structural:summarization
Criticism of broken covenant theory

In 1975, Bellah published The Broken Covenant. Bellah referred to the sermon delivered by John Winthrop (1587–1649) to his flock on the ship Arbella on the evening of the landing in Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Winthrop declared that the Puritan colonists' emigration to the New World was part of a covenant, a special pact with God, to create a holy community and noted: "For we must consider that we shall be a city on the hill. The eyes of all people are upon us." Parsons disagreed strongly with Bellah's analysis and insisted that the covenant was not broken. Parsons later used much of his influential article, "Law as an Intellectual Stepchild", to discuss Bellah's position.

Parsons thought that Bellah trivialized the tensions of individual interests and society's interests by reducing them to " capitalism "; Bellah, in his characterization of the negative aspects of American society, was compelled by a charismatic-based optimalism moral absolutism.