When we talk of a department of religious studies being the breeding grounds for a “new religious consciousness” together with Bellah’s evangelizing for republican civil religion, along with his desire to inform a “a new way of being religious within modern culture,” we can easily see how Bellah got the Berkeley secularists running for their guns. What was Bellah, a sociologist, thinking, anyway? Had he forgotten all he learned and taught about first-order religious institutions?
