Freedom From
"Like other Americans, [Wayne Bauer] thinks of freedom very much as freedom from — from people who have economic power over you, from people who try to limit what you can do or say. This ideal of freedom has historically given Americans a respect for individuals; it has, no doubt, stimulated their initiative and creativity; it has sometimes even made them tolerant of differences in a diverse society and resistant to overt forms of political oppression. But it is an ideal of freedom that leaves Americans with a stubborn fear of acknowledging structures of power and interdependence in a technologically complex society dominated by giant corporations and an increasingly powerful state. The ideal of freedom makes Americans nostalgic for their past, but provides few resources for talking about their collective future."
— Habits of the Heart with Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler, and Steven Tipton
Destructive Consequences
"Without derogating our modern technological achievements, we now see that they have had devastatingly destructive consequences for the natural ecology. We are engaged in an effort to mitigate and reverse the damage and regain an ecological balance whose complete loss could prove fatal. Modernity has had comparable destructive consequences for social ecology. Human beings have treated one another badly for as long as we have any historical evidence, but modernity has given us a capacity for destructiveness on a scale incomparably greater than in previous centuries. And social ecology is damaged not only by war, genocide, and political repression. It is also damaged by the destruction of the subtle ties that bind human beings to one another, leaving them frightened and alone. It has been evident for some time that unless we begin to repair the damage to our social ecology, we will destroy ourselves long before natural ecological disaster has time to be realized."
— Habits of the Heart with Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler, and Steven Tipton
Imagine Ourselves Special
"We have imagined ourselves a special creation, set apart from other humans. In the late twentieth century, we see that our poverty is as absolute as that of the poorest of nations. We have attempted to deny the human condition in our quest for power after power. It would be well for us to rejoin the human race, to accept our essential poverty as a gift, and to share our material wealth with those in need."
— Habits of the Heart with Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler, and Steven Tipton
Our Task
"Our task is greater than the defense of the remnants of the lifeworld, although if there weren't a lot of remnants it is doubtful that we would even be here. No one can live by the dollar sign and the power quotient alone. We still are who we are because religion, tradition, and community have somehow managed to survive in the face of all the disruptions of the last two hundred years. But our task is not simply, through nostalgia, to preserve the remnants. It is somehow or other to revivify the lifeworld and help it regain control over the systems. If we fail, we will simply commit suicide as the human race."
— The Robert Bellah Reader edited with Steven M. Tipton
Family as Private Sphere
"What would probably perplex and disturb Tocqueville most today is the fact that the family is no longer an integral part of a larger moral ecology tying the individual to community, church, and nation. The family is the core of the private sphere, whose aim is not to link individuals to the public world but to avoid it as far as possible. In our commercial culture, consumerism, with its temptations, and television, with its examples, augment that tendency. Americans are seldom as selfish as the therapeutic culture urges them to be. But often the limit of their serious altruism is the family circle. Thus the tendency of our individualism to dispose 'each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends,' that so worried Tocqueville, indeed seems to be coming true. 'Taking care of one's own' is an admirable motive. But when it combines with suspicion of, and withdrawal from, the public world, it is one of the conditions of the despotism Tocqueville feared."
— Habits of the Heart with Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler, and Steven Tipton
Peak Experiences
"With the weakening of the traditional forms of life that gave aesthetic and moral meaning to everyday living, Americans have been improvising alternatives more or less successfully. They engage, sometimes with intense involvement, in a wide variety of arts, sports, and nature appreciation, sometimes as spectators but often as active participants. Some of these activities involve conscious traditions and demanding practices, such as ballet. Others, such as walking in the country or jogging, may be purely improvisational, though not devoid of some structure of shared meaning. Not infrequently, moments of intense awareness, what are sometimes called 'peak experiences,' occur in the midst of such activities. At such moments, a profound sense of well-being eclipses the usual utilitarian preoccupations of everyday life. But the capacity of such experiences to provide more than a momentary counterweight to pressures of everyday life is minimal. Where these activities find social expression at all, it is apt to be in the form of what we have called the lifestyle enclave. The groups that form around them are too evanescent, too inherently restricted in membership, and too slight in their hold on their members' loyalty to carry much public weight. Only at rare moments do such largely expressive solidarities create anything like a civic consciousness, as when a local professional sports team wins a national championship and briefly gives rise to a euphoric sense of metropolitan belongingness."
— Habits of the Heart with Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler, and Steven Tipton
Chance for Another Course
"A chance for another course, another role for America in the world, depends ultimately on the reform of our own culture. A culture of unfettered individualism combined with absolute world power is an explosive mixture. A few religious voices have been raised to say so. The question of the hour is whether our fellow citizens, much less our leaders, are ready to hear such voices. "
— The Robert Bellah Reader edited with Steven M. Tipton
Recover the Integrity of Our Faith
"If we truly listen to the Beatitudes, we will hear them as a call for us to recover the integrity of our own faith and its lived expression. But if we only go through the motions of our religion, while closing ourselves off from its real meaning, if we do not discover that the kingdom of heaven is our only true home, the place that defines our most essential identity, we will be lost in the wilderness of decayed traditions and vulnerable to the domination of modernity's suicidal infatuation with power, the exact opposite of the Gospel message. Our greatest contribution to the world is, with God's grace, to try to be who, as Christians, we are. That will never be easy and will probably bring upon us rejection and even persecution, but it will also make us exceeding glad"
— The Robert Bellah Reader edited with Steven M. Tipton
