Dewey, Walker, and the Piety of the Uncommon

American pragmatism, religion, and race form a strange yet generative constellation. Figures like William James, John Dewey, and George Santayana, for instance, famously reimagine religious piety in the aftermath of Darwin’s revolution against traditional metaphysical attachments. For these authors, religiosity does not require a commitment to supernatural powers or agents but can be expressed in gratitude and awe toward the immanent, natural sources of human existence. More recently, pragmatism has been helpful for authors to respond critically to the problem of race within America and modern life more broadly. Although the classical pragmatists did not confront race in a systematic manner, contemporary thinkers contend that pragmatic ideas and tropes—experimentation, hope, critical inquiry, creatively responding to tragedy—are relevant to ongoing endeavors to fix America’s racial dilemmas.¹ Contemporary pragmatists examining the legacy of modern racism remind us that traditions can be reinterpreted to address omissions and blindspots in that tradition.

In a text like Eddie Glaude’s Exodus!, the reader is invited to think about these intersections and relationships between pragmatism, race, and religion. For Glaude, the well-known Old Testament story provided a guiding metaphor and metanarrative for antebellum black Americans; the story of Exodus enabled them to make sense of slavery and dislocation, to project and struggle for a different future, and to imagine communal identity based on practical concerns rather than some racial essentialism. Although Glaude tells us that he is more interested in the political dimensions of Exodus rather than its religious implications, he also acknowledges “the inseparable linkage between black religious life and black political activity” within antebellum America.² To put this another way, Glaude is less invested in the supernatural dimensions of the narrative and assumes that one can disentangle these dimensions from the historical implications and consequences of Exodus on black political thinking and action. Two figures that play a prominent role in Glaude’s text are philosopher John Dewey and the abolitionist David Walker. The former is useful for Glaude because of his vision of a democratic public, or counter-public, and his emphasis on critical inquiry as an intelligent response to social problems; the latter, in his famous 1829 Appeal to Coloured Citizens, provides a rhetorical expression of an Exodus imaginary that both excoriates America for its treatment of black bodies and imagines the future possibility of interracial coexistence. In many ways, Dewey’s natural piety is introduced to mitigate or curb the prophetic and perhaps supernatural excesses in the rhetoric of someone like Walker, excesses that might be pernicious to Deweyan-style democracy. In what follows, I don’t deny the importance of democratizing the prophetic stance; what I am interested in is how Walker’s Appeal might challenge and complicate Dewey’s understanding of piety, particularly his occasional rejection of supernatural piety in A Common Faith. By constructing a conversation between Dewey and Walker, I suggest that supernatural piety has un/common effects and consequences—especially in the context of black religious life—that Dewey hastily dismisses in his 1934 lectures.

I. Dewey and Natural Piety

The pragmatist tradition has, at its best, avoided two temptations that emerge alongside the rise of modern science. One temptation is to discredit religion as a whole insofar as religious doctrines hold onto elements that are displeasing to scientific standards—such as the proposition that humans are beholden to a supernatural power. The opposite temptation is to demarcate religion from other fields, such as science, in order to protect and secure religious life from scientific inquiry (or nonreligious inquiry in general).³ John Dewey, drawing from a pragmatist strand that accents natural piety toward the sources of our existence, desires to sidestep these tendencies in his masterful work A Common Faith. More specifically, he desires to reimagine the religious quality of experience, instead of discarding it, within a world that has been forever altered by Darwin’s discoveries. Dewey distinguishes his thought from those who believe in “the necessity for a Supernatural Being and for an immortality that is beyond the power of nature” and those who “believe that with the elimination of the supernatural...