John Dewey, God, and the religious education of the American public

Abstract

American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1953) wanted to change the way we understand the world. Born just prior to our Civil War, Dewey is a telling figure as the authority of a premodern day gave way to the progressive promise of modernity. In this regard, Dewey's family, church, college, academic, and peer relationships are considered. The article notes the “new” pedagogy of the Laboratory School (founded by Dewey and his wife at the University of Chicago in 1894), his early Christian years, and attraction to and struggle with evolutionary science's rational approach to experience. That struggle culminated with Dewey's rejection of theistic philosophical arguments and a withdrawal from the institutional church on his family's arrival in Chicago. We see how an administrative argument over the leadership of the Laboratory School took him to New York City and Columbia (1904). By this time he was acknowledged as a founder of the Progressive and Pragmatist movements. A self-described liberal humanist, he continued his involvement with social reform and the national politics of his day. A public argument as to the reality of God led Dewey to repackage religious faith as the possibility of a nation's scientific embrace of thoughtful, well-educated, participatory democracy. His resulting book, A Common Faith (1934), is considered. How his peer, Reinhold Niebuhr, might differ serves here as a contrast to Dewey's understanding.