Review of Challenging Modernity

Challenging Modernity, by Robert Bellah, edited and with introduction and conclusion by Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, New York: Columbia University Press, 2024, 371 pp., $32.00 / £28.00 (paperback), ISBN 9780231214896

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This collection features three posthumous essays by the sociologist of religion Robert Bellah, and seven responses from scholars and theorists who are, the editors say, ‘Bellah’s peers, not acolytes’ (ix). Picking up those artefacts of an unwritten sequel to Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution (2011), Challenging Modernity poses the question whether religion has a special role to play for societies under unprecedented strain. ‘In what way’, as historian Alan Strathern puts it, ‘might religious forms of the sacred become indispensable to solving the collective action demands of the climate crisis?’ (218). In approaching this question, Bellah, editors, and respondents all in various ways invoke the dialectical opposition of immanence and transcendence at the heart of Bellah’s sociology of religion.

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It is commonsense that talk of modernity requires some historical framework in which to juxtapose it to alternatives or precursors. Here, as in Religion in Human Evolution, much rests on the idea (nominally credited to the German philosopher Karl Jaspers [1883–1969] ) that the period around 500 BCE provides such a framework: this is the hypothesis of the Axial Age, on the grounds of which Bellah and his interlocutors distinguish between ‘Axial’ (modern) and ‘pre-Axial’ institutions and habits of mind. The Axial movements – exemplified by philosophy in ancient Greece and the prophets of post-captivity Judaism – all shared interlinked traits, such as de-emphasising particularity and community, and valorising universality and personal autonomy. These are the origins, according to the theory, of the liberal-democratic sensus communis that is instinctively referred to as modernity.

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The through line of Challenging Modernity is a supposition that global modernity, in its contradictions and shortcomings, is now facing the limitations of the Axial paradigm. Historian Kyle Harper sums up the problem in his reference to ‘Axial Age morality in the Anthropocene’ (56). As the driving force behind the pre-eminent institutions and mindsets of the contemporary West, have Axial tendencies left the world too dominated by individualism for there ever to be collective action in the face of problems like climate change? Do interlinked global crises show, in the words of German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, ‘the project of modernity . . . turning against itself?’ (67).

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The question is not a bad one, but its answer is frustratingly foregone for the present editors, whose neo-Malthusian outlook reflects Bellah’s own – ‘Malthus is still waiting’ to collect his due, as Bellah puts it (30). Challenging Modernity suggests again and again that the exigencies of the environmental crisis call for a repristination of religion in the West, perhaps with a ‘pre-Axial’ complexion to oppose the hypertrophied Axial logic of global neoliberalism. Bellah postulates, for instance, following a distinction of Paul Tillich’s between sacramental and prophetic religion, that ‘the Protestant neglect of the sacraments is part of the modern world’s neglect of the natural as sacred’ (279). Readers already sympathetic to such a view are apt to enjoy these passages and will probably find them useful for their own work. But those who regard the above question as an open one may search here in vain for help in resolving it.

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Political liberalism comes in for detraction from most of the volume’s principals, for being contrary to any real communitarian spirituality. The editors point, somewhat tendentiously, to the ‘seemingly limitless goods of modernity – individual autonomy and a universal right to happiness – that now threaten our shared future’ (x). Sociologist Philip Gorski roundly declares liberalism ‘inadequate for [our time]’ (324). Anthropologist Joel Robbins proposes that what is needed is ‘a pattern of values in which individualism can contribute to, rather than preclude, a moral way forward’ (302). But Strathern, whilst not necessarily disagreeing, observes the obvious tension: ‘can we wish religious movements into being from a sense of their social utility?’ (221). The editors, for their part, occasionally turn out pablum on this question: ‘the only remedy for bad religion is good religion’ (337).

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Challenging Modernity sometimes takes a break from its theses. Bellah’s ‘Prologue in Heaven (or Hell) to the Modern Project’ (a play on the opening of Goethe’s Faust) is a self-assured survey of Western history that proceeds through pairs of ‘theorists’ and ‘poets’, from Moses and Plato to Max Weber and Leo Tolstoy. A response by philosopher Ana Marta González, making play with Bellah’s penchant for binary oppositions, is an extended comment on the ‘cultural division of labor between theory and narrative’ characteristic of Axial societies (175). These essays are salutary reading in their own right. In what is perhaps the standout chapter, German sociologist Hans Joas presents a rigorous prehistory of some Weberian theory that quickly passes over the editors’ moral preoccupations. With his focus on Weber, Joas subtly critiques the collection’s premise – were not all the present questions about modernity already at play in Weber’s time? But it is a live and legitimate question whether climate and its concomitant issues have not differentiated late modernity from its proximate precursors. As Bellah puts the matter, ‘[Weber] could not know of the slow but now almost certain ecological catastrophe that we face, something whose consequences dwarf the worst crimes of World War II’ (157). Bellah upholds his brand, staking out provocative positions with an avuncular mien.

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Challenging Modernity will excite readers who share the editors’ vision of human history at an inflexion point. But for such a rich set of perspectives, the collection shows a curious lack of curiosity on certain topics. There is a didactic undertone throughout, in part because the contributors were invited to end their essays with moral reflection. Strathern’s chapter on divine kingship, for instance, is a dazzling piece of scholarship that changes register in its final paragraphs. ‘To speak so simply of science and truth may once have seemed slightly gauche in a scholarly context. But the climate crisis demands that we are more serious about such things’ (222). Does greater seriousness of purpose recommend simplification? How one inclines on this question is probably a good litmus test for how one will rate this volume.

Reference

Bellah, R. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Stevan Veljkovic
Faculty of Theology and Religion
University of Oxford, UK
stevan.veljkovic@theology.ox.ac.uk