In A Common Faith Dewey suggests that organized religion once provided a useful sense
of the whole, but that now it has abandoned that task and, instead, attempts to fob off on newly emergent societies the basically irrelevant sense
of the whole generated by an earlier society in a different
history If this last
judgment is
harsh, it was
harsh because «the religious» was so important to Dewey and because he still hoped for a religiousness capable
of setting forth a functional sense
of the whole.