A Quick Intro to The Stages of Faith

This is an essay I wrote in late 2002 for Community Unity, a diversity awareness group in Corydon, Indiana.

Community Unity sponsors the "World on the Square" festival on the town square in Corydon every August. The festival features foods and performers from different countries and cultures. If you find yourself in Southern Indiana on the second Saturday in August, I assure you that the World on the Square festival is an event you will be glad to experience.

A Quick Introduction to The Stages of Faith

By Allen J. Lopp
Fall 2002

As an item of interest, as an experiment, or just for a lark, I would like to offer to Community Unity a quick introduction to an area of study which is relatively new and not that widely known. It is called faith development theory, or the “stages of faith.” I find this subject fascinating. I believe Community Unity members may find it interesting as well, because it provides a framework that can give us insights regarding a person’s attitudes of tolerance or intolerance when they encounter others who are racially, culturally, or religiously different from themselves.

The classic work that initially laid out the stages of faith was a book of the same name (1) written by Dr. James W. Fowler of Emory University in Atlanta, and published in 1982. I personally discovered the stages of faith while reading the works of popular author M. Scott Peck, M.D., who is most well known for his best-selling book on spiritual growth, The Road Less Traveled, published in the late 1970’s. (2)

Every human with unimpaired mental faculties experiences at some age, early in childhood or later in adolescence or adulthood, a need to formulate a sense of meaning in his or her life. The stages of faith theory describes a sequences of phases, or stages, that apparently all humans go through as their capacity to develop this sense of meaning matures. Fowler describes six stages of faith; and while most adults develop up to Stage III, a progressively smaller percentage of adults advance into the higher Stages IV and V, and a thin sampling of humanity rise ethereally even to Stage VI. (To complicate matters, Peck writes about a similar path of development using only four stages. (3) I have decided to use Fowler’s six-stage approach for two reasons: First, his is the more classic and established schema in the academic world, and secondly, the delineation between Stage V and VI is particularly useful, yet it does not appear in Peck’s system.)

A Quick Survey of the Stages

Stages I & II are stages of primary socialization, and can be described differently depending whether we are speaking of a child or an adult.

In a young child growing up in a civilized environment, Stage I normally characterizes the toddler years. In the years of age three through seven, the toddler’s sense of ultimate meaning is usually taught to him in the context of religion, whether that religion is Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any other. (All evidence to date suggests that the stages of faith are basically the same for individuals in all religions and all cultures. The stages have mostly to do with the psychological structure of our faith rather than its content.) In Stage I, the child’s sense of meaning forms as she or he is taught about God and the related Bible stories (or the core legendary stories revered in other religions). These stories, for the very young child of Stage I, are grasped in the same way as are fairy tales --- the very young child might not clearly understand that Abraham was a real human who actually lived thousands of years ago, while Goldilocks is a fictitious character. Then later, as the child matures into Stage II, she or he develops a nascent sense of ethics that is based on the primitive mechanism of reciprocity: being “good” will lead to you being rewarded and praised, while being “bad” will get you punished. If I am a good boy I will get dessert after dinner, but if I am a bad boy I will be sent to my room without dessert. This reciprocity also extends to the child’s notion of God’s justice: If I am good God will find ways to bless me with good things, but if I am bad God will find ways to punish me.

We can also describe Stages I and II as they might look in an uncivilized adult, or perhaps a pre-civilization adult living in a tribe, say, ten thousand years ago. (4) In this context, Stage I is essentially living like an animal --- anything is justified in the name of survival. Stage I is the “law of the jungle.” Then Stage II is somewhat more refined, and again we see the emergence of reciprocity: Stage II is “eye-for-an-eye” and “tit-for-tat”-style justice. In effect, the operating motto for Stage II is “If you leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone --- but you cross me and I’ll show you who’s boss!” In its modern form, Stage II ethics can be easily recognized as the ethics of organized crime, or that of “life on the streets.” Peck characterizes these stages as “anti-social” and “chaotic because these people are basically unprincipled.” (5)

In Stage II the individual forms his/her framework of meaning in reference primarily to the immediate family. As we mature, approach adulthood, become fully socialized, and our social circle widens beyond the family unit to include the population of the immediate surrounding community, we progress into Stage III. Fowler selects the word “conventional” as a characterizing keyword for Stage III, while Peck applies the keywords “formal” and “institutional.” In each their own way, all of these keywords are correct. If I were to pick a keyword for this stage, it would be “conforming.”

Relating things to more familiar social terms, Stage III often corresponds to conservatism and religious fundamentalism --- but only if the prevailing values of one’s immediate community group are in some sense “conservative” and “fundamentalist.” I like to call this immediate community that the individual is surrounded by, that the individual identifies with and which provides a sense of belonging, as the individual’s “tribe” --- for indeed, the individual soaks up, to a great extent unconsciously as if by passive osmosis, the “tribal” values and social attitudes of the population group of which he/she is a member. These values and attitudes are internalized without much conscious examination; the Stage III person seems to assume “The other people around me think this way, so this must be the right and only way to think, and so I will think this way as well.” Thus, in Stage III we may see a lot of “isms” --- chauvinism, sexism, racism, ageism, ethnocentrism, nationalism: “parochialism” in its most literal sense, meaning “attitudes of the locality.”

Research suggests that for many adults, Stage III is the stage that they are likely to stay in for their entire adult lives. However, a significant percentage of people, in modern American society perhaps three or four out of ten, at some point during adulthood may move into Stage IV. Research further suggests that among these people, about half of them may move into Stage IV in their early twenties, and another third of them in mid-life around age forty.

Keywords for Stage IV might be rational, skeptical, questioning, individualistic, and truth-seeking. In Stage IV, the individual attempts to take responsibility for the values and attitudes that he or she adopts by examining them consciously and critically. Many of the core beliefs that were taught to us by our “family of origin” and our “community of origin” are placed into question, and sometimes discarded. Several famous philosophers in history, including Kierkegaard, Kant and Sartre, have each called this process of examining our own beliefs critically as “authentication”, and thus another keyword for Stage IV might be “authenticity.”

When an individual enters into Stage IV, if the person is outspoken about what he or she is thinking, it often causes conflict and consternation for the people around him or her. In Stage IV, young adults who were raised in strict religious homes often become agnostics or atheists, Christians may become Buddhists, children of staunchly Republican parents may become socialist or communist radicals, children from well-to-do homes may reject the privileges of wealth and choose to live as if they were impoverished. Some of this may be an extension of adolescent rebellion and psychological separation, but in true Stage IV development the individual engages in much sincere introspection and there is a struggle, often quite explicit, to discover our own individuality, to “find my true self” and “figure out who I really am.” Later in adulthood, Stage IV people often become scientists, for the scientific method is a particular discipline of questioning and truth-seeking that is popular in our current era of history. Stage IV persons may be cavalier about religion but they are rarely cavalier about truth.

Later in life, some Stage IV people eventually come to realize that not all important questions are scientific-type questions, that scientific knowledge is a particular, reliable type of knowledge, but it is not All Knowledge. Moreover, in recent decades, science itself has discovered something it never before expected: the world of science contains logical paradoxes. For example, we can only explain quantum physics if we sometimes treat light as a stream of particles, called photons, and at other times regard light as waves of energy; neither approach is sufficient to explain all the observable phenomena of light, but together both approaches can explain virtually everything. Similarly, we once thought measurements of time and space were absolute, but Einstein explained that time and space measurements only make sense relative to each other.

As Stage IV people discover that science and rational thought cannot explain everything, they begin seeing abstract patterns in their knowledge. And sometimes these patterns remind them of religious or mythological “truths” that they were taught by their Stage III parents when they were youngsters. At this point, they begin to appreciate that these truths, which they had previously dismissed as “superstitions” earlier in their Stage IV development, might actually make some sense --- but not in the literal sense as they were taught by their parents, but at a deeper, more abstract, more symbolic way. At this point, the individual begins his or her transition into Stage V, which is a state of faith that is mystical.

As a good example of how Stage IV thinking may lead into Stage V thinking, consider the debate between creationism versus evolution theory. Stage III creationists who are Judeo-Christian often seek to believe the words of the book of Genesis literally. Genesis says that God created the heavens and the earth in seven days, and so, they confidently proclaim, He did exactly that. Moreover, Bible study leads us to believe He did so about six thousand years ago; and so the earth, they proclaim further, is six thousand years old, and scientific evidence such as carbon dating, dinosaur bones, and other fossil and natural geological records fail to sway this assertion. Stage IV scientific types pooh-pooh this thinking as utterly silly, and believe the results of the radioactive carbon-dating machines if they believe anything. Then along come the astrophysicists, more specifically the “global cosmologists,” who bring forth a theory of the origins of the universe that they call the Big Bang. They say the universe was formed, maybe twenty or so billion years ago, by an enormous Big Bang --- and not only that, but they call this Big Bang a “singularity,” which means that not only do we not now know what caused the Big Bang, but even that it is impossible for us to ever know what caused the Big Bang, because it is theoretically impossible for us to see any events that may have occurred before the Big Bang in order to give rise to it.

A scientist mature in his or her Stage IV development may, in a private, introspective mood, look at all these ideas and wonder, “Gee, this Big Bang theory, in a way, looks very much like the story of Genesis. Perhaps, in the beginning God said, ‘Let there be light!’ and suddenly all the stuff of the universe was created in a Big Bang, and it immediately began expanding on a macro level, and collapsing on a quantum level, into light, heat, and matter. Similarly, perhaps God actually did create the heavens and the earth, separate the waters from the dry land, create life first in the oceans and later on the land, and then the higher mammals and finally man --- but he didn’t do so in seven days, but over twenty billion years ... and astrophysics and evolution were merely His methods for doing this!” Moreover, the concept of a “singularity” abstractly corresponds to God’s role as First Cause. As a scientist might begin to think along these lines, she or he makes an approach into Stage V.

Religious fundamentalists often characterize scientists as invariably atheists, but this is not true. As he reflected in many of his writings, Einstein often felt deeply that as he penetrated the mysteries of the universe, he was again and again also penetrating the mysteries of the nature of God --- the nature of God Himself, and the Nature that was created by God. But despite Einstein’s open expression of these thoughts repeatedly throughout his life, and despite the notion that evolution itself could be the work of God, the debate between creationists and evolutionists rages on to this day, with many folks on both sides of the argument refusing to raise the discourse to a higher level of thinking. Faith development theory suggests that they so refuse because they are not ready to psychospiritually. (6)

In Stage V the rationally thinking truth-seeker begins to consider the possibility that not all truth is purely rational, that some truths involve the balance of paradoxes, the need to explore old myths in a new perspective, with new interpretations, and with a new, more piercing level of comprehension. The recognition of abstract patterns in these new levels of truth lead the emerging Stage V thinker to discover connections which link previously unrelated concepts --- and thus our thinker becomes intrigued with a pervading sense of connectivity and an abyss of universal mystery. Our rational skeptic becomes a cautious mystic. And perhaps later, a more enthusiastic mystic.

Depending upon the nature of the parallels that have now been grasped, the Stage V faith-former may return, with new perspective, to re-examine the beliefs that were held in Stage III. Or this person may find an entirely new body of belief for Stage V exploration. By this I mean, a Stage III Christian fundamentalist who became a Stage IV agnostic may return to Christianity and become a Stage V Christian heavily into “spirituality.” But alternatively, the same individual might instead become a Stage V Buddhist or a Stage V New Ager. But if he returns to a Christian context, it will be with an intellectual and spiritual freedom that often will not please his or her Christian compatriots --- because most of them will still be in Stage III, and Stage III people like conformity, authority, and tradition; not spiritual freedom, doctrinal ambiguity, and mystery. Even within the same religion, Stage III people and Stage V people may find it difficult to get along --- because, as Peck points out, they have arrived at the same religion for entirely opposite reasons. (7)

All major religious traditions have a mystical, “esoteric” element. This element is called esoteric because relatively few believers get to the point that they can embrace it. At this esoteric level, the differences among various religious traditions become mere footnotes and the similarities become profound and enthralling. A mystical Christian and a mystical Jewish rabbi and a mystical Muslim Sufi usually will find it stimulating to worship together and to spend hours of lively conversation exchanging elements of their respective traditions. The Stage V individual is similarly open to other cultures and races. Most refreshing of all, the Stage V individual arrives at a deeply-felt sense that people of other faiths, cultures and races are all brothers and sisters within the human family. In Stage V we discover at an experiential level that everyone has a right to be simply who they are.

There is one final stage, which is very rare --- and I will add that, even as Fowler describes it, it is here where Fowler's conclusions are thinly documented, and are thus most speculative.

Probably less than one percent of humanity might develop into Stage VI. While Stage V develops the ability to perceive the right of people --- and animals, and all creation --- to be whoever they are and whatever it is, Stage VI becomes consumingly dedicated to it. At this stage, we sometimes see individuals of amazing spiritual strength, clarity, and dedication; we see a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King, Jr. or a Sir Thomas More or a Mother Teresa. We see an individual who is willing to dedicate everything in their life, as well as sacrificing that life itself if necessary, to work toward a social, political or spiritual breakthrough for the surrounding world. Even though the names just listed changed human history each in their own profound and obvious way, this is not always the case --- Stage VI people many times do work in quieter but equally dedicated ways. Briefly, the sign qua non of a faith-holder in Stage VI is a dedication so strong that it includes the possibility of total self-sacrifice.

Concluding Remarks

It is my hope that the relevance of the stages of faith to the work of Community Unity might be clear to the reader at this point. Since the mission of our group is to nurture tolerance and acceptance for people who are different from ourselves, the faith development theory just presented gives us a new framework that can help us perceive social and psychological forces in a new light. Racism and religious intolerance, if it exists, is likely to be most potent and impenetrable with individuals in faith development Stage III --- but by no means do I mean to imply that all Stage III people are racists or otherwise intolerant. I do mean, however, to point out that Stage III people tend to formulate their attitudes in relation to their immediately surrounding social group. This alone is a powerful insight. For such an individual to progress into Stage IV, he or she must be willing to break away mentally from their group and think independently, not only at the functional level, as most adults do, but also at the philosophical and ideological level. Not all adults can find the intellectual courage to do this.

In the tiny space I have left, I would like to echo a point that both Fowler and Peck address in their treatments on the subject. Fowler points out that organized religions, certainly in America and likely most everywhere, tend to nurture their members to an advanced point within Stage III --- in other words, most of our preachers, rabbis, and priests want their parishioners to become accomplished experts at conforming to traditional tenets. It is acceptable for us to be able to regurgitate the core teachings exactly as they have been handed down for centuries, and it is even better if we can find new, modern reasons for conforming to the exact same, time-tested conclusions. But when, in the privacy of our hearts and minds, we begin to occasionally arrive at new conclusions of our own, and to question the standard dogma, we encroach upon Stage IV. If we attempt to discuss such matters with the usual preacher, rabbi or priest, they will almost invariably, creatively or not so creatively, intellectually corral us back into the comforming obediency of Stage III.

So, paradoxically, religion as currently practiced often requires a person to leave the church environment in order to develop into and through Stage IV questioning. Yet on the other side of Stage IV lies Stage V, and a Stage V believer is often a more genuinely motivated, and a more socially conscious believer in ways that the Stage III folks can hardly grasp. So the institutionalized church finds itself in an uncomfortable double-bind: it is difficult to deny the desirability of nurturing Stage V development, but the riskiness of the intermediary Stage IV is intrinsically unmanageable. Thus, Stage III becomes the highest expected level of developmental achievement --- what Kenneth Keniston calls the modal developmental level. (8) Furthermore, development beyond Stage III is not merely unexpected --- it might be actively discouraged, resisted and prohibited! Many believers higher than Stage III will prove to be difficult to control, difficult to argue with, and difficult to persuade into tithing regularly.

So, if you are currently a church-going type, do not tacitly assume that your local spiritual authority and your local parish will support your desire to achieve a high level of spiritual advancement as it is described here; whether they will depends very much upon the nature of your particular community of faith. If you want to develop higher than Stage III, you may find it necessary to strike out intellectually and spiritually on your own. Peck writes passionately on this point, going so far as to scowl at the “sinful Christian Church” on Earth. (9)

Yet, in a world that aches with racism, poverty, epidemic disease, and wars in almost every corner of the globe fostered by various forms of religious intolerance, can we afford not to nurture all the Stage V citizens that we possibly can? Is a “racial equality” achieved out of social conformity --- “political correctness” if you will --- in any sense acceptable when compared to a genuine sense of human family that we might attempt to cultivate and possibly even achieve within our hearts?

Recently, I actually found a fundamentalist Christian hymnal that stated in an appendix essay that “nowhere in the Bible does it say that all humans are considered to be the children of God.” Thus, based on the tribal Stage III identity of the ancient Israelites, it went on to assert that we should not offer social aid to our human neighbors if they do not first convert to fundamentalist Christianity! But here at Community Unity, when someone tells us that we should not sponsor a public speaking event by a Buddhist monk unless he “promises not to proselytize” --- are we being presented with anything less outrageous? Whether I am a Christian or Buddhist, a Buddhist monk clearly has the same right to “proselytize” as a Christian preacher --- gee whiz, and all this time I naively thought it was more properly called “freedom of speech” and protected by the First Amendment!

Clearly, as members of Community Unity we still have plenty of work ahead of us, just as do similar groups throughout our society and world. The theory of the stages of faith development helps us gain a new way of looking at the nature of this work --- and an appreciation of its enormity as well.

Footnotes 

(1) James W. Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982).
(2)      M. Scott Peck, M.D., The Road Less Traveled (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978).
(3)      Peck, The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 187-200.
(4) This comment admittedly is speculative. In order to study psychologically a person who lived 10,000 years ago we would need a live subject in the modern day, and obviously, we do not have that.
(5)      Peck, The Different Drum, p. 189.
(6) The word psychospiritual was coined by Peck in The Road Less Traveled to describe matters that are both psychological and spiritual in nature.
(7)      Peck, The Different Drum, p. 193.
(8) Kenneth Keniston, “Psychological Development and Historical Change,” in Robert Jay Lifton, ed., Explorations in Psychohistory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), pp. 160-164. Also discussed by Fowler in Stages of Faith, p. 294.
(9)      Peck, The Different Drum, p. 199.

Copyright (c) 2002 by Allen J. Lopp.  All rights reserved.