Magical or Literal Faith is OK for Children; Adults Need to Mature
Part 2 in a four-part series on how faith changes throughout life: Early stages of faith development correspond to the early stages of psychological development.
James W. Fowler (1940–2015) was a theologian, ethicist, and developmental psychologist at Emory University. He conducted groundbreaking research in the psychology of religion, interviewing or drawing on interviews with nearly 600 subjects. His book, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (1981), draws on a wide range of scholarly literature and firsthand research to present six stages that emerge as we human beings work out the meanings of our lives.
Fowler interviewed people from various traditions—both religious individuals and those who were not religious, including avowed atheists. It is important to note that for purposes of his research, Fowler defined faith not necessarily as religious or equated with religion, but rather as any person’s way of leaning into and making sense of life. Faith, as a dynamic system of images, values, and commitments that guides one’s life, is fundamental to everyone who continues to live. For religious people, including Christians, that system certainly includes those images, values, and commitments that are related to religion. This post focuses on the stages that we go through as children.
Part 1: Maturation Changes Faith: Christianity and Human Development
Part 2 (this post): Magical or Literal Faith is OK for Children, Adults Need to Mature
In all three synoptic gospels, Jesus is depicted using a child as an object lesson in conjunction with one of his sayings concerning the oft-mentioned empire of God, or empire of heaven:
Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the empire of God as a child will not enter into it. (Mark 10:15, Luke 18:17)
Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the empire of heaven. (Matthew 18:3)
Becoming like a child is a beautiful metaphor for the exercise of faith; at the same time, Jesus’ use of the simple thinking of a child to create this metaphor can hardly be considered a ringing endorsement of immaturity or infantilism for his followers. This is especially true given apostolic admonitions elsewhere concerning maturity.
In his work on stages of faith in children, Fowler identifies an initial pre-stage that applies to infants up to about age two. Their only ‘faith’ involves the undifferentiated seeds of trust and love (or abandonment and deprivation) that characterize their relationships with those they depend on. The strength or capacity developed at this stage is trust and mutuality of love and care. Distortion or failure of these relationships can harm the establishment of trust and mutuality, resulting in either excessive narcissism or isolation. The most important factor in moving on to the first stage of faith is the convergence of thought and language toward the use of symbols in speech and ritual play.
Children at Stage 1 (Intuitive-Projective), from about age three to seven, imitate the older figures around them, including what is said or done concerning religion. They also engage richly in fantasy uninformed by logic. The images they create and remember, both sensory and imaginative, are durably converted into memory. Self-awareness is largely egocentric; children at this age cannot conceive of anyone having a perspective different from their own. During these years, children have their first awareness of anything having to do with death, sex, or the taboos with which we protect ourselves from these powerful realities.
New strengths and capacities include the development of imagination and the collection of powerful images through experiences and stories that register with their own feelings about the ultimate conditions of existence. Bible stories and the characters that inhabit them are especially vivid and relatable, and occurrences that would be counted as miraculous to most anyone older seem perfectly natural. Unrestrained images of terror or destructiveness are especially dangerous at this stage. So is the exploitation of imagination to overly reinforce taboos or expectations surrounding morality or doctrine.
The primary factor for transition to the next stage is the beginning of concrete-operational thinking. The emergence and development of this capacity and its many permutations have been so well documented for so long that it has become established as a standard phase of human mental and psychological development. A significant concern of concrete-operational thought is to distinguish between what is real in an empirical sense and what only seems to be real by way of imagination or inaccurate sensory and mental apprehension.
Check out the ARCHIVE of Faith Shifter posts.
Fowler’s Stage 2 (Mythical-Literal) is characterized by concrete-operational thinking. It most often extends from about ages seven to twelve, but it also includes some adolescents and even some adults. Adolescents and adults who dwell at this stage in terms of faith and religion often operate according to more mature stages of development in other areas of their lives.
People at this stage engage in religious beliefs and observances as symbolic of belonging, while religious narratives themselves are interpreted in a literal way. The meanings of dramatic stories are in the stories, not above or beyond them. The narrative and the truth conveyed are indistinguishable. This is appropriate for this stage of development; however, it is inappropriate for mature adults of normative ability who would “rightly divide the word of truth” for application to the religiously mediated aspects of human experience. Adults who dwell at this stage are an abiding reality and must be lovingly held within our religious communities; at the same time, its corresponding outlook must not be the standard for adult religious learning, formation, or spiritual maturation.
Another characteristic of this stage is the presence of simple reciprocity concerning the ultimate (e.g., if I please God, it will go well for me; if I displease God, there will be negative consequences). This truth of ‘reaping what you sow’ is retained at subsequent levels of development, albeit in the context of a more complex set of additional factors that condition and mediate it.
The strength or new capacity of this stage is that story, drama, and myth, including those connected with religion, can help locate or provide coherence and meaning within lived experience. A danger at this stage is the development of overcontrolling perfectionism, or a ‘works righteousness’; or conversely, an abasing sense of one’s own ‘badness’, through experiences of mistreatment or disfavor.
One factor for moving on to the next stage can be the recognition of contradictions within religious or ideological narratives that lead to reflection on their potential external meanings. This would begin the process of separating the narrative and the truth conveyed by it. The main factor for development into the next stage is the emergence of formal-operational thought, recognized as a standard process in developmental psychology.
Next week, Part 3 of this series is about how levels of development we may or may not experience as adults change our understanding of faith and religion over time, insofar as we may experience these higher modes of cognitive and psychological development. Part 4, the following week, focuses on the highest stages of spiritual development.