Faith Development: Stage Six

This article describes the sixth of six stages of faith development as outlined by James Fowler.  First time readers are encouraged to read the earlier articles to put today's into context.

Stage 6/Universalizing Faith:  With Stage 6 we come to the culminating phase of faith development.  Only a very few reach and actualize this stage. Because this is the last stage in this last article, I think it will be helpful to include a review to show how the development of faith naturally culminates in this stage. 

The progression of faith through its different stages can be likened to the widening concentric ripples in a pond after an object is dropped into it.  The movement within each ripple stimulates and creates the next concentric circle that follows, just as each faith stage stimulates and creates the one which will follow.  And like the concentric ripples, each faith stage contains but supersedes that which came before it.

In the “pre-stage” that Fowler hypothesizes occurs in infancy, we are conditioned by how the environment responds to our total dependency.  This predisposes us in our attitudes toward God:  can we trust the world to be a safe place?  Will our needs be answered?  Do difficulties eventually pass, or are they interminable?  There is little if any separation of self, and Fowler calls this pre-stage “undifferentiated” faith.

The first concentric circle out from the initial point of contact is Stage 1/Intuitive Projective Faith.  This first stage is made possible by the development of language, which helps us learn to separate ourselves from the world around us, and separate the world into its component parts.  Our awareness of self as separate is very egocentric – we assume everyone to be like us as we are still deeply connected to the matrix into which we plunged.  Faith at this stage is both imaginative and undefended.

The next ripple outward is Stage 2/Mythic Literal Faith.  It corresponds to what Piaget calls “concrete operational” thinking, which occurs during the elementary school years.  We learn to separate fact from fantasy, and the faith at this stage is very concrete.  If you do good God will reward you, if you do bad you will be punished.

The third circle outward is Stage 3/Synthetic Conventional Faith.  It parallels the emergence of formal operational thinking in adolescence:  the ability to abstract, to “think about thinking.”  Faith at this stage is a synthesis of the values of our community or of people we care about. It is stable and conventional, but largely unexamined.  It is the faith practiced in most synagogues and churches.

The fourth ring is Stage 4/Individuative-Reflective Faith.  It comes with a psychological leaving of home and recognition of the limits of perspective in one’s birth community.  It allows one to bracket one’s faith, to see it as a piece of a larger whole.

The fifth ripple described last week is Stage 5/Conjunctive Faith.  It involves a deep experience of the duality of living as both a fallible human and as a creature created in the image of God, with all that implies.  Fowler describes how a person at this stage:

Lives in paradox and in the tension of ironic consciousness and commitment.  In an analogy with revolutionary theory, they can see the corruption and vulnerability of the old regime, even as they can also see and rejoice in the possibility of a new order, one more replete with a balance of equality and justice, of inclusion and corporate devotion to the common good.  They recognize the imperative that all things be made new, yet they are deeply invested in the present order of things.  They have attachments and commitments that make revolutionary alignment too costly and frightening to entertain.  So they live divided, in tension, working for amelioration and evolution toward justice but deeply aware of their own implication in the unjust structures that they oppose.

One last note before we discuss the final ripple in our pond metaphor, Stage 6/Universal Faith.  I think it important to remember that these are concentric levels of development, superseding but still containing what came before.  All stages previous to one’s highest level still exist within an individual and can be re-activated depending on the circumstance.  Usually when our physical or emotional security is threatened we will regress to a previous stage of development, because that is a stage we have more experience in and therefore more confidence in.  For example, imagine you are a confident and affluent professional secure in your life and open to the world around you, functioning at Stage 4 or Stage 5.  But you have trouble getting pregnant and after months of trying you start to wonder if it's because you haven't been "good" enough (based on the criteria of whatever faith system you belong to -- and this could include not eating enough organic fruit) and are now being punished for your sins.  This is the concrete but ultimately magical thinking of Stage 2, which emerged from within you because you feel threatened and insecure.

As our faith has developed through these stages, it has enlarged in two critical dimensions.  One is what Fowler calls a “decentration of self,” where we gradually learn to stop worshipping our egos. The second dimension is the change in values that naturally accompanies this.

We begin our lives in a fused stage of oneness and undifferentiated faith.  Gradually our sense of our self as separate and unique forms, reaching its peak in the Stage 3/Stage 4 levels.  From this point our identity begins a return to the oneness from which we came, but this time with the consciousness of ourselves as both individuals and as interconnected to the unity of life.  We begin to lose our egotism, and as we become less concerned with grasping for a sense of security and a sense of self through status, achievement, money, or power, that which we value changes as well.  As the concentric rings of our world broaden outward, there is more and more we identify as “us” and less and less we see as “them.”  The dichotomies of Stage 5/Conjunctive Faith are healed within us, because we come more to identify with everything in the world:  “this too is us.”  We might say that Stage 6 is where the ripple merges back into the pond, with the initially separate rings having spent their force and the natural unity of the pond re-establishing itself in equanimity.  In human terms, this means an emptying of investment in one’s self and an opening to God in everything.

Fowler lists Gandhi as one example of a person at this stage of faith (others he mentions include Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King and Abraham Joshua Heschel).  He includes the following quote from Gandhi to illustrate:  “There comes a time when an individual becomes irresistible and his action becomes all-pervasive in its effect.  This comes when he reduces himself to zero.”

Most of us learn ways not to see those whose presence challenges us with the stark inequities in our society.  Three blocks in downtown San Francisco, confronted with repeated entreaties from the homeless, is enough to challenge my commitment to helping the poor.  Mother Theresa took her ministry to Calcutta, to the most neglected segments of humanity in the world. Martin Luther King made his mark not by challenging the Ku Klux Klan, but by challenging the compromises that everyone, black and white, had accepted as the unfortunate but unavoidable norms in the South.

Fowler speaks of how people operating from this stage

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.

This brings us full circle to the place at which we started:  radical monotheism.  For Stage 6/Universal Faith is lived radical monotheism.  If we truly believe and practice the faith we profess, that we are all one part of a larger whole, than we too would be living lives of Universalizing Faith.  The vast majority of us, including this writer, fall woefully short of this ideal.

Josh Gressel, Ph.D., is a couples and individual therapist based in Pleasant Hill, CA. Visit his website at joshgressel.com.  He is currently accepting referrals.