80. Bellah, Robert N. "Religious Evolution." In Reader in Comparative Religion edited by W.A. Lessa and E. Vogt. New York: Harper and Row, 1965b: 73-87.

Describes five stages in the "evolution" of religion; as ideal types, these are primitive, archaic, historic, early modern, and modern. Actual cases do not easily fit into this schema. An interesting fact is the emergence throughout the Old World during the first millennium BCE of a profound and enduring world rejection. This idea was entirely lacking in prior times. There was no conception of salvation (indeed nothing to be saved from) and only vague notions of an afterlife. Contemporary revivals largely lack this notion of world-rejection. In Bellah's view, ideas of "the general order of existence" (quoting Geertz) change, becoming more differentiated, comprehensive, and rational (in Weber's sense), and ideas about religion itself change accordingly, and all of these changes occur in relation to change in other social realms. Religion is always an attempt to comprehend and affect the world and its injustice and unpredictability through a process of symbolization, leading to at least the notion of freedom in the face of the contingencies of life.

81. ---. "Civil Religion in America." Daedalus 96 (1), 1967: 1-21.

Introduces a rather vague concept, apparent only in the public rhetoric of the elite, which nonetheless has been widely used though roundly criticized. See item 19.

82. ---. Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World. New York: Harper and Row, 1970a.

Sets forth his views on American civil religion. See also the following entries.

83. ---. "Christianity and Symbolic Realism." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 9, 1970b: 89-96.

84. ---. "The New Religious Consciousness and the Crisis of Modernity." In The New Religious Consciousness edited by Charles Glock and Robert Bellah. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976: 333-52.

A highly pessimistic overview of the "crisis of modernity" and the future of religion as a sense-making force in modern life. The article is extremely abstract and speculative, foretelling doom for the modern utilitarian order and its ultimately subjective technological reason [i.e., based only on appreciation of what works] and a millennium most likely of authoritarian fundamentalism, though Bellah foresees a remote possibility of a more open, ends-directed society under the guidance of one or more of the new religions, following ecological, nuclear, and/or economic catastrophe, brought on by the loss of legitimacy of modern institutions.

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