John Dewey, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
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).123 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.
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.A Common Faith + Essays, pp. 19–21
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.A Common Faith + Essays, pp. 8–9
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.A Common Faith + Essays, pp. 3–4
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.