Robert Bellah´s Five Stages Heading to Subjective Morality- Actually a Demographic Trend vs Truth

Robert Bellah´s observations are helpful: "Robert Bellah begins by defining religion as "a set of symbolic forms and acts that relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence." He argues that beginning with the single cosmos of the undifferentiated primitive religious worldview in which life is a "one possibility thing," evolution in the religious sphere is toward the increasing differentiation and complexity of symbol systems. His evolutionary religious taxonomy specifies five stages: primitive (e.g., Australian Aborigines), archaic (e.g., Native American), historic (e.g., ancient Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, early Palestinian Christianity), early modern (e.g., Protestant Christianity), and modern (religious individualism). In the modern stage of religious evolution, the hierarchic dualistic religious symbol system that emerged in the historic epoch is collapsed and the symbol system that results is "infinitely multiplex." In this posttraditional situation, the individual confronts life as an "infinite possibility thing," and is "capable, within limits, of continual self-transformation and capable, again within limits, of remaking the world, including the very symbolic forms with which he deals with it, even the forms that state the unalterable conditions of his own existence." "This argument foresaw the reflexive individualism that characterizes both the intellectual culture of post-modernism and the "new religious consciousness" of the 1960s and 1970s. With Charles Glock, Bellah undertook a project in the early 1970s to investigate the latter, the results of which were published as The New Religious Consciousness (University of California Press 1976). In his concluding remarks, Bellah foreshadows the argument of Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life —written with Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton (University of California Press 1985 [second edition 1995], hereafter Habits )—in arguing that the deepest cause of the 1960s counterculture was "the inability of utilitarian individualism to provide a meaningful pattern of personal and social existence. The crisis of the 1960s therefore was "above all a religious crisis." As a response to the sterility of the utilitarian worldview, the counterculture turned to the American tradition of expressive individualism in the form of a spirituality grounded in the primacy of individual experience and the belief in nonduality, exemplified by the appropriation of Zen Buddhist practices. Again foreshadowing the argument in Habits , Bellah highlights the danger that expressive individualism may come to articulate with utilitarian individualism, to which it was originally a response. When expressive individualist-inspired religious symbols and practices "become mere techniques for 'self-realization,' then once again we see utilitarian individualism reborn from its own ashes." Thus, by the 1970s, Bellah's positive embrace of the "wide-open chaos of the post-Protestant, postmodern era" in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (Harper 1970) had grown more cautious as the full consequences of the "modern" religious epoch became more evident. By the 1980s, the relationship is clearly strained. Understanding that the treatment of religion in Habits is an elaboration of the fifth "modern" stage of religious evolution makes clear that the "infinite possibility thing" he lauds in "Religious Evolution" has become the hyperprivatized "Sheilaism" ("my own religion") he laments in Habits . Particularly troubling about the personalized and privatized modern religion examined in Habits is that it is underwritten by what Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue (1981) calls an "emotivist" view of ethics that reduces the foundation of moral claims to the subjective feelings of individuals and renders the development of common moral understandings difficult if not impossible. Yet, Bellah was an Episcopalian Christian. He was observing a popular trend of some demographic significance. http://hirr.hartsem.edu/ency/bellah.htm