John Dewey’s viewpoint on “Religion” and “Religious”
In Religion versus the Religious, Dewey presents a pragmatistic viewpoint on “Religion” and put forward a new definition for “Religious”。 And in doing this, he argues it is both possible and necessary to dislocate the term “religious” from “religion” and calls for a common pursuit towards religious experience.
Dewey believes experience is the living process, and all our doings and undergoings are substances of experience. It is not a passive, onlooking process, but a whole penetrated by sensation, value, and reason. And in past times, human under unfavorable conditions tend to fear the unseen power, fall to his knees and allow the “supernatural” grasp hold of his conscious. But the time has come to take full control and seek religious experience.
What, then, is a religious experience? “Any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value is religious in quality.” A religious experience will allow you to get to a state of harmony in which you feel as a whole with the universe through natural interaction, and thereby enhance the quality of life. This state of harmony with the universe can be achieved through many ways, may it be religion, art, knowledge, science, or good citizenship. It operates only through imagination, and is religious in quality.
Religious experience can be sought potentially everywhere, “whatever introduces genuine perspective is religious” as he pointed out, even in poetry. When a reader reads poetry with a religious attitude, poetry intervenes in life. This intervention works as well, if not better, than actual religions in terms of harmonizing the self with the universe.
Dewey didn't answer to some of the most controversial questions like “Does God exist?” And he did not need to. He emphasized that traditional religions had burdened “religious” too much and therefore stained it with the darker sides of religion and the corruption of human heart. He did not say religions and supernatural stories are falsehoods, but claimed that they were unnecessary. The nature doesn’t need the supernatural to back her up.
Dewey took a glance back into the history of religions and found some religions go to extremes in exchange for reverence. Worships of animals, ghosts, ancestors and phallic worship all fall into this category. Brutal measures had been taken: human sacrifices, sexual orgies, exorcisms and the list goes on and on. This bestiality lies in the very background of a civilized man and isn’t fully gone.
Having seen the dark edge of religions and centuries of unceasing debate over which religion should dominate, Dewey believes the only right thing to do is wipe the slate clean and start afresh by ridding religions, freeing whatever is religious in experience from all historic encumbrances and embracing religious attitude, something that may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal. “Just because the release of these values is so important, their identification with the creeds and cults of religions must be dissolved.” Religions must go, what’s religious may stay and expanded to other aspects of life.