In the present era, few things have been so assailed as tradition and orthodoxy. In the perduring words of John Courtney Murray, “We will not tolerate the idea of an orthodoxy. That is, we refuse to say, as a people: There are truths, and we hold them, and these are the truths.” Instead, a cobbling together of newfangled creeds and ever-growing, frequently contradictory convictions is occurring on a near day by day basis as a carrying capacity of the culture endeavors to construct what resembles nothing so much as the ethical equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster. However, this desire for a man-made morality is not new. For over a century, a dedicated effort has been made to wipe away the horizon and unchain humanity from the stultifying sun of moral absolutism. One deceptively decorous encapsulation of that very ideological enterprise is John Dewey’s seminal 1934 work A Common Faith. Its principle thesis? Mankind must divest itself of its callow adherence to a fictitious supernatural entity who, by his supposed omniscience and omnipotence, has stymied social change and inveigled men into adhering to outdated and even immoral ideals. Having done this, they must redirect their religious fervor and fealty to the project of unencumbered human and material improvement. Only then will we see real progress. Only then will we see meaningful change. Or so Dewey claims. And yet, whether that is actually consonant with reality is unclear. Indeed, a very strong case can be made that the price of drinking up the sea has been a mewling and puking society that has inured itself to immorality and is too punch drunk to see or say otherwise. 

In this paper, I will analyze and evaluate John Dewey’s arguments in A Common Faith, first examining his critiques of traditional religion and its adherents before presenting his proposed “religious” replacement. In response, I will offer a series of theoretical challenges to his position before concluding with a more general evaluation of whether “a common faith” can realistically replace traditional moral orthodoxy. Ultimately, I hope to prove that Dewey’s attempt to replace orthodox morality with a man-made “common faith” is both theoretically and practically insufficient due to its intellectual incoherence and experiential incongruousness.

At its core, A Common Faith is a reactionary work born of Dewey’s disbelief in and dissatisfaction with the pie in the sky deity who had hitherto been dictating morality. For Dewey, not only has any sort of “unseen power” been thoroughly debunked by a nexus of science and common sense, but religion’s obsequious insistence on “the necessity for a Supernatural Being and for an immortality that is beyond the power of nature” has also been proven to be an out and out hindrance of social progress. He contends that instead of focusing on “the causes of war and of the long list of economic and political injustices and oppressions,” churches have turned their chief attention to paltry moral vices and abuses like “drunkenness, sales of intoxicants, and divorce.” He further argues that even if churches got their act together and went after the serious and present evils of the age, their efforts would be undone by their slavish need to look beyond “man and nature for their remedy.” According to Dewey, no deus ex machina is coming and “The point to be grasped is that, unless one gives up the whole struggle as hopeless, one has to choose between alternatives. One alternative is dependence upon the supernatural; the other, the use of natural agencies.” Unsurprisingly, Dewey prefers the latter; however, he recognizes that the ardor of religious adherents is a uniquely potent force which, if rendered and directed towards certain social aims, could result in incalculable change. Thus, A Common Faith is his attempt to do just that as he endeavors to wrest the religious away from religion and superimpose it elsewhere. However, what he terms “religious,” by his own admission, “denotes nothing in the way of a specifiable entity, either institutional or as a system of beliefs… It denotes attitudes that may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal.” Given this, it is obviously eminently important to establish just what those ends and ideals entail. Unfortunately, here, the wheels begin to fall off the applecart because in eschewing any sort of transcendent being or moral ontic referent, Dewey critically, even fatally, undermines any argument for the existence of or adherence to the very ends and ideals he hopes to direct men towards. 

Initially, this issue is obscured by Dewey’s efforts to articulate a method for generating and identifying ideal ends through the use of intellect, emotion, and imagination. He writes:

“There is but one sure road of access to truth—the road of patient, cooperative inquiry operating by means of observation, experiment, record and controlled reflection… The aims and ideals that move us are generated through imagination. But they are not made out of imaginary stuff. They are made out of the hard stuff of the world of physical and social experience.”

However, this three-fold process is far from full-proof. To begin with, the use of intellectual inquiry does not guarantee a functional or desirable form of morality. Writing on this issue in the latter half of the twentieth-century, atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen put it this way:

“We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or classist amoralists. Reason doesn’t decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me… Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality.”

Nielsen is not alone in thinking this. In truth, when reason is given free rein, morality actually has an irritating habit of running away from us. Rock band King Crimson put it succinctly in their 1969 song “Epitaph,” writing, “Knowledge is a deadly friend / If no one sets the rules / The fate of all mankind I see / Is in the hands of fools.”  In his book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Professor John Gray of the London School of Economics and Political Science echoes this sentiment, writing, “The biblical myth of the Fall of Man contains the forbidden truth. Knowledge does not make us free. It leaves us as we have always been, prey to every kind of folly.” Interestingly, Gray is not writing in defense of traditional morality. Quite the opposite, actually. In fact, he goes on to lambast secular humanists (he surely would’ve counted Dewey among their number) for their adherence to what he sees as little more than a masked form of Christianity. He accuses them of being “soft atheists” due to their unwillingness to affirm a political economy that reflects a materialistic worldview—their materialistic worldview. To Gray, they are being ideologically incoherent, crippled by sentimentality and quibbles about morality; however, when the price of coherence is a society where Social Darwinism reigns supreme, most people are willing to grin and bear a little or a lot of inconsistency. Ergo, if irrational emotions are what is needed to check the more Machiavellian tendencies of men, so be it. Thus, Dewey’s second metric for directing us towards ideal ends seems to be vindicated as, if nothing else, a protective measure against run-away realism. Unfortunately, emotions are themselves capable of confusing and corrupting our ideals and ends. 

Instinctively, we know this to be true. No reasonable person would ever suggest that the mercurial moods of man ought to be the final arbiter of what is right, what is good, or what is moral. Indeed, the ability for something to “move us,” as Dewey describes, says very little, if anything, about the moral worth of any particular endeavor. Incontinence is, after all, a perniciously prevalent affliction—ethical or otherwise according to WebMD—and assuming that every movement is one rife with moral gravitas seriously strains the bounds of credulity. Furthermore, putting that assumption into practice would be inadvisable in the extreme if for no other reason than the simple fact that “an ethics based on instinct will give the Innovator all that he wants and nothing that he does not want.” In fairness to Dewey, he does, at least in passing, acknowledge this problem, writing, “The tendency to convert ends of moral faith and action into articles of intellectual creed has been furthered by a tendency of which psychologists are well aware… Desire has a powerful influence upon intellectual beliefs.” However, he later argues that while “…intense emotion may utter itself in action that destroys institutions… the only assurance of birth of better ones is the marriage of emotion with intelligence.” Sadly, not unlike most marriages today, the union of emotion and intelligence frequently ends in divorce with the former getting the whole kit and kaboodle. In Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, he describes this showdown as the triumph of inclination over duty and, in conventional terms, it answers to the name of hypocrisy: “When we observe ourselves in any transgression of a duty, we find that we do not actually will that our maxim should become a universal law… we only take the liberty of making an exception to it for ourselves or for the sake of our inclination.” Emotion or inclination, then, cannot be the deciding voice on what we consider an ideal end.  

Dewey’s final proposed generator/judge of ends and ideals is imagination. He writes, “The aims and ideals that move us are generated through imagination. But they are not made out of imaginary stuff. They are made out of the hard stuff of the world of physical and social experience.” Unfortunately, for the coherent secularist, the world of physical and social experience is inherently, as one poetic philosopher put it, “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” Moreover, according to Professor Richard Dawkins, what Dewey terms the “hard stuff” is what it is and imagining otherwise is just a tremendous waste of time:  

“In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A.E. Housman put it: ‘For Nature, heartless, witless Nature Will neither care nor know.’ DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”

Clearly, however much Dewey might wish that Willy Wonka ruled the world, pure imagination trades for very little on the moral marketplace, and meliorism, in point of fact, dies under the knife of determinism. At this point, I hope I have demonstrated that Dewey’s three criteria for generating and judging ideals and ends (intellect, emotion, and imagination) all exhibit rather significant weaknesses in their ability to consistently and coherently deliver anything close to a liveable or functional morality. However, that does not stop Dewey from making a number of claims about ideals and ends, demonstrating that much like a politician, so too is the philosopher equipped to speak from both sides of his mouth.

Among Dewey’s identified (and thoroughly unsubstantiated) ends and ideals are “human-association, art, and knowledge,” all of which he claims are readily apparent on a natural basis, giving him leave to say “we need no external criterion and guarantee for their goodness.” Of course not. How silly to think otherwise. Never mind that the mafia is a human association, pornography a form of “art,” and knowledge a key component in building the atomic bomb. Clearly, these are all guaranteed goods. Now, I will concede that given the fact that Dewey wrote A Common Faith in 1934, those are all anachronistic examples, and it is certainly not for me to say whether or not Dewey might have been willing to revise some of his espoused self-evident ideals. Indeed, he very clearly leaves space for robust revision within the pages of his work. “There is no special subject-matter of belief that is sacrosanct,” after all, and modifying morality is part and parcel to being a proper philosopher. 

Dewey more or less makes the former point outright, asserting that his principal concern is to “press home the logic of disposal of outgrown traits of past religions,” claiming that all prevailing beliefs and practices are “relative to the present state of culture.” In essence, he is an advocate of bailing out the socially relative bathwater and while a baby or too might get the boot, well, in “the present state of the culture,” we are all about a woman’s right to choose.  Interestingly, Dewey does not seem to realize that in endorsing a perpetually pending conception of morality, he sows the seeds of immobilizing insecurity and uncertainty, inadvertently undermining any kind of call to action. In his 1909 work Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton diagnoses this apparently perennial problem, writing: 

“But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it… In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines… Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.”

Thus, while Dewey claims that new and improved moral epiphanies can serve as “standing grounds” for successive societies, the constant skepticism and scrutiny that is baked into the common faith cake lays a foundation of sand instead of cement, making the whole enterprise an exercise in frustration and futility. Moreover, setting aside the previously proven point that a “common faith” cannot reliably provide coherent and cogent ideals or morally defensible ends, the aforementioned problem of inaction born of insecurity is further exacerbated by Dewey’s erasure of man’s eternal source of accountability. 

Within the pages of A Common Faith, it is readily apparent that Dewey believes that men have been more or less scared into submission by a non-existent supernatural entity. To him, the coercive nature which begets supposedly good behavior diminishes the value of the behavior altogether. He claims that “ the reverence shown by a free and self-respecting human being is better than the servile obedience rendered to an arbitrary power by frightened men.” I completely agree. However, free men are not necessarily good men. Indeed, in the immortal words of James Madison, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” and even then, oftentimes governments, be they earthly or eternal, fail to control what Dewey himself calls the “bestial” tendencies of men. I think Poet Samuel Johnson put it best when he said, “With respect to original sin, the inquiry is not necessary; for whatever is the cause of human corruption, men are evidently and confessedly so corrupt, that all the laws of heaven and earth are insufficient to restrain them from their crimes.” If neither the laws of heaven nor earth can control men, it seems patently absurd to suggest that a cobbled together and constantly fluctuating “common faith” could compel them to do anything at all. Furthermore, even if it could, compulsory compassion is anathematic under Dewey’s anti-coercion paradigm. Thus, Dewey ends in a rut, unable to deny that “Atheism inevitably, in the moral sphere, leaves unanswered the question what obliges us, what forces us–not what persuades us–what forces us to behave as we should?” 

In the end, Dewey’s attempt to present man with a concept of morality unmoored from any foundational beliefs or principles simply misses the mark. His vision of a common faith cannot construct convictions; it eschews creeds, and the nexus of those two factors leaves it largely without teeth. In essence, Dewey knocked the bottom off the boat and set off across the tempestuous sea, confident in his philosophy, but I think C.S. Lewis put it best when he said: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” Ultimately, the realization of a common faith would require one of two things. The first, and what I believe is the most likely and most objectionable, would be the abandonment of Dewey’s provision for personal autonomy. In that scenario, people would be freed from the oppressive hand of their non-existent deity and benevolently dragged kicking and screaming towards the font of blessings that is limitless progress and eternal relativism. While I think many people, especially in this day in age, are more than willing to go that route, I genuinely believe that John Dewey would consider that a tragedy and a perversion of his philosophy. Actually, I think he would probably distance himself from any movement that tried to benevolently cram its creeds and beliefs down the throats of dissenters, no matter how well-meaning the crammers may be. The far more palatable answer for Dewey, though the more impossible one for me, when it comes to fixing the gaping holes in his philosophy, would be a cure for the wickedness of the human heart because, at bottom, I believe that A Common Faith is predicated on Dewey’s belief in the inherent goodness of humanity. Unfortunately, that is something that history has disproved time and time again. Thus, ultimately, to be anywhere close to feasible, A Common Faith would require the triumph of hope over experience, and while I cannot fault Mr. Dewey for his optimism, I can and do fault him for his ignorance.

Religion in America. Fall 2019. Grade Earned: A