John Dewey: The Evolution of a Faith

Abstract

The evolution of the religious outlook of the American philosopher and educator John Dewey is a classic example of what in the past hundred years has been a common phenomenon in American religious life. Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, just before the Civil War. Dewey was never entirely at ease with the type of sentimental evangelical faith taught by his mother. In the Congregational Church, which Dewey regularly attended throughout his youth, and at the University of Vermont, which Dewey entered at age fifteen, he found a less sentimental and more liberal religious atmosphere than the one that prevailed in his home. James Marsh was a Congregational minister and a professor of philosophy at the University of Vermont in the 1820s and 1830s, and he helped to launch the American Transcendentalist movement by publishing, in 1829, a widely read and influential first American edition of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection.