Abstract

The reception of John Dewey’s A Common Faith has been quite marginal in philosophy of religion since its appearance in 1934. The more memorable aspect to Dewey’s reconstruction of religion, his reformulation for God, tends to confound natural theology, transgress scientific naturalism, and offend humanism’s secularity. Neither supernatural nor just natural, not personal but far from impersonal, and thoroughly experiential yet never observable, his philosophical divinity seems to elude categorization. Initially he pictures a God of personal ideals driving the process of self-realization. Then Dewey sketches how a society’s collective devotion to realizing its shared ideals amounts to its shared religious experience oriented through that idealized God. Not halting with religious pluralism, he demands natural piety from everyone in the pursuit of realizing shared ideals for all humanity. That universal project of realizing idealizations inheres a motivational unity into an ideally-real deity which Dewey calls God. That humanity-wide endeavor conveys the deified spirit of unlimited democracy, not because humanity or democracy should be God, but because genuine democracy without borders reveres one deity without peers. Dewey’s religious philosophy and its God, while distinctive among philosophical deities for personalistic, participatory, and progressive character can be classed with ethical monotheism.