“World Cheers Dewey at Lively 90”1 was the headline for a front page story in The New York Times on 21 October 1949. Reporter Kalman Seigel recalled how 1500 gathered the night before to extend their best wishes to John Dewey, America’s foremost philosopher. Notes of congratulations came from Harry Truman, the President of United States, and also from the Prime Ministers of Britain and India.
The birthday celebrations lasted three days. On the final evening, the guest speaker was General Dwight Eisenhower who had been the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in World War II. Presently, he was President of Columbia University but in three years he would become the thirty-four President of the United States.
Such acclaim for Dr. John Dewey was far removed from his birthplace—a small rural New England town of Burlington, Vermont; he was born on 20 October 1859. The next month on 24 November, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published. The ideology of this book would indeed play a significant role in his religious life.
In 1933, John Dewey signed the Humanist Manifesto I. Of the 34 signatories, his name was by far the most illustrious. At that time, the United States had been paralyzed
by the Great Depression. During this difficult period, many Americans were radically reassessing their belief systems. Capitalizing upon the growing skepticism and agnosticism, Dewey reasoned that, by aligning himself with the Manifesto, he could use his celebrity status to promote and enhance Religious Humanism across his country. 2
A year later, Professor Dewey was afforded a highly favorable opportunity for publicizing his naturalistic worldview. President James Angell of Yale invited Dewey to give three presentations at the Terry Lectures on the topic: ‘Religion in the light of science and religion’. These lectures were published in a small book titled, A Common Faith—“Dewey’s most comprehensive statement about religion and religious phenomena.”3
Admitting that “all the peoples we know anything about have had a religion,”4 Dewey began his treatise by differentiating between ‘religion’ and ‘religious’. From Dewey’s perspective, “religions have traditionally been allied with ideas of the supernatural and often have been based upon explicit beliefs about it.”5 This close association of supernaturalism and the institutionalized church was the basis for his rejection of both.
Dewey never saw himself as an atheist; in his mind, such a designation engendered nothing but negativity. Nevertheless, “God was not a Being and had no independent
existence.”6 In reality, ‘God’ was a concept or a human ideal. As a professional philosopher, he “would prefer to reconstruct the concept of ‘God’ rather than eradicate it.”7 A metaphorical construct best suited his purpose.
‘Religious’, on the other hand, was something experiential; it could be analogous to viewing a beautiful painting or listening to a symphony orchestra’s rendition of Handel’s ‘Messiah’. The act of civil disobedience by Rosa Parks (1913-2005), a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama on 1 December 1955, would most definitely be a ‘religious’ act. Even though Dewey had died three years previously, he would have applauded this courageous woman for not making room for a white passenger on a bus.
Not wanting to be an ‘ivory tower philosopher’, Dewey believed that his Religious Humanism should demonstrate faith in action. In 1909, John Dewey was one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). At the inaugural meeting held in the same year, he was one of the conference speakers. He argued that there were no inferior races and that, in America, all citizens should enjoy equal opportunity in every facet of life.8 In a similar vein, he worked to establish the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Its initial purpose was to defend men
who did not want to participate in World War 1.
Underlying Dewey’s naturalistic faith system was his commitment to evolutionism. In 1909 on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species (and his own fiftieth birthday), he gave a lecture on “Charles Darwin and His Influence on Science.” He wrote that this book would introduce “a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics and religion.”9 Now more than a century later, Dewey’s prophetic statement has come true.
On 1 June 1952 at the age of 93, Dr. John Dewey died. With him, Religious Humanism also expired. In its place, Secular Humanism arose. One of its main declarations has been to either divorce itself from its religious roots within Religious Humanism or deny that they ever existed.
Footnotes:
1. K. Seigel, “World Cheers Dewey at Lively 90,” The New York Times, 21 October 1949, front page.
2. H. Mowat, “The Concept of God in John Dewey’s Thought” (MA thesis, McMaster University, 1968),19-20 at www.///digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/opendisserations/5685.
3. D. Hildebrand, Dewey: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 187.
4. J. Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 8. Italics in the original.
5. Ibid., 1.
6. Ruth Anna Putnam, “Dewey’s Faith,” in Dewey’s Enduring Impact,
eds. J. Shook and P. Kurtz (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2011), 186.
7. Hildebrand, Dewey: A Beginner’s Guide, 197.
8. Susan Carle, “John Dewey and the Early NAACP,” in Dewey’s Enduring Impact, eds. J. Shook and P. Kurtz, 257.
9. John Dewey, “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy,” The Middle Works, 1899-1924, ed. Jo Ann Boyston, vol. 4 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), 6.
