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

A son of the church

An often forgotten facet of John Dewey's youth was his deep relationship with the church and how that was complicated by his relationship with his mother, Lucina Dewey. A quick glance at Dewey's letter applying for membership in the Congregational First Church of Burlington is suggestive: “I think I love Christ and want to obey Him. I have thought for some time I should like to unite with the church. Now, I want to more, for it seems one way to confess Him, and I should like to remember Him at Communion.” ¹ Signed by the 11-year-old Dewey, this letter contains the same wording Lucina wrote for Davis Rich Dewey, John's older brother.

There had been an earlier boy in the family also named John Dewey. This older brother died as the result of a horrific accident involving boiling water and a kitchen fire roughly nine months before the philosopher John Dewey's birth. Alan Ryan notes that the effect of this death on Dewey's “upbringing is a matter of speculation, but it is hard to believe that his mother's continuous attention to his moral and spiritual welfare had nothing to do with her guilt over the death of the first John Dewey.” ² Lucina Artemisia (Rich) Dewey came from a prosperous, well-connected family. Her father had been a Vermont General Assemblyman and her grandfather had served in Washington as a congressman. She was a member of the upper class of Vermont politics and community life. Archibald, Dewey's father, was a Burlington grocer known for his sometimes excessive good will. Twenty years older than Lucina, Archibald enlisted to fight in the Civil War, and Lucina was left with the children, including 3-year-old John. But she handled the situation with her usual verve. She moved into northern Virginia to be with John's father, a quartermaster of the First Vermont Calvary. The young child surely experienced his mother's anxiety about the war, its causes, and what might unexpectedly occur to the family. Her concerns were not unrealistic. Northern Virginia was too close to Washington, which at one point was overrun by confederate soldiers. But both parents survived the war, and the family returned to Vermont where Dewey's father opened and managed a small grocery store as Dewey's mother reentered Burlington society and a centering role in the Congregational First Church of Burlington, a liberal institution.

After the war Lucina “continued the family tradition of public service in church charities rather than politics, but with the same uninhibited vigor.” ³ Her interest in the moral life of the young men attending the nearby University of Vermont led to being the model for a fictional Mrs. Carver, the heroine of Freshman and Senior, an educational pamphlet of the Congregational Sunday School and Publication Society. The hundredth anniversary record of the Burlington Congregational Church remembered Lucina as a person “who was always looking forward from things as they are, to what they ought to be, and might be.” ⁴

Meanwhile, Dewey's hometown was changing. Rapid industrialization meant new class divisions and issues connected with concerns regarding immigration and substandard housing. While the young Dewey was certainly aware of all this, his childhood seemed marked more by avid reading, an occasional canoeing outing on Lake Champlain, and the earning of pocket money through the tallying of boards in a local lumberyard. At this early age, he seemed more interested in matters of family and church than what was going on in his larger Burlington context.

We might imagine, however, that whatever guilt Lucina carried because of the earlier accident and death of her young son was compensated for and resolved by her role in the social needs of the community and her pious intrusion into her dead child's replacement, John Dewey, as well as into the lives of the young adults of the church and community. Lucina's piety was intense, enthusiastic, and personal; she regularly asked classmates of Dewey's, “Are you right with Jesus?” In his seventies, Dewey saw such intrusiveness as “particularly irritating, and to have caused that ‘inward laceration of spirit’ that he complained of as the most predictable result of an excess of religion in childhood.” ⁵ Nevertheless, Dewey obeyed his mother, and throughout his youth and young adulthood maintained church membership and was a regular speaker on faith and morals at churches and other young adult Christian gatherings.

A young man's vocational and theological questions

Despite his close personal connection to the church, Dewey did not intend to serve it. He did not seek ordination. This presented a vocational problem for him. During this era, those who taught philosophy (an early interest of Dewey's) were almost always members of the clergy. It would appear that without ordination, teaching in a public school might be the one option the thoughtful Dewey could pursue, but that would be a future decision. An initial step toward a vocation might be further schooling.

Certainly family and those important to Lucina's side of the family had no question that the shy Dewey should go to college. In 1875 he entered the University of Vermont, at that time best described as a small (100 students, 8 faculty) regional school. Not yet 16, he found the faculty embodied an enthusiastic mixture of Scottish philosophy and theology called Intuitionism. Composed of common-sense observations and realistic conclusions drawn from such considerations (intuitions), this philosophy was a strong defender of religion and its theistic values. ⁶ While initially intrigued by intuitionalism, Dewey soon found its dualistic thinking and predictable outcomes unpalatable. Certainly the university introduced him to other philosophers, but his heavy use of the college library provided his real education. He was impressed by Thomas Henry Huxley's Elements of Physiology, a book that gave organic form and substance to what lay hidden within Dewey's imagination. He would affirm Huxley's work as the first place where he could find a model for his philosophical ambitions.

Barely 19 and a “shy and self-conscious young man,” ⁷ Dewey graduated Phi Beta Kappa and second in his class of eighteen, but even with his degree in hand remained “at a loss about his future career.” The obvious choice, public school teaching, must have “looked unpromising both to him and to anyone who wondered how on earth he was to keep order in the classroom.” ⁸ He taught for just two years in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and for one term in Charlotte, Vermont, a small town only a few miles south of his home in Burlington. Very little has been unearthed regarding either position, but Dewey spent time in Oil City brooding on the reality of his prayer life and whether or not he “meant business” when he prayed. One night Dewey was suddenly “overtaken by a ‘supremely blissful feeling that his worries were over.’” ⁹ Overcoming whatever was holding him back, at age 23 Dewey submitted and had his first paper, “The Metaphysical Assumptions of Materialism,” accepted for publication in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. He also succeeded in getting enrolled in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. This was an unusual choice in that the school was founded on the German research model and was that rare instance where the president was not a clergyman. Dewey would receive the PhD in 1884.

The college graduate at Johns Hopkins

While at Johns Hopkins under the influence of Professor George Sylvester Morris, Dewey adopted Hegelian Idealism as a useful working philosophy. Absolute Idealism moved Dewey away from the dualisms of Intuitionalism and deeper into Huxley's organic ideas. In his search for an adequate philosophy, Dewey accepted the natural world as being an organic unity composed of multiple parts “interrelated like those of a biological organism.” ¹⁰ While this had roots in both Darwin's and Huxley's work, Morris's rendition of Absolute Idealism continued to tie such unity within the “vast, unfolding, all-embracing divine self-consciousness of which we are a part.” ¹¹ Neither Dewey nor Morris could escape the idea that nature was imbued with a spiritual principle necessarily corresponding to the human structures permeating individuals and society. ¹² Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) challenged the Absolute Idealism espoused by Morris, but a divine self-consciousness was important to both Dewey and Morris in their metaphysical assumption that spiritual laws and the conditions for righteousness were implicit within the universe.

Professor at the University of Michigan

Morris accepted an appointment to the faculty at the University of Michigan. Morris asked Dewey to come to Michigan and teach the history of philosophy to a class of seven students. He did well with this assignment, and was next asked to teach psychology, at that time directly connected to theology. Dewey emphasized the reality of a universal consciousness and the ways moral and ethical behavior were tied to such theistic beliefs. Indeed, much of what he taught at that time as psychology (as well as the articles he wrote about philosophy) remained grounded in Hegelian metaphysical understandings. In Michigan, Dewey “was active in the affairs of the Student Christian Association and the First Congregational Church in Ann Arbor. He taught Bible classes and lectured students on such topics as ‘The Search for God,’ ‘The Motives of the Christian Life,’ ‘Christ and Life,’ and ‘The Place of Religious Emotion.’” ¹³ Nothing in these early years at Michigan suggested that he was increasingly disaffected with institutional religion.

The young professor nevertheless continued to be troubled by Darwin's evolutionary theory. He was beginning to believe that the human self as defined by the theistic psychology he was teaching was a regressive idea. He was also beginning to think that if human behavior more properly belonged within the natural order of things (and was not somehow beholden to an Absolute Being), then the human self might better be understood as an agent of responsibility. ¹⁴ This radical idea anticipated a sharp separation from Absolute Idealism. Dewey's steady progression down this path was certainly influenced by the publication of William James's Principles of Psychology (1890): “James treated the mind from a Darwinian approach; he argued that experience came as a ‘dynamic, flowing process in which mind was no spectator, but a “fighter for ends.” ¹⁵ After reading James, Dewey told an interviewer that “The Hegelian cosmos … just dropped away.” ¹⁶

Dewey proved to be a productive, thoughtful, and engaging young colleague, interrupting his time at Michigan with a brief teaching stint at the University of Minnesota. But when his mentor, George Sylvester Morris, suddenly died, Dewey left Minnesota, quickly returning to Michigan as professor and head of the department of philosophy. Over his years as a University of Michigan professor, Dewey displayed the scholarly enthusiasm and productivity that seemingly marked everything he undertook. While the task of untethering philosophy from theology gave him a location for such work, he was only beginning to understand the roles played by the natural world and experience. For Dewey the human mind became something other than the subsidiary part of an Absolute continuity. He saw that the mind was possibly a product of the biological and cultural continuity of experience naturally existing between humanity and the environmental context provided by the world. He accordingly became interested in what might bridge the gap between science and human moral behavior, and he worked at developing a complex and dynamic set of instruments which could scientifically measure (via experience) any belief or statement about the world. Dewey called such an approach Instrumentalism. It would anticipate his Chicago work in education, which he came to refer to as Experimentalism instead of Instrumentalism or Pragmatism. All such terms, however, were grounded by “a naturalism stemming from a biological-anthropological approach with no resort to supernatural forces or ideals.” ¹⁷ This giant step—the separation of human experience from the control of an Absolute entity—would go with him to Chicago: “The Dewey who left Michigan for Chicago in 1894 was a great deal more radical, more down to earth, and more interesting than the young man who had left Johns Hopkins for Michigan ten years before. He was not a fire-eating leftist, and he never became one.” ¹⁸

The mature philosopher: Chicago (1894)

William Rainey Harper, the first president of John D. Rockefeller's University of Chicago, was not keen on hiring Dewey, but had been turned down by several of his initial choices. He found himself asking Dewey to come and teach. Dewey accepted. He was to be hired as the chair of the department of philosophy, which also included psychology and pedagogy, but he convinced Harper to move pedagogy into a separate department. He was hired as that chair as well.

By Chicago, Dewey had “finally stripped his work of the metaphysical method, the transcendental logic of internal relations, with which idealists established the existence and nature of the Absolute.” ¹⁹ He began to think about dropping his chairing of the philosophy department and instead teaching philosophy via the development of a vibrant pedagogy. But perhaps more importantly, he came to Chicago having married a woman whose personal background and character was unlike his own. Alice Chipman was a junior at the University of Michigan when she and Dewey resided in the same boarding house. They fell in love and following her graduation were married. The new Mrs. Alice Chipman Dewey was an orphan who had been raised by her grandparents, Fredrick and Evalina Riggs. Her grandfather had been adopted by the Chippewa tribe at a time and in a place that had little or no support for such ideas. Fredrick Riggs was a free thinker and somewhat of a cultural outlier. His granddaughter had inherited much of his independent thinking and provided the philosopher, John Dewey, with strongly needed support. Alice Dewey was fearless. She told Dewey to not worry about what the public thought, but to follow what he knew to be true. She also supported him in his belief “that institutionalized religion was on the whole an enemy to true faith.” ²⁰ When the Dewey family came to Chicago, they did not become members of a local congregation, and Dewey's mother, living with them at the time, commenced a bitter battle over this issue. But Alice and John were not moved by her argument. They would not go to church and would not send their children to Sunday School.

Alice Dewey also challenged Dewey in the rebalancing of his philosophy by emphasizing the importance of practical experience. Dewey had come to Chicago “dissatisfied with the remoteness of absolute idealism from the concrete particulars of human experience.” ²¹ He felt such avoidance of practical experience and the concrete happenings of life was his philosophical weakness. He wanted to show how philosophy dealt with human problems instead of being centered on the often esoteric and metaphysical issues put forth by non-scientific philosophers. At this particular moment his personal faith held “that the world was friendly to human purposes, a naturalism that suffered from none of the practical deficiencies of absolute idealism.” ²² This position suggested that humans were born into a social, holistic environment that not only educated them, but also posed problems they inevitably wanted to solve, initially for their own sake. Dewey's maturing thought took shape in his experimental approach to education; in simple fashion this five-step approach usually (but not always) occurred in sequential fashion; students and teachers: (1) were to identify the experiential (contextual) problem they hoped to solve; (2) uncover related data (clarification) surrounding the problem; (3) suggest possibilities (hypotheses); (4) sort out implications (choosing one); and (5) test the resulting hypothesis by overt or imaginative action. The experiential problems encountered by a learner were to be subjected to this experimental method. Whatever results emerged from such work were to again be directed into and through the same process.

Dewey's five-step method was to be generalized: “There was to be one major mode of knowing which could be applied consistently in all areas of thought.” ²³ Dewey believed that Chicago's citizens needed to be engaged by a thoughtful, problem-posing educational model. At the turn of the century, Chicago was a chaotic urban city, yet even after taking it all in, Dewey could tell Alice that “you can't really get rid of feeling here that there is a ‘method’ and if you could only get hold of it things could be so tremendously straightened out.” ²⁴ He felt that a modern industrial society needed to systematically and “scientifically” act in an intelligent fashion. By so doing, a country could progressively move forward:

Dewey was certain that there was no difference in the dynamics of the experience of children and adults. Both were active beings who learned by confronting the problematic situations that arose in the course of the activities engaging their interests. For both, thinking was an instrument for solving the problems of experience, and knowledge was the accumulation of wisdom that such problem-solving generated. ²⁵

In 1896 Dewey's wife (“Mrs. Alice Chipman Dewey”) was the principal and co-founder of the University of Chicago's Laboratory School. This was where his educational philosophy was to be experimentally worked out. This arrangement fell apart when the university acquired the Cook County Normal School, an elementary school of the Chicago Institute (which became the University's School of Education). Dewey's laboratory school and the normal school were to merge. The Institute's school arrived with a million-dollar endowment for the university. What might have been a misunderstanding or a subtle administrative move on the part of President Harper led to a series of confrontations as to the true role of “interim” principal, Mrs. Dewey. Dewey saw the resulting confusion as a move to undercut not only Mrs. Dewey's authority but also an attack on the progressive educational philosophy of the Lab School. He believed that any new arrangement would tip toward the more traditional model clearly espoused by Harper. Alice Dewey resigned and John rapidly followed with his own resignation.

The public intellectual at Columbia (1904)

Dewey let it be known that he was available, and in 1904 Columbia (with a lectureship at Teacher's College) immediately hired him. Dewey was now living in New York City during an era that embodied an evolutionary approach in the natural sciences, experimental method in the social sciences, and pragmatism in philosophy—a confluent moment abetted by technological transformation and an atmosphere of social and political reformism. This moment could not fail to have consequence for a society concerned about religion. By this time a leading theoretician and spokesman of the progressive movement, Dewey was focused on the scientific nature of the universe. When considering religion, this put him at some distance from the premodern ideals and values emanating from earlier supernatural arguments.

He raised the topic of religion in the final moments of the Edinburgh Gifford Lectures (1929). In that series Dewey asked what might occur were we to replace those ideals handed us by culture with ones realized via scientific reasoning. Dewey's book that followed, The Quest for Certainty (1934), was understood by critics to be an argument against the supernatural. Dewey amplified such concerns in a review of the book—Is There a God? A Conversation—involving articles by three theologians taken from The Christian Century. In that review Dewey asked whose God was being affirmed, moving from that question into an evaluation as to how (or if) a “God” was anything more than a human invention. In the aftermath of the uproar that followed, Yale invited him to give the Terry Lectures, an opportunity that reached print that same year as A Common Faith (1934). ²⁶ While A Common Faith is not an explicit rendering of Dewey's experimental method and its five-step process, his initial chapter clearly embodies his method; that is, he initially identifies the problem. He notes that there are many religions, yet all affirm some kind of different supernatural powers lying beyond nature. Second, he uncovers relevant data as to this problem. This data included how God had been historically “conceived in a multitude of incompatible ways,” ²⁷ which he details. The word “God” was understood by him to be a human “hypostatization of particular ideal ends and values” that in no way is suggestive of an “extant being” with supernatural powers. ²⁸ “God,” thus described, is understood by Dewey to be a collective term encumbered by institutionally defined creeds and dogmatic statements. Such definitions “are affairs of the traditions of the culture with which individuals are inoculated.” ²⁹

The third step in the experimental process is to suggest alternative possibilities. Dewey is clear about his goal; that is, he will develop another way of conceiving of “the religious phase of experience, one that separates it from the supernatural.” ³⁰ He therefore describes the difference between “religion” and “the religious.” For him “religion” is a noun best understood as descriptive of human institutions such as the Christian church. In contrast, the “religious” is best understood as an adjective modifying particular experiences.

Fourth, he sorts out the implications contained within his contrasting definitions of religion and the religious. He believes that if he can do this, then “the religious aspect of experience will be free to develop freely on its own account.” ³¹ He expects religious experience to be idiosyncratic. He asserts such experiences can be recognized as “religious,” but they are not a different kind of experience or capable of being organized into an institutional system of beliefs. Such experiences are not amenable to religion's labeling. Because they cannot exist by themselves or be organized into a distinctive form of religion, they need no “doctrinal apparatus” for interpretation ³² He further suggests that because traditional containers regarding things religious are somewhat closed, people often lose their personal awareness of religious experiences.

The fifth movement in Dewey's experimental method has to do with testing via overt or imaginative action. Were Dewey intentionally following his five-step experimental method, at this point he would have offered a set of concrete examples that fit his understanding of whatever he understood was contained in the term “religious experience.” In other words, the reader of A Common Faith would then have been able to recognize a religious experience were the reader to experience one. Dewey had already stated that people often lose awareness of such experience because the institutional church is perceived to be the arbiter of all things religious. Some clarity is therefore expected of Dewey. But he seems intentionally vague at this point. This intentionality is tied, I believe, to Dewey's primary argument—that religious experience be seen not only as residing idiosyncratically with individuals, but understood to be the constituent (communal and necessarily unique) building blocks of democracy's common faith.

We can, however, push this a bit more—Dewey insists that religious experience always involves a relationship “to the world in which we live.” ³³ In the lived moment of a religious experience we become aware of “a deep-seated change in our being in its entirety.” ³⁴ This is not a momentary occurrence involving a partial change. It instead results in “a change of will conceived as the organic plenitude of our being.” ³⁵ By “a change of will,” Dewey is saying that such an experience results in a person's becoming newly aware and engaged in the world. By “organic plenitude,” Dewey suggests that a bodily difference, an active, energetic, new incarnation of this person is now made visible. In other words, such change (as occasioned by a person's “religious” experiencing) is palpable, an unexpected sense of agency happening in a moment during which a person suddenly realized, without benefit of supernatural prompting, exactly what it means to be fully present within the natural, contextual world.

At this point Dewey is building a case in his manuscript for what he will call a common faith, but we might profit by returning to that time in Oil City when as a young man he was suddenly overtaken “with the sense that everything that's here is here, and you can just lie back on it.” ³⁶ In that moment, he became aware of a deep security that had been absent in his life, an internal peace and a new agency connecting him to a world-orienting freedom. Dewey later commented on the experience: “I've never had any doubts since then, nor any beliefs. To me faith means not worrying.” ³⁷

Dewey's understanding of “religious experience” might seem individualistic, yet he felt that a similar intensive reconnecting of a nation with the world of experience might be imagined and embodied when people communally turned to a thoughtful “common” solving of their societal problems.

Social intelligence and a new kind of “religious” education

In this regard, Dewey believed the authority that was once the sole property of the church had shifted to science. Because of this shift, he argued, one no longer went to church seeking answers to the problems faced by humans. This crumbling of what had once seemed eternal was a hard thing for the church to understand; in his words, “the greatest change that has occurred in religion in all history.” ³⁸ With what is now called “Christendom” seemingly in tatters, people were turning to a scientific understanding of the world. But the church in Dewey's era did not fully recognize or understand this shift. It still continued to draw “a line between the religious and the secular and profane.” ³⁹ Such “lines” were inappropriate, Dewey contended, because “the religious” was an experience “independent of the supernatural … and … necessitates no such division.” ⁴⁰ With no such division, the progressive power of science could be best realized in a society via a broad implementation of Dewey's rational educational method. No “lines” were needed, he argued, for the “ideal ends” of a democratic community could be expanded and nurtured into a common religious faith by citizens placing a high priority on the “development of social intelligence.” ⁴¹ Through the means of social intelligence such ideal ends could “assume concrete form in our understanding of our relation to one another and the values contained in these relations.” ⁴² Such understanding could serve as the directive criteria for shaping purposes into a “creed” that “cannot be shaken.” ⁴³ Dewey ends A Common Faith with this statement: “Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.” ⁴⁴ This was nothing less than a proposal, if not for the entire world, at least for the religious education of the American public, to result in a fully engaged, problem-solving, thoughtful citizenry.

What to make of Dewey

Dewey correctly recognized the cultural “shift” from the authority of the church to the authority of science. He himself made that transition without apology. If his mother's intrusiveness at his early age was a contributing factor, it paled in his admiration of the rational thought he came to hold that demolished much of his earlier appreciation for philosophical conceptions of the cosmos. But this shift in Dewey was the result of a twenty-year personal exploration. This had to be a hard shift for Dewey, a young man making his way through his early years in part dependent upon his loyalty to the church. But he was now on the other side of this shift; accordingly, he no longer believed in a supreme being, and his clearest picture of what all this might mean for the broader American culture were his words in A Common Faith. His book is an argument for the merging of a participatory democratic process, an interpretation of religious experience, and the collective use of his educational, scientific method.

Perhaps the strongest critique of Dewey's embrace of the rational promise of a hopeful, scientific future and a newly “educated” religious citizenry came from colleague and peer Reinhold Niebuhr, who felt that “modern educators are, like rationalists of all the ages, too enamored of the function of reason in life. The world of history, particularly in man's collective behavior, will never be conquered by reason, unless reason uses tools, and is itself driven by forces which are not rational.” ⁴⁵ Christianity for Niebuhr was about true myth, and was not capable of being judged by rational, scientific thought. Accordingly, Niebuhr condemned modernism, or as he called it, “the Age of Reason.” ⁴⁶

Both Niebuhr and Dewey were left-leaning liberals, but Dewey believed in the power of rational thought while Niebuhr held to a mixture of Marxism and Christianity. As a result Niebuhr believed that “the appeals to reason by secular liberals like John Dewey … were maddeningly stupid.” ⁴⁷ Niebuhr held that the world was more complex than was imagined by Dewey, and Dewey, for whom the natural world was positively sufficient, felt Niebuhr was a minister obsessed with sin, a posture reminiscent of his early years under his mother's intrusive watchfulness. ⁴⁸

Dewey struck Niebuhr as shallow, unable to confront the depth of evil in the world, unwilling to face the doubleness of the human heart. Dewey could hardly see what Niebuhr was talking about. It seemed to him that Niebuhr clung to a protestant obsession with sin that he had no need of and in whose intellectual foundations he had long ceased to believe. ⁴⁹

I wish Dewey had pressed deeper into what Niebuhr saw as the complexity of human experience. Perhaps my Calvinist underpinnings betray me, but Dewey's disavowal of human sinfulness seems a major flaw. Two years before Dewey's lectures reached print as A Common Faith, Niebuhr made public his concerns in Moral Man and Immoral Society. Individuals might be moral, Niebuhr suggested, but when gathered together, they prove to be immoral. Niebuhr held that greed, power, and the sinful nature of humanity were always visible in whatever constituted a society's economic structure. He had sharp condemnation for those “who profit from the present system of society.” ⁵⁰ Persons embracing unjust economic structures “are the real hindrance to the establishment of a rational and just society.” ⁵¹ He believed that when people suffer “because of politics and economics, Christian ethics had to deal with politics and economics.” ⁵² Politics for Niebuhr was always “a realm of impure motives, and Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society preached a spectacular deflationary kind of progressivism.” ⁵³

Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society was ahead of its time. Dewey had to have been aware of and read it, but there is no reference to it in A Common Faith. Perhaps he felt Niebuhr's comments had not warranted a response: “Dewey provoked in Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930s, at a time when Niebuhr's politics were much like his own but when Niebuhr's bleakly Protestant vision of fallen humanity was very much not.” ⁵⁴ If anything, Dewey's too easy regard for the inherent goodness of humanity misses the arrogance of the scientific posturing which later would result in the Holocaust, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima. Both men continued to engage in leftist liberal politics, Dewey holding his more optimistic point of view while Niebuhr continued to follow what he called Christian Realism.

If I am dismayed with Dewey's embrace of secular rationalism and his ardent interest in “rational” science, I am reluctant to throw out a Dewey who pedagogically frames much of what I believe and have experienced as pastor and professor. His affirmation of the educative value of a democratic process, the importance of listening to the learner's environmental context, and the need for the teacher to step inside the life process of the learner fits my hopeful understanding of education as well as ecclesiology. As I understand Dewey, an educator or minister is someone quite different from an autocratic authority or “Herr Pastor.” Reading Dewey today for me confirms a more horizontal approach to ministry, a participatory model of congregational leadership, and an appreciation for the educative presence of a “teaching elder” in the ongoing journey of faith with students and congregants, not over them.

But, at the same time, I am more akin with Niebuhr in his suspicion that communities are never monolithic, but instead are composed of diverse personalities forming multiple classes interconnected within the economic structures that define the community. Niebuhr was blunt: Dewey was of the middle class and wrote his educational philosophy from that (privileged) location. I, and many of my friends, share that location. This is not automatically a disqualifier for authentic teaching or ministry, but Niebuhr also noted that Dewey and Dewey's friends “live in a world of individual relationships [and are] unable to appreciate the consistency with which economic groups express themselves in terms of pure selfishness.” ⁵⁵ For Niebuhr, given such concerns, there was the unspoken need for the presence of a just structure that intentionally connected with whatever Dewey meant by a common faith. It would also help if Dewey were to name a few tools that might provide passion toward the formation of such a structure while also developing a core of committed individuals sufficient to the task. Niebuhr did not think that Dewey was remotely interested in such issues.

Conclusion

Looking back, we (now) can see that Dewey's life was balanced on the cusp of a major cultural change involving the clash of religion and science. Disavowing Christianity and the philosophic principles surrounding it, he moved into a life where critical reason without incorporating the presence of a supernatural authority was understood to be sufficient for adequately building participatory democracy. The American public was to be saved by science and a more intelligent educational process. While his proposal for the “religious” education of the American public never got off the ground, numerous threads of his philosophical work still resound in this culture, none more so than his pedagogical approach turning traditional education upside down. The educator or minister who supports a communal process wherein all democratically participate accordingly stands in Dewey's shoes. But much of what he came to believe about the hopeful nature and kerygmatic promise of science's rational, critical reflection has not stood the test of time. He is fairly said to represent the “high tide of American liberalism.” ⁵⁶ He died in 1953. In retrospect, given the cultural context of his time, a religiously educated “common” faith was an illusionary liberal hope; instead, in retrospect, what we've come to call postmodernity (with its multiple authorities) was inevitable.