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The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial

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Robert Bellah's The Broken Covenant is a scathing critique of modern American priorities. Bellah claims that our ideals, while good, have been misapplied: Diligence, initiative, and the desire to model virtue have yielded to material gain, individualism, and imperialism. In Bellah's mind, we have divorced our ideals from the bonds of social justice. Salvation requires not simply restoring the old covenant, but shaping a new one around a unifying civil religion.

Bellah, echoing his own disillusioned era, examines the flawed myths upon which Americans base our identity and actions. These include the myths of origin and chosenness, which generate arrogance; prosperity, which demands material success to prove "moral virtue and religious salvation" and produces "emotional and imaginative constriction...in a world of common sense and plain fact" (76); and pluralism, which--when coupled with chosenness--degenerates into a limited "welcome" on condition of conformity. With such skewed traditions, says Bellah, our failure is no surprise. Through racism, materialism, and other ethical crimes, the nation's original covenant, its promise of social justice, "was broken almost as soon as it was made" (139).

Bellah offers an honest look at many American flaws, and I found his critique of our nativism and disregard of community especially compelling. He takes care to show how Lockian and Calvinist ideals have come to contradict original Christian values such as humility and love of neighbor, an argument very interesting to a Christian like me. I don't think we need to reject those ideals altogether, but Bellah's argument was an effective call to consider how I apply them.

Bellah then seeks to redeem our myths, but "any reappropriation of tradition must be made in the full consciousness of [past failure]" (144). He wants a new covenant, for "unless the free act of liberation [such as 1960s rebellion] moves rapidly toward an act of institution...even the liberation itself turns into...new despotism" (34). According to Bellah, this new "act of institution" should incorporate classical and Biblical traditions but reject the selfish model of Locke, "the utilitarian morality of self-interest" (xx). And Bellah longs for an internalized covenant, which "can never be completely captured by institutions" (142). He desires personal conviction over external conformity, and such passionate conviction is better inculcated by community and churches than government.

To fulfill a covenant, however, one needs a religion. I know the objective of Bellah's covenant (social justice), but his book fails to delineate a sufficient set of "principles" for practitioners of the civil religion to follow. Bellah seems to reject established creeds and embrace a relativistic attitude, and his vague longings for "unity with nature" (155) and "immediacy of experience" (157) cannot recreate the solid "imaginative, religious, moral, and social context" of the spiritual forerunners he admires. I agree with many of Bellah's premises, but in the end, I think that he falls prey to his own fear: By shying away from absolute truth, he fails to crystallize his (very Christian) ideals within a covenant.

In response to the overwhelming academic reaction to his first essay "The American Civil Religion," Robert Bellah again addresses the creation, development, and subsequent destruction of "the covenant" manifested in the American Civil Religion in his book, The Broken Covenant. By enumerating and expounding upon the "myths" of the American Civil Religion, Bellah attempts to uncover the American self-understanding that has both created and corrupted the Covenant. The myth of origin reveals the basic self-conceptualization of America: a pristine wilderness, a place of new beginnings for "the chosen" who reform the old covenant. According to Bellah, from a biblical as well as classical republican perspective, America is a land of living myth with a covenant based on Calvinist teachings of common charity, love, individual dignity, and responsibility through which the internal spiritual covenant meshes with the external political covenant to create public virtue. He believes that the American "covenant" legitimizes and gives purpose to the American identity.
He compares his book to the lamentations of a prophet crying out in the wilderness, trying to alert the population to societal corruption and impending doom while maintaining a hope for the future upon repentance. He argues that utilitarianism, capitalism and science, along with the "sins" of slavery and the treatment of the Native Americans, have corrupted and destroyed this covenant, leaving America empty of purpose. In violation of the covenant, capitalistic self-interest motivated American society instead of republican virtue. His solution espouses the creation of a new covenant that humbly recognizes the past and present flaws of America, renews the traditions of the old covenant and provides moral and spiritual meaning for the technological and scientific dimensions of modern society.
Using mostly primary sources, armed with a sociologist's understanding of American history and fueled by personal experience, Bellah attempts to evaluate the American Civil Religion in the past, present, and future. Though he realizes the current problem regarding the corrupted ideals of republicanism, equality, spirituality and religion, his ideas for the resurgence of the American Civil Religion are vague and abstract. He proposes a state of constant revolution, a continuous renewal of covenant through religious and spiritual rebirth that will fill the external political covenant of America with meaning. Along with the restitution of the inward covenant, Robert Bellah kowtows to the popular theories of the early 1970s, such as communitarianism and socialist policies, which have failed thus far in America. Rather than a transcendent new order, he espouses the call for reform common to the generation disillusioned by the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal; his book appears to be the result of a personal attempt to find meaning in a changing modern society.

Robert Bellah's work is intended, in his own words, as a type of puritan "Jeremiad" for twentieth century America. Three times America has faced trials, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and Vietnam, Watergate, and the student protests of the 1960's. Speaking from the 1970's, Bellah strives to demonstrate where America has gone wrong and find cohesiveness again by re-shaping the American mind. Bellah's main purpose is to show how America has slipped from a sense of high calling and broken the original covenant and its communal obligations through utilitarian morality of self-interest. Bellah seeks to show the way for a recovery of a revitalized covenant and a renewal of American society (xiii).

Bellah's book primarily examines what he famously termed, "American civil religion," the religious dimension of a people that interprets its historical experience in the light of transcendent reality (3). First, Bellah reexamines America's "myth of origin." Unlike other peoples, America as a nation began on a definite date (3). This gave the American myth a sense of "newness" that downplays tradition and allows Americans to choose its own symbols and government. Bellah next looks at both the positive and negative consequences of Americans as a chosen people. Bellah argues that from almost the beginning, while retaining the conception of chosenness, America slipped away from the obligations of the covenant and broke it through its treatment of the native Indians and institution of black slavery (37). Furthermore, in its quest for an industrial and efficient economy, America has thrown off the restraints of the puritan covenant and pursued unbounded self-interest (84).

In response to this crisis, Bellah wants a return to a "new degree of moral freedom" disciplined through renewed discovery of cultural and social norms - a new, secularized covenant (86). Bellah also considers the place of different cultural groups in American society and argues that capitalism has encouraged individual self-interest to the exclusion of communal concerns. For Bellah, recognizing the broken covenant does not mean rejecting the past, but rather forming new invigorations and projections to build a society in the light of a transcendent ethical vision (141-142). American society could be renewed by a return to the language and myths of the biblical covenant and civic republicanism while rejecting libertarian self-interest - a re-establishment of American civil religion.

The Broken Covenant is not a historical monograph. Rather, Bellah uses history to understand the problems of late twentieth-century America and explain American society in modern terms. As such his methodology is based primarily on famous figures from American intellectual history such as Jefferson, Lincoln, and Winthrop. Usually his portrayal seems accurate, though he does not always establish the context of some quotations that fit well into his rhetorical organization, as with his use of Melville (38). Overall, Bellah makes a convincing case for the sources of the problems he sees in American society. His suggestions for alternatives, however, are deeply colored by his time and secular assumptions. Bellah's greatest contribution is to draw the attention of Americans to problems in society, show us how their history has shaped national consciousness, and encourage them to search for solutions with humility and vision.

Robert Bellah's book is a thoughtful and, in places, animated sociological critique of American culture in covenantal terms. Bellah views himself as a "Jeremiah" in an age of cultural crisis, calling for a fresh look at the realities beneath standard political terminology and a renewal of the religious imagination that breathes life into a people. As a sociologist, Bellah traces the influence of American "myths of origin" in order to determine their place in the ideological climate of the nation. Underlying all myths, he argues, is the peculiarly American concept of "covenant:" a binding social obligation that depends upon biblical imagery, classical virtue, and a sense of transcendent order and purpose. The covenant is made before both man and God (in an undefined sense), and finds its manifestation both in founding documents and in the political language of the nation. Because America will crumble without the covenant, Bellah contends that her citizens have the responsibility to uphold it in spite of severe cultural tensions.
The crux of Bellah's argument is not, however, that this covenant exists, but that it has been broken almost from the beginning. Although Americans have always viewed themselves as a "City on a Hill," and a supreme example of liberty to the nations, he argues that the existence of slavery and racism have undermined the covenant, rendering it an external form without internal force. Bellah correctly identifies key tensions within the American ethos: egalitarian standards vs. the reality of racism; Americanization vs. immigration; the Puritan work ethic and strong religious traditions of poverty and self-sacrifice vs. the Social Gospel and the ideal of wealth as the primary measure of success.
Bellah's awareness of the covenantal heart of American culture is insightful, and so, too, is his exposure of tensions at the core of the American identity. Where Bellah falters, perhaps, is in his hope for a solution. He encourages Americans to reaffirm the outward covenant (which includes a classical form of civil religion), while admitting that they have failed to uphold its spirit in the past. In an age which denies the value of tradition, he argues that men must turn to "what can be called transcendental or ecstatic reason," or a spiritually-oriented imagination that experiments with new forms of community and "symbolic expression" and renders possible a "new balance" of typically American conflicts of interest (153, 159). The nation, with some discretion, should not be afraid to look at previously forbidden cultural structures like socialism or eastern religion in order to strike this golden mean. The old forms of expression--Roman, Puritan, and staunchly capitalist--could not be lived out in reality. Let us return to the covenant "shell," Bellah urges, but let us find a different kind of energy to fill it.
Yet the "spiritual imagination" that Bellah exhorts America to fulfill is a tenuous ideal. He rightly recognizes that the covenant must be upheld by the inner life of religion, and he is wise to return to an understanding of reason as a kind of vision or insight which has very little to do with scientific knowledge. But he is not able to give the new driving force of reason a defined object. He utilizes the vocabulary and imagery of the civil religion which he affirms, but because the object of that imagery cannot provide concrete assurance of redemption, for individuals or for nation-states, he is unable to offer real hope. The overall force of Bellah's text, though written in stirring prose and often convincingly argued, falters somewhat in its end when he resorts to the weak ideal of "experimentation" as a means to bring about transcendent goals.

Robert Bellah's book, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, calls on America to renew her founding myth of a national covenant. Bellah writes his book out of a conviction that America is undergoing a time of trial, torn apart by radical individualism and capitalist greed, and in need of a new, common set of moral, religious and social values. Bellah argues that these values are found in the renewal of the notion of covenant, the idea that we are held responsible as a collective body to treat one another with charity. Bellah supports his thesis by first identifying America's founding myths of liberty, covenant and inner conversion, reformation and constant renewal, as seen in the Founders' good synthesis of Biblical symbolism with classical republican ideals. Bellah also sees a utilitarian, individualistic strain in America's founding, and he argues that the covenant was immediately broken by the national sins of slavery and oppression of Native Americans. Bellah examines the ideas of chosenness and success, arguing that covenant must restrain these ideas and impulses. Bellah criticizes capitalism as putting unrestrained political power in the hands of corporations, calling on America to renew her founding myths in terms that speak to the crises of modern times. Bellah draws from primary sources like John Winthrop, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln and Herman Melville, demonstrating that America has never been without leaders who call on her to renew the covenant and fulfill its conditions of charity and brotherly love.

Bellah's book is a sociological examination of America's civil religion, and he analyzes the past mainly as it relates to the present. He thoughtfully diagnoses America's sins, and his books' strengths are its compassion, its strong sense of social justice, and its ability to combine a respect for tradition with an acute understanding of America's past wrongs. Bellah understands that America has strengths and flaws, and that sometimes America's flaws are its strengths unrestrained by compassion and covenant. Bellah's weaknesses actually lie in his solution to the problem of America's sins. Bellah accurately assesses America's crisis of vision and need for a renewal of covenant, but his new socialist, intellectual and religious national movement will not provide that common set of moral and ethical values. Bellah strongly emphasizes newness, saying we need "a new vision of man, a new sense of human possibility, and a new conception of the ordering of liberty." America's sins are old, not new: selfishness, materialism, radical individualism and greed. The solution to these sins is not a new vision of man or a new way of ordering liberty, but a return to a past vision of man and past way of ordering liberty.

Bellah calls his book a "jeremiad intended to change America." Overall, Bellah succeeds in writing a jeremiad that, if it does not change America, at least makes America think about her origins, her sins and her need to renew a commitment to charity.

Robert Bellah is one of America's most creative sociologists. He pioneered in the study of American "civil religion," to which this book is a significant contribution. The transaction in getting this volume through Amazon was flawless.

Book is very, very readable. Also according to page 164 of the book The Search for Christian America (written by Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden):

"[In 1967] Bellah touched off a massive and continuing debate about the existence of an American civil religion. He quickly translated his discovery into his own jeremiad, arguing that civil religion 'has often been used and is being used today as a cloak for petty interests and ugly passions,' an argument elaborated in The Broken Covenant."

Not sure if I agree that a Rousseau-type civil religion per se exists, for I personally think Rousseau's ideas of Civil religion, especially along with his anti-Christian stance is evil and reprehensible. Not that Bellah actually mentions Rousseau...

Anyway, as an identification and description of some sort of patriotic religious experience this book remains five stars.