Bellah graduated from Harvard in a joint sociology and Far East languages program, with Talcott Parsons and John Pelzel as his advisors, respectively. Bellah first encountered the work of Talcott Parsons as an undergraduate when his senior honors thesis advisor was David Aberle, a former student of Parsons. Parsons was specially interested in Bellah's concept of religious evolution and the concept of "civil religion". They remained intellectual friends until Parsons' death in 1979. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1955. His doctoral dissertation was titled "Religion and Society in Tokugawa Japan" and was an extension of Max Weber's Protestant ethic thesis to Japan. It was published as "Tokugawa Religion" in 1957.