The First Stage of Faith

The past two weeks I have been looking at the concept of faith development, relying on the work of James Fowler.  In week one, I introduced the basic premise.  In week two, I described the ways in which we can organize our faith:  polytheism, henotheism and radical monotheism.  In this week's post, I want to take a look a Stage One: 

Before doing that, let's ask the question:  what do we even mean by development?  I think many of us believe that once we're adults we're no longer children, or teens, or young adults. As if those earlier stages of development were erased by our current stage.

A more accurate way to picture development, I believe, is demonstrated by the Russian Matryoshka dolls that fit into each other: ever smaller versions of the same figure fitting one inside the other.  What this depicts is the way we have younger versions of ourselves which are contained in older, more mature, and fuller versions of ourselves.  I may look like a fully functioning adult, but under the right stimulus (attending a high school reunion, revisiting one's birth home, spending time with siblings) these younger versions emerge full force, almost as independent entities.  It is during these moments when we can appreciate that we have younger versions of ourselves living inside us, just waiting for the right moment to come out.  This is true with our faith as well:  sometimes it will be more complex and mature, but when threatened we can all become more concrete and fundamental.

Fowler describes the ways in which faith development is like other forms of development: it is created from the interaction between the individual’s innate potential and the stimulation or repression of the outside environment, it develops along pre-programmed lines, and it is possible to say that a later stage of development is “better” than an earlier one in that it is larger, more inclusive, and better equips the individual to cope with the world. 

However, Fowler’s faith model differs from other developmental models in important ways.  One difference is that his model includes the role of emotion, intuition and imagination, whereas Piaget, for example, focuses exclusively on left-brain logic.  Fowler states that our faith is more comprehensive than our cognition or moral reasoning alone – it includes them but is not limited by them.  Another difference is that Fowler emphasizes that faith is formed in relation to communities and society, and is not an enterprise that happens in isolation or in dyad only.  

In Fowler’s model, each level of faith development ideally would correspond to a specific stage in our lives.  For example, he proposes that the teenage years are best suited to a Stage 3 (Synthetic Conventional) faith level, just as mid-life tasks are best suited for a Stage 5 (Conjunctive Faith) level.  Optimally, life will influence our faith and our faith will influence our life.

Put negatively, to approach a new era in the adult life cycle while clinging too tightly to the structural style of faith employed during the culminating phase of the previous era is to risk anachronism.  It means attacking a new agenda of life tasks and a potential new richness in the understanding of life with the limiting pattern of knowing, valuing and interpreting experiences that served the previous era.  Such anachronism virtually assures that one will settle for a narrower and shallower faith than one needs.

Infancy and Undifferentiated Faith:  Fowler hypothesizes a precursor to the beginnings of formal faith development, a “pre-stage” he calls “undifferentiated faith.”  His description parallels closely Erick Erickson’s description of the first psychosocial stage of infancy.  The newborn baby, completely dependent upon the care of others for his or her survival, has either experiences of gratification or frustration in the care received.  Imagine the wail of a baby unattended and multiply that by the hundreds or thousands of times it occurs in a neglectful home.  Then imagine the experience of a baby who is picked up, cared for, fed, cleaned and held nearly every time she calls out in distress.  These experiences, though preverbal, are hard wired into the individual’s experience of the world at the most primal level.  Erickson says the core issue at this stage of development is between basic trust and basic mistrust, and that when successfully navigated the infant emerges from this stage with an attitude of hope.

Fowler extends Erickson’s thinking to suggest that our most basic attitudes toward God are formed at this phase.  Is the world a safe and loving place?  Do we really matter? (i.e. “Does God really care?”)  Can we put our faith in an all powerful other and expect that good will result?  Our predispositions to these most basic and profound questions are heavily influenced by our experiences in the first months of life.

Stage 1: Intuitive-Projective Faith:  With the beginning of language in the second year of life, the child acquires a new and powerful tool with which to begin navigating the world.  No longer dependent only on the perceptions of the senses, the child begins to name her world, word by word, and in so doing to establish an element of control she didn’t previously possess.  Speech is what separates us from the instinctually bound natural world, giving us a power to create and control.  The narration of creation in Genesis, which begins with chaos that is step by step separated into component parts, parallels our development from the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of undifferentiated perceptions in infancy, to the tentative ordering of early childhood made possible through language.

In his research, Fowler interviewed children age 4-7 and asked them about their faith with questions like “Where do people come from?” and  “How did trees get here?”  What he found was a fascinating interplay of imagination and language.  The children would creatively combine images and symbols from home, school, fairy tales, Bible stories and television shows to begin to construct a system of faith.  He found this in children from religious homes as well as those who came from secular and even anti-religious homes.

Fowler emphasizes how powerful these symbols are for young children, because their perceptions are so strong and they are so relatively undefended.  Fowler talks about the fears of children at this age:  of the dark, of monsters, of something happening to their parents.  Fairy tales, biblical stories and some children’s cartoons provide an outlet for these fears as they typically depict someone small and weak pitted against someone large and powerful, with the weak invariably triumphing over the strong, and good over evil.  They thus provide an ordering morality for the developing child in an adult world of what for them must seem like capricious, all-powerful giants.

Fowler summarizes the faith of this first stage as a

Fantasy-filled, imitative phase in which the child can be powerfully and permanently influenced by examples, moods, actions and stories of the visible faith of primally related adults….The gift or emergent strength of this stage is the birth of imagination, the ability to unify and grasp the experience-world in powerful images and as presented in stories that register the child’s intuitive understandings and feelings toward the ultimate conditions of existence.  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 or unwitting exploitation of her or his imagination in the reinforcement of taboos and moral or doctrinal expectations.

If you ask adults who believe in God what their first experience of God was, you will usually be tapping into very powerful images from this age.  I remember once, when teaching this material in a church, I asked the audience in attendance for some examples of their first experience of God.  A 94-year-old woman raised her hand and related that when she was four years old, living on a farm in Nebraska, her father awoke her and her sisters in the middle of the night and said:  "You've got to come outside and look!"  They got out of their bed in their pajamas, and bundling up against the Nebraska winter, they went outside.  "I looked and as far as I could see there was white snow reflecting a full moon.  And I just knew there was a God.  I just knew it."  Her voice, in relaying this 90-year-old memory, still had the same certainty of faith.

Next week:  Stage 2:  Mythic-Literal Faith

Do you have a question about your marriage or relationship? Is there a particular topic on relationships or individual psychological issues you would like addressed in this blog? Ask Josh in the comments below or email him at josh@joshgressel.com.

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.