Stages of Faith
An Interview with James Fowler

by Harold Kent Straughn

Straughn: Dr. Fowler, I'd like to begin by asking you to unfold in summary
form the six stages of faith as your research has developed them.

Fowler: All right. Inevitably this will be sketchy. If we start with
infancy-the time from birth to two years-we have what we call
undifferentiated faith. It's a time before language and conceptual thought
are possible. The infant is forming a basic sense of trust, of being at home
in the world. The infant is also forming what I call pre-images of God or
the Holy, and of the kind of world we live in. On this foundation of basic
trust or mistrust is built all that comes later in terms of faith. Future
religious experience will either have to confirm or reground that basic
trust.

Stage One: Intuitive/Projective Faith

The first stage we call intuitive/projective faith. It characterizes the
child of two to six or seven. It's a changing and growing and dynamic faith.
It's marked by the rise of imagination. The child doesn't have the kind of
logic that makes possible or necessary the questioning of perceptions or
fantasies. Therefore the child's mind is "religiously pregnant," one might
say. It is striking how many times in our interviews we find that
experiences and images that occur and take form before the child is six have
powerful and long-lasting effects on the life of faith both positive and
negative.

Stctge Two: Mythic/Literal Faith

The second stage we call mythic/literal faith. Here the child develops a way
of dealing with the world and making meaning that now criticizes and
evaluates the previous stage of imagination and fantasy. The gift of this
stage is narrative. The child now can really form and re-tell powerful
stories that grasp his or her experiences of meaning. There is a quality of
literalness about this. The child is not ytet ready to step outside the
stories and reflect upon their meanings. The child takes symbols and myths
at pretty much face value, though they may touch or move him or her at a
deeper level.

StageThree: Synthetic/Conventional Faith

There is a third stage we call synthetic/conventional faith which typically
has its rise beginning around age 12 or 13. It's marked by the beginning of
what Piaget calls formal operational thinking. That simply means that we now
can think about our own thinking. It's a time when a person is typically
concerned about forming an identity, and is deeply concernedl about the
evaluations and feedback from significant other people in his or her life.
We call this a synthetic/conventional stage; synthetic, not in the sense
that it's artificial, but in the sense that it's a pulling together of one's
valued images and values, the pulling together of a sense of self or
identity.

One of the hallmarks of this stage is that it tends to compose its images of
God as extensions of interpersonal relationships. God is often experienced
as Friend, Companion, and and Personal Reality, in relationship to which I'm
known deeply and valued. I think the true religious hunger of adolescence is
to have a God who knows me and values me deeply, and can be a kind of
guarantor of my identity and worth in a world where I'm struggling to find
who I can be.

At any of the stages from two on you can find adults who are best described
by these stages. Stage Three, thus, can be an adult stage. We do find many
persons, in churches and out, who are best described by faith that
essentially took form when they were adolescents.

Stage Four: Individuative/Projective Faith

Stage Four, for those who develop it, is a time in which the person is
pushed out of, or steps out of, the circle of interpersonal relationships
that have sustained his life to that point. Now comes the burden of
reflecting upon the self as separate from the groups and the shared world
that defines one's life. I sometimes quote Santayana who said that we don't
know who discovered water but we know it wasn't fish. The person in Stage
Three is like the fish sustained by the water. To enter Stage Four means to
spring out of the fish tank and to begin to reflect upon the water. Many
people don't complete this transition, but get caught between three and
four. The transition to Stage Four can begin as early as 17, but it's
usually not completed until the mid-20s, and often doesn't even begin until
around 20. It comes most naturally in young adulthood. Some people, however,
don't make the transition until their late 30s. It becomes a more traumatic
thing then, because they have already built an adult life. Their
relationships have to be reworked in light of the stage change.

Stage Four is concerned about boundaries: where I stop and you begin; where
the group that I can belong to with conviction and authenticity ends and
other groups begin. It's very much concerned about authenticity and a fit
between the self I feel myself to be in a group and the ideological
commitments that I'm attached to.

Stage Five: Conjunctive Faith

Sometime around 35 or 40 or beyond some people undergo a change to what we
call conjunctive faith, which is a kind of midlife way of being in faith.
What Stage Four works so hard to get clear and clean in terms of boundaries
and identity, Stage Five makes more permeable and more porous. As one moves
into Stage Five one begins to recognize that the conscious self is not all
there is of me. I have an unconscious. Much of my behavior and response to
things is shaped by dimensions of self that I'm not fully aware of. There is
a deepened readiness for a relationship to God that includes God's mystery
and unavailability and strangeness as well as God's closeness and clarity.

Stage Five is a time when a person is also ready to look deeply into the
social unconscious-thoe myths and taboos and standards that we took in with
our mother's milk and that powerfully shape our behavior and responses. We
really do examine those, which means we're ready for a new kind of intimacy
with persons and groups that are different from ourselves. We are ready for
allegiances beyond our tribal gods and our tribal taboos. Stage Five is a
period when one is alive to paradox. One understands that truth has many
dimensions which have to be held together in paradoxical tension.

Stage Six: Universalizing Faith

Some few persons we find move into Stage Six, which we call universalizing
faith. In a sense I think we can describe this stage as one in which
persons begin radically to live as though what Christians and Jews call the
"kingdom of God" were already a fact. I don't want to confine it to
Christian and Jewish images of the kingdom. It's more than that. I'm saying
these people experience a shift from the self as the center of experience.
Now their center becomes a participation in God or ultimate reality. There's
a reversal of figure and ground. They're at home with what I call a
commonwealth of being. We experience these people on the one hand as being
more lucid and simple than we are, and on the other hand as intensely
liberating people, sometimes even subversive in their liberating qualities.
I think of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the last years of his life. I think of
Thomas Merton. I think of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. I think of Dag
Hammerskjold and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the last years of his imprisonment.
These are persons who in a sense have negated the self for the sake of
affirming God. And yet in affirming God they became vibrant and powerful
selves in our experience. They have a quality of what I call relevant
irrelevance. Their "subversiveness" makes our compromises show up as what
they are.

.....

For adults there are some important things we need to do in terms of rites
of passage. We need to acknowledge that at mid-life one's religious needs
and depths change. Again some new forms of spirituality need to be
developed.

.....

What kind of spirituality can sustain people with realism and grace in that
period? Then we begin to face retirement or old age and I think our need
for spirituality changes again.

....



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