Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

The group’s only non-clergyman, Robert Bellah, a Harvard sociologist with a preacherly bent, had coined the phrase civil religion, and had recently published an essay on America’s “covenantal” tradition, by which he meant a commitment to the communal public good that persevered alongside America’s less elevated ethic of market-based self-interest. Bellah argued that America’s covenantal side must be restored in order to transcend the “mood of vindictiveness and repression rather than generosity of spirit,” which “could lead to the end of free government in America.” The imprint of that essay was far more evident in Carter’s final speech than Christopher Lasch’s thinking—although, just as with Lasch and Daniel Bell, the president ignored the part of Bellah’s argument that said national revival was impossible until corporate power was checked.