A Common Faith

Dewey's Common Faith

It is sometimes forgotten how deeply Americans and American philosophers think about religious questions. For example, the "golden age of American philosophy" of the early 20th century resulted in William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience", Josiah Royce's "The Problem of Christianity" and William Ernest Hocking's "The Meaning of God in Human Experience", three difficult and searching explorations of religious questions and their relationship to science and contemporary culture.

Another outstanding study of religious questions by an American thinker is John Dewey's "A Common Faith" (1934) based upon the Terry Lectures on Religion in Light of Science and Philosophy Dewey delivered at Yale. At only 80 pages and three lectures, Dewey's study is much shorter than any of the three books by James, Royce, and Hocking. If anything, however, it is more difficult to read and understand. I am reading an accessible, inexpensive edition of this book published in 2013 with an outstanding introduction to Dewey and "A Common Faith" by the scholar Thomas Alexander.

Dewey tries to develop a "common" faith, meaning an outlook that may be shared by all the people in a social democracy regardless of class, prior creed, race, or other factors. By developing a "common" faith, Dewey does not necessarily mean to do away with all the specific current religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, in all their aspects.

Dewey, unlike James, Royce, and Hocking is an avowed naturalist. His common faith purports to do away with what Dewey sees as outdated, untenable beliefs in a supernatural being separate from the world of nature. Some readers have plausibly questioned whether Dewey follows through with this goal consistently throughout "A Common Faith".

This book is difficult in its language, thinking and organization. It often seems muddled and demands close attention. The three separate chapters each develop their own themes but are also circular, repetitive, and concentric making many of the same points in different ways.

In his first lecture, "Religion versus the Religious" Dewey develops his basic distinction between "religion", which includes particular religions with their widely varying doctrines and practices and the "religious". Broadly speaking, he rejects the former for their differences from each other and for their adherence to supernaturalism and he argues for a "religious" outlook, naturalistic in scope based on ideals such as love, friendship, knowledge, and community with nature. James, Royce, and Hocking would have understood and shared the broad contours of the distinction which has some resemblance to the current over-used phrase "spiritual but not religious". I think the distinction valuable but it is too harsh on individual religions and also understates the different approaches possible in a "religious" view of life.

In the second lecture, "Faith and its Object" Dewey argues that people have a tendency to take the needs and values of their lives and project them into an already-existing supernatural being with accompanying doctrines. Dewey argues that ideals are needed to give meaning to human life but arise from life and from the use of creativity and imagination. They are not realities found prior to human experience in a pre-existing spiritual realm. The religious life for Dewey is devoted to ideals as possible, such as the ideal of social justice, and works to realize the ideal in life rather than in responding to a pre-existing reality. Dewey argues that belief in supernaturalism, among other deficiencies, does not survive the teachings and methods of the sciences or of a study of history.

Of the three philosophers mentioned at the beginning of this review, only Hocking was alive at the time Dewey wrote "The Common Faith" and thereafter. Hocking was an idealist philosopher strongly committed to the spiritual character of reality. In 1957, Hocking wrote a book, "The Meaning of Immortality in Human Experience" in which he discussed (pp 119 -- 122) "A Common Faith" at some length, with a focus on its treatment on ideals and imagination. Hocking praised Dewey's conclusion that "the meaning of life is found in serving ideal ends, that is to say, in attempting to embody them in practice. To find one's life integrated, that is to say, wholehearted and therefore significant, one must reach the point, says Dewey, where certain ideals present to imagination dominate conduct." Hocking criticizes Dewey for limiting ideals to the world of imagination and for rejecting metaphysics. He writes "if human life is to rest seriously, as Dewey urges, on the connection with the environing world 'in the way of both dependence and support,' we shall have to pass beyond poetry, fiction, or other modes of imagination to the objective facts of that relationship." Philosophers of differing persuasions offer critiques of Dewey's naturalistic use of ideals and imagination.

The third lecture "The Human Abode and the Religious Function" considers changes in technology and in social organization and their impact on religion. Dewey considers social change, which has reduced the scope of religion from the days in which it was the dominant cultural influence of a particular group, an even more important factor than science in changing the role of religious expression in a democracy from "religion" to "religious". He seeks a common devotion among citizens of a democracy to work for the betterment of all and for the realization of ideals. Dewey concludes:

The ideal ends to which we attach our faith are not shadowy and wavering. They assume concrete form in our understanding of our relations to one another and the values contained in these relations. We who now live are parts of a humanity that extends into the remote past, a humanity that has interacted with nature. The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant."

As with so much philosophy and with Dewey in particular, there are many insights in "A Common Faith" and many issues to question. The issues go to the sharpness of the divide between "religion" and "religious", the total rejection of supernaturalism, the consistency of Dewey's use of ideals and imagination with his professed naturalism, and the scope in advocating for militant social activism that he gives to the "religious" life. There is much to be learned and pondered in a good philosophical text even when the reader is not convinced. Deweys' "A Common Faith" is an inspiring effort to combine religious and secular ideals. It is a book that is part of American thought and achievement in thinking about religious issues.

Robin Friedman