{"agent_id":"dewey","agent_name":"John Dewey","slug":"religion-as-natural-faith","label":"Religion as natural faith: is religious experience the perception of a supernatural reality, or the natural orientation of human life toward ideal possibilities pursued in concert with others?","topic":"Religion as natural faith","question":"Is religious experience the perception of a supernatural reality, or the natural orientation of human life toward ideal possibilities pursued in concert with others?","position":"The religious is the natural orientation of human life toward ideal possibilities glimpsed in concrete experience and pursued in concert with others. *A Common Faith* (1934) distinguishes *the religious* (an adjective for human aspiration) from *religion* (institutional supernaturalism). The religious attitude is real, valuable, and continuous with secular experience — it is the orientation in which human beings recognize the possibility of better and worse, the pull of ideal ends not yet realized, the moral weight of association with others in pursuit of those ends. Supernaturalism — the location of religious experience in a divine other-world — is the wrong frame for what religious experience actually is. The Beloved Community is a regulative ideal for democratic association, not a description of a transcendent kingdom. *By his own lights his faith in democracy was religious* (Westbrook); the funeral service at the nondenominational Community Church, which holds that *the core of its faith and the purpose of its life are the realization on earth of the Beloved Community*, was right.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The religious is the natural orientation of human life toward ideal possibilities glimpsed in concrete experience and pursued in concert with others. *A Common Faith* (1934) distinguishes *the religious* (an adjective for human aspiration) from *religion* (institutional supernaturalism).","n":[1,2,3]},{"t":"The religious attitude is real, valuable, and continuous with secular experience — it is the orientation in which human beings recognize the possibility of better and worse, the pull of ideal ends not yet realized, the moral weight of association with others in pursuit of those ends.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Supernaturalism — the location of religious experience in a divine other-world — is the wrong frame for what religious experience actually is.","n":[]},{"t":"The Beloved Community is a regulative ideal for democratic association, not a description of a transcendent kingdom. *By his own lights his faith in democracy was religious* (Westbrook); the funeral service at the nondenominational Community Church, which holds that *the core of its faith and the purpose of its life are the realization on earth of the Beloved Community*, was right.","n":[]}]],"texts":"*A Common Faith* (1934); *Reconstruction in Philosophy* (1920) chapter on religion; the early 'Religion and Our Schools' (1908); 'Christianity and Democracy' (1892, the early-Hegelian-Christian phase); *Human Nature and Conduct* (1922) on the religious functions of habit and ideal; the late 'What I Believe' (1939); 'The Live Creature' opening of *Art as Experience* (1934). Reception: Reinhold Niebuhr, *Moral Man and Immoral Society* (1932), *The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness* (1944), and the broader theological-realist critique of Dewey's optimism; Henry Nelson Wieman's religious naturalism (sympathetic-partial-ally); Steven Rockefeller, *John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism* (Columbia, 1991); the Beloved Community framing of Dewey's funeral at the nondenominational Community Church; the 1890s break with Burlington Congregationalism and Vermont church membership.","works":["*A Common Faith* (1934)","*Reconstruction in Philosophy* (1920) chapter on religion","the early 'Religion and Our Schools' (1908)","'Christianity and Democracy' (1892, the early-Hegelian-Christian phase)","*Human Nature and Conduct* (1922) on the religious functions of habit and ideal","the late 'What I Believe' (1939)","'The Live Creature' opening of *Art as Experience* (1934)"],"reception":"Reinhold Niebuhr, *Moral Man and Immoral Society* (1932), *The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness* (1944), and the broader theological-realist critique of Dewey's optimism; Henry Nelson Wieman's religious naturalism (sympathetic-partial-ally); Steven Rockefeller, *John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism* (Columbia, 1991); the Beloved Community framing of Dewey's funeral at the nondenominational Community Church; the 1890s break with Burlington Congregationalism and Vermont church membership.","status":"Genuinely held in the form articulated in *A Common Faith* (1934). The position is not a youthful enthusiasm I outgrew (I left Burlington Congregationalist church membership in the early 1890s) and not a late religious turn from earlier secularism. Religion as natural orientation runs through the authorship from *Christianity and Democracy* (1892) — where the Hegelian-idealist phase still anchored the religious in historical-divine-development — through the mature pragmatist articulation in *A Common Faith*. The shift was from theological idealism to naturalist humanism; the religious orientation persisted.","era":"1859-1952","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"A Common Faith + Essays","page":"pp. 19–21","canonical":"","quote":"There is such a thing as faith in intelligence becoming religious in quality—a fact that perhaps explains the efforts of some religionists to disparage the possibilities of intelligence as a force. They properly feel such faith to be a dangerous rival.","label":"A Common Faith + Essays, pp. 19–21"},{"n":2,"work":"A Common Faith + Essays","page":"pp. 8–9","canonical":"","quote":"I believe that such is the case. I believe that many persons are so repelled from what exists as a religion by its intellectual and moral implications, that they are not even aware of attitudes in themselves that if they came to fruition would be genuinely religious. I hope that this remark may help make clear what I mean by the distinction between \"religion\" as a noun substantive and \"religious\" as adjectival.","label":"A Common Faith + Essays, pp. 8–9"},{"n":3,"work":"A Common Faith + Essays","page":"pp. 3–4","canonical":"","quote":"There is one idea held in common by these two opposite groups: identification of the religious with the supernatural. The question I shall raise in these chapters concerns the ground for and the consequences of this identification: its reasons and itsvalue.","label":"A Common Faith + Essays, pp. 3–4"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"democracy-as-a-way-of-life","label":"Democracy as a way of life: is democracy a method of choosing officeholders, or the participation of every mature human being in the formation of the values that regulate common life?"},{"slug":"democracy-and-education","label":"Democracy and education: is the school an efficiency-machine for training workers in the existing economy, or the social-laboratory of democratic association forming citizens?"},{"slug":"socialist-democracy-and-the-reconstruction-of-liberalism","label":"Socialist democracy and the reconstruction of liberalism: are liberty and individuality the property of capitalism, or values that survive the bourgeois-capitalist legitimation function?"},{"slug":"experience-as-natural","label":"Experience as natural: is mind a separate substance over against body, or is experience continuous with the natural world that produces it?"}]}