Reply to Bellah

D r. Bellah's comment has caused us to rethink the implications of our research for his statement of the relationship between social science and religion. We now think that rather than setting the limits of his position our results (see our article in the September 1973 issue) call for a general clarification and reformulation of his theory. Let us briefly rehearse our findings. In conducting sustained empathic field research upon a strongly sectarian group (the Christian World Liberation Front, a selfprofessed Jesus Freak group) from a symbolic realist position we found that: (1) the perception of our subjects that their religious position is uniquely and exclusively true led them to demand that our researcher (who seemed to empathically understand their position) abandon his symbolic realist position and convert to theirs; (2) the failure of our researcher to convert challenged basic sectarian premises of their ideology and traumatized subjects who coped by intensifying efforts to convert our researcher; (3) such efforts traumatized our researcher who was pushed towards a reductionistic analysis of their position where it conflicted with his symbolic realist orientation. We will briefly respond to the main points of Dr. Bellah's comment and then attempt the clarification of his position which we think is called for. We will take Chapter 15 of Bellah's Beyond Belief-which includes an additional essay as well as the original Symbolic Realism article-as the basic formulation of his position (Bellah, 1970). Point one: Bellah feels that a symbolic realist field worker can empathically understand attitudes that deny the reality of his own symbolic realist position without either converting to them (and thus abandoning that position) or making his analysis of them reductionistic. He maintains that a merely empathic understanding of the conversion experiences of such a group (in which exclusivist beliefs are a central factor) would not be a contradiction in terms. Response: If a researcher claims to understand experiences which members believe compel belief and he is not compelled to believe he

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• Verbal behavior

  Noam Chomsky, B F Skinner•Language•1959

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