterwards wrote,
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