Bellah on Symoblic Realism

As should be evident, Bellah has always been a cultural sociologists,

taking serious the causal efficacy of values, the centrality of
meaning, and the suig generis reality of symobls. His famous
definition of religion in Religious Evolution is unmistakably cultural.
This perspective on religion is also evident in his major
methodological statement on behalf of a nonreductionist
perspective in the social scientific study of religion, the perspective
of symbolic realism
In the essay Between Religion and Social Science, Bellah criticizes
the Englightenment myth of secularizationthe view that there is
only a mechanical relation between science and religion, namely,
the more of one the less of the other. He argues that the theoris of
Mar, Freud, Durkehim, and Weber contribute to this myth because of
their reductionist view of religion. Even when they correctly see the
symbolic (nonrationl, noncognitive) dimensions of human life and
hence religion (Freuds unconscious, Durkheims collective
effervescence, and Webers charisma) , they end up explaingin
religious symbols away as expressing some other more fundamental
reality. Bellah in contrast advocates a postion he calls symbolic
realism in which religious symobls are seen to express a
nonreducible reality, a reality sui generis. While not denything that
rationalistic and reducitonistic approaches have something to tell su
about religion, he refuses to allow them to be the only voices.
To put it bluntly, religion is true. This is not to say that every
religious symbol is equally valid any more than every scientific
theory is equally valid. But it does mean that, since religious
symbolization and religious experience are inherent in the structure
of human existence, all reductionism msut be abandoned. Symoblic
realism is the only adequate basis for the social scientific study of
religion.
as Durkheim said of society, religion is a reality sui generis
No expression of mans attempt to grasp the meaning and unity of
his existence, not even a myth of a primitive Australian, is without
meaning and value to me.
Two secular intellectuals have made major contributions in recent
years to the position I am trying to set forth in this paper; Hebert
Finagarette in The Self in Transformation and Norman O Brown in
Loves Body. Both of them oppose any kind of symbolic
reductionism; both of them know that reality is inner as well
as outer and that the symbol is not decoration but our only
way of apprehending the real.

As a sociologists I am by no means prepared to abandon the work

of the great consequential and symbolic reductionists. They have
pointed out valid implicatiosn of religion life that were not previously
understood. But I am prepared to reject their assumption that they
spoke form a higher level of truth than the religious systems they
studied. I would point out instead their own implicit religious
postions. Most of all I am not prepared to accept the implication that
the religious issue is dead and htat religious symobls have nothing
directly to say to us.
Rather than the norm of scientific objectivity invading all spheres of
human experience, the role of noncognitive factors in sicence itself
has become increasingly recognized.
What this signals is a shift away from the mechanical model of early
natural science in which reality was seen as residing in the object,
the function of the observer was simply to find out the laws in
accordance with which the object behabes and subjective was
synonymous with unreal, untrue fallacious. For this
mechanical model there has increasingly been substituted the
interactionist model of social sicnece, or what Talcott Parsons calls
action theory. Here reality is seen to reside not just in the object
but in the subject and particualry in the relation between subject
and object. The canons of empirical sciecen science apply primarily
to symobls which attempt to express the nature of objects, but there
are non-objective symobls which express the feelings, values, and
hopes of subjects, or which organize and regulate the flow of
interaction etween subjects and objects, or which attempt to sum up
the whole subject-object complex, or even point to the context or
ground of that whole. These symbols too express reality and are not
reducible to empirical propositons. This is the poisiton of symbolic
realism. P93