Robert Bellah on Religion, Morality, and the Politics of Resentment

The premier sociologist of religion talks to MUP general secretary Roger Bowen.

In a 1977 issue of the New York Review of Books, Robert Bellah and McGeorge Bundy exchanged letters in response to a book review that touched on the behavior of Harvard University during the McCarthy period. Bellah, the subject of this interview, is a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Bundy served as national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

Bellah wrote that in 1954, when he was a Harvard graduate student, Bundy, -who was then dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, threatened him with nonrenewal of his fellowship if he did not name his fellow undergraduate comrades in the Harvard student Communist Parry. Bellah had been a party member as an undergraduate from 1947 to 1949. Bellah said he would talk about himself but not name names. The Federal Bureau of Investigation questioned him a few days after he was called to Bundy's office, and he followed the course he had told Bundy he would.

In spring 1955, Bellah was put forward by the Department of Social Relations at Harvard for a junior appointment. Bundy told him that the Harvard Corporation would approve his appointment, with one caveat: if Bellah were called by any government investigating committee and failed to "cooperate fully," his term appointment would not be renewed. Bellah decided to take a postdoctoral fellowship at the Islamic Institute at McGill University in Montreal. Two years later, Harvard offered Bellah another appointment without the provision attached to the 1955 offer, and he accepted.

Bundy replied in the New York Review of Books that he had never threatened Bellah's fellowship and that he had urged Harvard to appoint him in 1955 without the qualifying provision. Rather than reply to Bundy with a further letter, Bellah asked the Harvard administration to release the documents about the events in question so that the truth could be known. He was told that it was Harvard's policy not to release such information until fifty years after an incident had occurred.

In 2004, Bellah once again sought the documents, and the Harvard administration sent all that it said could be found. There was no record of the meeting with Bundy in 1954. However, correspondence between Bundy and Nathan Pusey, Harvard's president, made it seem that Bundy had indeed wanted to make an unqualified appointment in 1955 but was turned down by the corporation. One new piece of evidence was a long letter by Talcott Parsons, chair of the Department of Social Relations and Bellah's adviser, protesting the corporation's action. This correspondence was sent with a cover letter of support from the chair of the Harvard chapter of the AAUP. All this was reported in another letter to the New York Review of Books published in the February 10, 2005, issue.

In its May 25, 2005, issue, the New York Review of Books published a letter from the psychologist Leon J. Kamin, who recounted even worse treatment from Harvard. He, too, went to Canada but returned some years later as chair of the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. It is obvious that we still have only a few rays of light on the subject of Harvard's collaboration with McCarthyism-that history remains to be written. It was with reference to these two letters that this interview began.

Bowen: I was surprised to learn that you were blacklisted from teaching at Harvard in the 1950s, because Harvard had a reputation of somehow standing hard and firm against McCarthyism.

Bellah: I think we have to remember that the nation was in the grip of a classic paranoid hysteria. If you look at the actions of the AAUP or the American Civil Liberties Union during those years, they were not always praiseworthy.

Bowen: But the Harvard AAUP chapter came to your defense.

Bellah: Yes, it did. At least it added a cover letter to Talcott Parsons's memo. And Talcott was active in the AAUP. So that's true in that particular case. I would trust current Harvard faculty to do a perfectly fair job, but it's probably beyond the capacity of any of the AAUP chapters or anyone to go back and review what happened in that period. And if someone did, he or she would, of course, have to look at not just Harvard's record, but that of the academy nationwide. And there would be some good stories as well as bad stories.

Bowen: Let's go back to the root cause of your being blacklisted. Happily, we can ask this question today without upsetting anyone: why did you join the Communist Party?

Bellah: The irony is that I'm a lifelong sociologist of religion. Religion has always been my preoccupation. I'm now a practicing Episcopalian, but I grew up as a Presbyterian in Los Angeles, where I attended a fairly liberal Presbyterian church. And then my mother became wedding director-this is a long way around, but you need it-at the First Congressional Church, which is a huge gothic structure near downtown Los Angeles. The pastor was very reactionary, but somehow, through not paying attention I suppose, he hired a divinity student from the University of Southern California to be the high school minister. And this guy was absolutely aflame with the social gospel and social criticism. He had us reading the great prophets. So, in a sense, I discovered Marxism late in high school.