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Dating from Aristotle, political and religious institutions have been modeled on the human family. Adding to this observation, Freud emphasized the relation of man to his father, and the projective usefulness of religion in dealing with anxiety within the family. Bellah wishes to add that the religious structure affects the family and gives examples from two major religions. He reviews Freud's ideas on religion and applies them to Christianity (before the advent of
Mariolatry) where atonement and identification with the divine father are combined with the wish to murder the father in each elevation of the Eucharist. The Judæo-Christian concept is different from that of the Chinese in which the cosmos is a closely related community or organism. Father and mother have first claim on reverence for the Confucian; after their death they form the center of the family cult. The authority of the Chinese religion is derived from the family while that of the Christian comes from the projected divine.
Few readers will be able to evaluate the quotations and statements about the Chinese. However the author apparently is not aware that the words of Jesus, in his ninth hour on the Cross, 'My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?', do not indicate a pessimistic rejection of the father; rather, they are regarded as a fulfilment of prophecy from the first line of Psalms XXII which ends in spiritual victory over death.