The Varieties of Vicarious Group Narcissism: Robert Bellah

The Religious Dimension

We met Bellah as a student of Parsons’s in our last article on vicarious group narcissism and briefly in this primer on civil religion and civility. Today I’m going to go over his conception of our civil religion and its relationship to group narcissism. Along the way we’ll look at some of his evidence of how our civil religion could’ve turned out, mostly to address the Puritan genealogy question.

Bellah gained renown from a paper on our civil religion that later developed into a lecture, delivered in Japan of all places, which in turn produced a famous book called The Broken Covenant. The book traces the history of what Bellah calls our civil religion, speculates on the future of the country and religion, and suggests some remedies for current conflicts. Bellah describes the approach of The Broken Covenant as an exercise in “interpreting cultural meaning” instead of the “sociological explanation” characteristic of Parsons, but as we’ll see below, he comes very close to Parsons’s normative project.[i]

Origins of American Civil Religion