Faith After Religion — A Lifespan Development Approach
Faith is a funny word. For some inspiring, for others, triggering. Faith is often considered to be synonymous with belief, a concept set aside for those of a religious persuasion, placed in contrast to the intellectual and scientific rigors of secular thought. But if you hail from an ultra-religious upbringing as I do, you’ll know all too well that in many circles, discussions of faith go far beyond run-of-mill belief.
From a psychological perspective though, what is faith? We could dismiss faith as only for the religious, but perspectives from evolutionary biology challenge us to think about religion, spirituality, or at least their psychological underpinnings as ubiquitous human experiences manifest across the epochs in disparate cultures from all over the globe. It appears that the human spiritual disposition, while more pronounced in some over others, is not so much an intellectual or political choice, but rather a tendency of human psychology.
This perspective is shared by the late James W. Fowler, a United Methodist Minister and Professor of Theology and Human Development at Emory University. Fowler is best known for his 1981 book, Stages of Faith, which is still referenced in undergraduate psychology textbooks and that recently appeared on my radar in a lifespan development course as part of my graduate-level clinical counseling program. The reason that the work of a Methodist minister has made its way to a Masters of Science program is that his work draws not just from his own Christian sentiments but from the theoretical perspectives of the great names in developmental psychology including the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget who developed a framework for the cognitive development of children, Erik Erikson who created an 8 stage framework for psychosocial development across the lifespan, and Lawrence Kohlberg who developed a 6-stage model for morality.
Fowler applies a developmental psychological perspective to the maturation of faith across the lifespan. In the copy of Stages of Faith that I have, Fowler goes so far as to create a fictional dialogue between the aforementioned developmental psychologists, as if to demonstrate that what he goes on to say about faith is based not on his belief biases, but on established lifespan development psychology.
In short, Fowlers knows his shit.
Faith Maturation or Spiritual Ambition
I have been told that in religious circles, Fowler’s work has been taken slightly out of context and is instead used as a sort of roadmap for the ambitious Christian religionist. This appears to be a common use of psychological research in general — that it is often taken out of its context of the observation of human behavior and cognition, and is presented to the public almost as a way of hacking our human experience, using emerging psychological and neuroscientific knowledge to optimize our human experience whether it be in the pursuit of improved performance in memory, efficiency, happiness, relationships, or self-knowledge. Anyone who has taken this approach to self-improvement to an extreme knows it’s folly.
In religious communities, faith development can be pursued in real earnest, almost aggressively. Indeed numerous passages in the New Testament appeal to the devout to make spiritual advancement, and to attain maturity and the “measure of stature that belongs to the fullness of the Christ” (Eph 4:13, NWT).
So, I hope the reference to Fowler is not somehow offputting to my readers who know the perils of obsessive desire for religious purity, the sort of scrupulosity that plagued me as a Jehovah’s Witness, personal spiritual ambition combined with community competition for mystical one-up-manship.
But surely we’re all past that now.
Famously, Fowler presents 6 stages of faith. But beyond this, he provides a definition of faith, that is of value not only to the spiritual seeker; the person who (like myself) seeks to understand the role of spirituality in the human experience, but also to those who consider themselves firmly in the secular camp. In this, I think Fowler’s perspective on faith, albeit from the religious or spiritual perspective, can be of introspective value to all of us. Fowler puts it this way
“Faith, rather than belief or religion, is the most fundamental category in the human quest for relation to transcendence. Faith, it appears, is generic, a universal feature of human living.”
What is Faith?
(Trigger warning. I’m sure I have given dozens of religious sermons centered around the definition of faith. Mostly based on the Biblical definition at Hebrews 11:1. Pardon me, as I indulge in a bit of deconstruction.)
St. Paul the Epistle says that faith is the “assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld” (Hebrews 11:1, NWT). “The assured expectation of things hoped for” — or rather — the dogged refusal to entertain the possibility that what one hopes for might not come to fruition. And the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld. The use of the word evidence here implies that the Christian can find evidence of their unseen beliefs (realities), in the world around them. This is a classic example of confirmation bias as religionists identify experiences that reconfirm their beliefs either in the existence of an omnipotent god, his interference in their personal life, or the value of living based on religious principles. This opposes good science, wherein one would present a hypothesis and seek evidence to falsify the hypothesis rather than confirm it.
I digress.
Fowler’s definition of faith is based on the psychological and is more robust. It can be applied to religious faith not only of the Christian persuasion, but all faith systems, and as I have argued, ethical, moral, and value systems that may resonate with the secular thinker. Fowler sees faith as “a human phenomenon, an apparently generic consequence of the universal human burden of finding or making meaning” (p.33).
Fowler describes faith as an operation of the human ability to imagine. He says that humans have the tendency to imagine an ultimate environment that shapes our worldview, value systems, thinking, and initiatives. He puts in this way:
“Faith forms a way of seeing our everyday life in relation to holistic images of what we may call the ultimate environment. Human action always involves responses and initiatives. We shape our action (responses and initiatives) in accordance with what we see to be patterns of action and meaning.” In essence, we imagine an ultimate environment and then form our actions based on this ideal. Fowler breaks down how this relates to personal cognitive systems and social connection in the following:
“Faith, in its binding us to centers of value and power and in its triadic joining of us into communities of shared trusts and loyalties, gives form and content to our imagining of an ultimate environment.” (p.24).
In short, we use our capacity for imagination to create an image of an ultimate environment and then draw value systems and community connectivity from these images. Fowler clarifies that this is not just fantastic thinking. He says, “Imagination is not to be equated with fantasy or make-believe. Rather, imagination is a powerful force underlying all-knowing. In faith, imagination composes comprehensive images of ultimate conditions of existence”.
Fowler admits that some would protest that they don’t hold such an imagined ultimate environment. But replies by saying “You may add that far from being ultimately concerned about such matters, you don’t really have much concern about them at all. In response to this commonly stated position, I have to reply that the fact that an image of the ultimate environment is largely unconscious or tacitly held makes it no less influential or operative in a person’s initiatives and responses in life.”
Similarly, the fact that one imagines the ultimate conditions of existence as impersonal, indifferent, hostile, or randomly chaotic, rather than as coherent and structured, does not disqualify his or her image as an operative image of faith” (p.31). I think of the oft-repeated comment of the psychedelic advocate Terrence McKenna who famously stated: “My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite”. Even the perpetual suspension of belief is an imagined universal ideal from which a set of values (or negative values) can be drawn thus constituting a faith system.
This is a well-thought-out definition as it includes even the irreligious. Secular, scientific, and political worldviews can all be considered ultimate environments by which humans organize their responses and actions. If one believes that God is in control of everything that happens on the earth or that the universe is an expanding mass of atomic energy that we happened to have evolved onto, both are ultimate environments that shape the way we develop value systems and form communities.
Faith can, by this definition, be framed as an individual or a community experience. From the perspective of the individual, Fowler says this, again broadening faith to the human rather than just the spiritual or religious:
“We value that which seems of transcendent worth and in relation to which our lives have worth. Further, in a world of powerful forces that have an impact on us, enlarging and diminishing us, forming and sometimes destroying us, we invest loyalty in and seek to align ourselves with powers that promise to sustain our lives and to undergird “more being”. The centers of value and power that have god value for us, therefore, are those that confer meaning and worth on us and promise to sustain us in a dangerous world of power” (P.18).
In this sense then spirituality is a reaction to the power structures in the world around us. Perhaps it is that in moments when our brute force or powers of intellect fail us in social gameplay or when we are threatened with elimination from natural powers beyond our control, we draw strength from centers of value and power that are based on our epitomized ultimate environment. From this we gain a sort of conciliatory power that can sustain us, revitalize us, or console us.
According to Fowler, faith becomes a communal matter when the images of ultimate environment are similar among people, they are shared. He puts it this way, “In each of the roles we play, in each significant relationship we have with others, in each institution of which we are a part, we are linked to others in shared trusts and loyalties to centers of value and power. In each of these contexts, we serve common goals, we hold shared meanings, we remember shared stories, we celebrate and renew common hopes. Our identity and our faith must somehow bring these diverse roles, contexts, and meanings into an integrated, workable unity.” (p.19).
James W. Fowler’s 6 Stages of Faith Development
Fowler begins with ages 0–3 with what he calls “Undifferentiated Faith”. He refers to the undifferentiated phase of infancy as a pre-stage to his subsequent 7 stages of faith. It is during this time of a child’s life that they have their first experiences of mutuality; or the sharing of feeling, action, or relationship between two parties. Fowler states, “Our first pre-images of God have their origins here. Particularly they are composed from our first experiences of mutuality, in which we form the rudimentary awareness of self as separate from and dependent upon the immensely powerful others” (p.121).
This reminds us that Fowler’s definition of faith involves values that emerge to draw strength when faced with threats from more powerful forces in our world. Thus during the undifferentiated pre-stage “the seeds of trust, courage, hope, and love are fused in an undifferentiated way and contend with sensed threats of abandonment, inconsistencies and deprivations in an infant’s environment” (P.121). These are the psychological mechanisms that begin to form in the infant. He goes on to say that “The emergent strength of faith in this stage is the fund of basic trust and the relational experience of mutuality with the ones providing primary love and care.” (P.121). Even in unfortunate circumstances where such care is not provided, the faith system can still find its roots but yield value systems based on isolation and lack of trust as could be seen as the self-sufficient and exploitative values of adult anti-social personality challenges.
Stage 1: Intuitive Prjective Faith (Ages 2–6)
Based on the research the developmental psychologists, Fowler reiterates that a child of this age “uses the new tools of speech and symbolic representation to organize her or his sensory experience into meaning units.”(p.123). The child begins to use imagination to bring sense to the language, symbols, actions, moods and stories of the adults in their lives. They are not inhibitted by logical thought at this time and therefore create elaborate fantasies based on the stories that they hear from others. This is the sort of story-booking ideals of fairytales. Fowler modestly includes Biblical stories among these fairytales, as is warranted given the way they are presented in Christian children’s books at this age. It is during this time that a child associates imaginative stories in their mind (based on the fairytales they hear from adults) that can have longlasting emotional reinforcers that Fowler states “later, more stable and self-reflective valuing and thinking will have to order and sort out” (P.133).
Fowler boldly calls out a danger that exists at this stage in faith development which struck a nerve for me, as a know it will with many recoverers of Religious Trauma PTSD. Fowler states that “the dangers in this stage arise from the possible ‘possession’ of the child’s imagination by unrestrained images of terror and destructiveness, or from the witting and unwitting exploitation of her or his imagination in the reinforcement of taboos and moral or doctrinal expectations” (p.134).
Possession is a strong word.
Fowler goes on, “There are religious groups who subject Intuitive-Projective children to the kind of preaching and teaching that vividly emphasizes the pervasiveness and power of the devil, the sinfulness of all people without Christ and the hell of fiery torments that await the unrepentant. This kind of faith formation — and it’s equivalent in other religious traditions — can ensure a dramatic ‘conversion experience’ by the time the child is seven or eight. It runs the grave risk, however, of leading to what Philip Helfaer calls “precocious identity formation” in which the child, at conversion, takes on the adult faith identity called for by the religious group. This often results when the child is an adult in the emergence of a very rigid, brittle, and authoritarian personality” (P.133).
I can’t help thinking about a video presented at a regional convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses about 5 years ago depicting worldly forces as masked soldiers fit with assault rifles, surrounding the defenseless Jehovah’s Witnesses (adults and children) in the center of a field who obediently waited on the hand of Jehovah for salvation. This frightening scene was shown to an audience of families, some with children in the Intuitive-projective years who no doubt also knew the stories of the destruction of the unrighteous in the flood and the razing of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire and hail, not to mention dozens Biblical stories of rape, war, and murder graphically represented in colorful books given to children to pacify them during longer indoctrination session.
I won’t go on. But the naivitee of parents who believed that they were safe to allow the Lord to mold their children in these formative years, and the religious leaders who ignorantly and arrogantly proliferated such material, has led to a generation of recoverers who now face the therapeutic challenge of parsing the traumatic emotional reactions associated with these imaginative stories of their youth from the realities of an adult social world.
Stage 2: Mythic-Literal Faith (ages 7–12)
This stage is identified by the narrative nature of the developing faith. In this stage says Fowler, there is a more linear, narrative construction of coherence and meaning. “Story becomes the major way of giving unity and value to experience”.
Interestingly, this is the first stage that Fowler identifies that an individual can stagnate well into adulthood. Fowler includes some interview content in Stages of Faith to demonstrate this. Perhaps you can also think of some adults who cannot seem to conceptualize their value system outside of talking about their experiences and how they might compare or contrast to your own. Fowler says that individuals in this faith stage “do not steps back from the flow of stories to formulate reflective, conceptual meanings. For this stage the meaning is both carried and ‘trapped’ in the narrative” (P.149).
As an aside, Erik Erikson’s approach to development across the lifespan suggested that individuals face crises, the resolution of which push an individual into a new lifespan phase. In the case of Stage 2 faith, Fowler states that “the implicit clash or contradiction in stories that leads to reflection on meaning” can lead an individual to Stage 3.
Stage 3: Synthetic-Conventional Faith
Fowler aligns this phase with psychosocial development that often occurs around the age of twelve. At this time the adolescent begins to form a worldview that is a synthesis of the other important figures in their life from parents to first friendships and puppy love relationships. However, from this point on, Fowler doesn’t mention chronological age so much. This again is to imply that faith (be it religious, spiritual, or any other philosophical, ethical, or moral system drawn from an imagined ultimate environment) can stagnate at any one of these stages beyond stage 2. It is in this that Fowler’s faith stages can be a framework for self-reflection and self-awareness, regardless of where we fall on the theoretical spectrum.
Fowler states, “In Stage 3 Synthetic-Conventional faith, a person’s experience of the world now extends beyond the family. A number of spheres demand attention: family, school or work, peers, street society and media, and perhaps religion. Faith must provide a coherent orientation in the midst of that more complex and diverse range of involvements.” (P.172).
Relating back to his definition, Fowler says that stage three faith, “structures the ultimate environment in interpersonal terms. It’s images of unifying value and power derive from the extension of qualities experienced in personal relationships. It is a “conformist” stage in the sense that it is acutely tuned to the expectations and judgments of significant others and as yet does not have a sure enough grasp on its own identity and autonomous judgment to construct and maintain an independent perspective” (P.173).
The word conformist, of course, reminds me of my old religious environment. Emphasis was placed on the unity of thought and doctrinal agreement to protect the cohesion of the brotherhood. The result, of course, is that as Fowler’s definition of stage 3 implies, autonomous perspective-building and moral judgment are almost completely disallowed.
In this phase too, expectations of others form the basis of spiritual authority. Fowler says that authority “resides in the interpersonally available “they” or in the certified incumbents of leadership roles in institutions” (P.154). I think back to many times when lay people in my religious community would approach me for instruction on how to handle all sorts of personal matters from education, employment, relationship, and family advice. Authoritative expectations were freely given from local elders, the governing body (spiritual leadership body at headquarters), written material published by the Watchtower Society, the Bible, or God. Regardless of the authority called upon, Fowler’s point is that autonomous spiritual decisions are relegated to a body outside of the self.
When it comes to personal identity development, Fowler states that during this stage, individuals develop the capacity for “forming of a personal myth — the myth of one’s own becoming in identity and faith, incorporating one’s past and anticipated future in an image of the ultimate environment unified by characteristics of personality” (P.173). That is to say that, although autonomy is delegated to other parties, and conformity may result, there is still a merging of this conformity with self-concept such that a characteristic personality will develop albeit not unique in relation to others in the community.
Stage 4: Individuaitve Reflective Faith
It is during this faith development phase that, as Fowler puts it, “the late adolescent or adult must begin to take seriously the burden of responsibility for his or her own commitments, lifestyle, beliefs and attitudes…The self, previously sustained in its identity and faith compositions by an interpersonal circle of significant others, now claims an identity no longer defined by the composite of one’s roles or meanings to others.” (P.182).
As a result, “the person must face certain unavoidable tensions: individuality versus being defined by a group or group membership; subjectivity and the power of one’s strongly felt but unexamined feelings versus objectivity and the requirement of critical reflection; self-fulfillment or self-actualization as a primary concern versus service to and being for others; the question of being committed to the relative versus struggle with the possibility of an absolute”
Looking back at the onset of traumatic symptoms when my faith system crumbled that I discuss in A Voice from Inside, it appears to fit within this framework. The tension of separating one’s faith viewpoint from the community with which I built my previously firmly held stage three faith.
Dangers here, as Fowler puts it, “inhere in its strength: an excessive confidence in the conscious mind and in critical thought and a kind of second narcissism in which the now clearly bounded, reflective self over-assimilates ‘reality’ and the perspectives of others into its own world view” (p.183)
Stage 5: Conjunctive Faith
Fowler states “Conjunctive faith involves the integration into self and outlook of much that was suppressed or unrecognized in the interest of stage 4’s self-certainty and conscious cognitive and affective adaption to reality” (p.197). In this stage there is a “reframing and reworking of one’s past” and an “opening to the voices of one’s deeper self” and includes a recognition of the unconscious social myths associated with one’s socioeconomic class or racial/ethnic group.
Fowler says that this stage is uncommon before mid-life. It is a faith stage that is “alive to paradox and the truth in apparent contradictions, the stage strives to unify opposites in mind and experience” (p.198). This paradoxical understanding of truth can lead to either transcendence or cynical withdrawal. Fowler puts it this way:
“The new strength of this stage comes in the rise of the ironic imagination — a capacity to see and be in one’s or one’s group’s most powerful meanings, while simultaneously recognizing that they are relative, partial and inevitably distorting apprehensions of transcendent reality. Its danger lies in the direction of a paralyzing passivity or inaction, giving rise to complacency or cynical withdrawal, due to its paradoxical understanding of truth”
It’s as if an individual graduates to the philosopher’s or mystic’s vision of paradoxical truth in this stage of faith. The individual becomes ironic in that they see that the truths accepted by their group are not universal or impervious to contradiction. The challenge will be for the individual to aggregate the lived experience in previous stages, paradoxical truth, and imagine a faith system that is still operational in their group.
This could occur within any group religious or social. This is the moderating effect of the paradoxes of eastern spirituality that have been incorporated in western psychotherapeutic perspectives. We think of the existential absurdity, or the fluidity of the Dao, and Keirkegaard’s contrast of the ethical and aesthetic. To the extent that these paradoxes are integrated into a system of values that provide power, they become a faith system at Fowler’s conjuctive level.
Stage 6: Universalizing Faith
Finally, we make it to the peak of Fowler’s developmental faith perspective. The ever elusive Stage 6: Universalizing Faith. What spiritual seeker would not want to have the confidence that their faith had transcended that of their tribe, included the multitudinous perspectives of neighboring groups and peoples, and reached the heights of the likes of Gandhi and Mother Theresa?
Universalizing faith is just that. It has been through the crisis breaking from a spiritual group (stage 4), reintegrating in appreciation of paradoxical truth (stage 5), and now transcends to include value structures that not only embrace and absorb those of the community of man but seek to improve them toward a move them toward spiritual liberation.
Fowler quotes from one of his earlier works:
“Stage 6 is exceedingly rare. The persons best described by it have generated faith compositions in which their felt sense of an ultimate environment is inclusive of all being. They have become incarnators and actualizers of the spirit of an inclusive and fulfilled human community. They are ‘contagious’ in the sense that they create zones of liberation from the social, political, economic, and ideological shackles we place and endure on human futurity. Living with felt participation in a power that unifies and transforms the world, Universalizers are often experienced as subversive of the structures (including religious structures) by which we sustain our individual and corporate survival, security and significance. Many persons in this stage die at the hands of those whom they hope to change. Universalizers are often more honored and revered after death than during their lives. The rare persons who may be described by this stage have a special grace that makes them seem more lucid, more simple, and yet somehow more fully human than the rest of us. Their community is universal in extent. Particularities are cherished because they are vessels of the universal, and thereby valuable apart from any utilitarian considerations. Life is both loved and held to loosely. Such persons are ready for fellowship with persons at any of the other stages from any other faith tradition.” (p.201).
The universalizers that come to mind are the ones who also became prominent leaders and are thus remembered by history. This is because of the subversive nature of their visions. They also manifest what Fowler calls “relevant irrelevance”, they commit themselves to a subversiveness that seems counter to what has been accepted as relevant by the societies that they are part of but that is “born out of radical acts of identification with persons and circumstances where the futurity of being crushed, blocked, or exploited”. The acts that they do are in the cause of universal justice and involve “the negation of one’s personhood or identification with the negations experienced by others.” Their faith system includes values that not only provide an ethical frame but also action to improve humankind toward a spiritual vision of what mankind can be — a spiritual ideal.
This is not activism for its own sake or social disruption for irony’s sake. This is the epitome of all faith traditions. A faith that is not bound by religion or even communal value systems. It expands upon accepted faith traditions in ways that offer a model that could easily be mapped to any system or group. I can’t but take a moment to self-reflect on whether I can sense the potential for this kind of universalized faith in myself, what it would look like, and when and how it might manifest, spiritually, socially, or otherwise.
Can you?
Can Secular People Be Religious
I can’t help but feel like I’m giving a sermon in this episode of provisional aspirations. The idea of maturing in our spirituality, developing more inclusive faith, and transcending the parts of ourselves that restrict our best parts is the kind of contemplation that yields awe for what one might be, the good that one might do for others, the small changes one might make to simultaneous benefit to self, other, and humanity. It’s enchanting.
But it’s not my intention to be thus. My introduction to Robert Fowler was in my counseling studies, called out for use with spiritually-minded individuals who might seek counseling and who may need assistance as they face psychosocial crises toward maturation across the lifespan, including those that might include elements of what we might traditionally call faith.
Theoretical psychology has a tendency to lure us toward better versions of ourselves. Talk of authenticity, self-actualization (from Maslov’s humanist approach), and Robert Fowler’s universalizing faith draw our minds away from the doggedly rational, the aridly neuroscientific, or the “we’re-just-apes-on-the-savannah” paradigm from evolutionary psychology that is more popular in the last decade or two. It tempts me to think that there is something more poetic to the understanding of human emotion, cognition, and behavior that our modern approaches take. But if I’m ever to be a scientist or clinician, I will have to stop such magical thinking.
But even for the ruthlessly scientific, political, materialistic, mathematical (in some secular) worldview, it appears there could still be a tendency to imagine a universal environment and draw from it frameworks of value and power by which we determine our actions. Regardless of our religious, philosophical, political, or intellectual bent, Fowler’s work somehow challenges us to wrest these from our unconscious minds and take another look.
(This article is a repost from wallisbooks.com. If you enjoy my work and would like to support me, buy me a cup of coffee!)
References:
Fowler, J. W. (1981). Stages of Faith. New York: Harper & Row.
