In our Study of the Day feature series, we highlight a research publication related to a John Templeton Foundation-supported project, connecting the fascinating and unique research we fund to important conversations happening around the world.
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child,” writes the Apostle Paul in one of the New Testament’s best-known passages, “but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” The development of faith, Paul says, should track with other forms of human maturation: it can be thought of as sequential, linear, predictable.
In the late twentieth century, the American theologian James W. Fowler developed his own take on putting away childish things. Drawing inspiration from psychology’s growing understanding of human developmental phases, he popularized the notion of “stages of faith,” which sought to define and map people’s faith development as they move through life on an upward trajectory of growth or maturation.
On the journey, believers pass through a sequence of distinct faith types — beginning with narrow fundamentalism, and rising eventually to a creative form of faith that’s open to understanding and learning from differing perspectives.
While holding to the metaphor of faith development as a generally upward progression (the upward/downward metaphor is commonly used), Fowler’s present-day heirs are well aware that individual faith doesn’t always progress in a linear or time-dependent manner. Some 75-year-olds have matured into a wiser faith; others, not so much. They may proceed in fits and starts, simply stay at the same faith type for decades, or even move downward in the hierarchy. But we haven’t discovered many answers about when and why those sorts of changes in faith style and type happen, and what those changes predict.
By 2001, Heinz Streib, who was one of Fowler’s Ph.D students at Emory University, was advocating for a more nuanced understanding of faith development, which considered not only the faith types but a set of more loosely correlated overlapping faith styles which contribute to a given person’s current faith type. Style 2 (characterized by an emphasis on religious texts and teachings as authoritative) is most concentrated among those in the ethnocentric, fundamentalist faith type, but can be present in people who had other faith types. Style 5 (which features openness for encountering the Other, and a baseline of intellectual humility) predominated in the type Fowler ranked most developed, but can show up in smaller amounts among people with other faith types.
In a new paper, Zhuo Job Chen, a psychologist of religion at UNC Charlotte, teamed up with Streib, who is at Bielefeld University in Germany, to examine a wealth of longitudinal information about the faith journeys of more than 300 people in the U.S. and Germany. Using results from repeat administrations of a standardized faith development interview, Chen and Streib assessed how people’s faith types and styles had evolved over time using a range of variables to tease apart both predictors and outcomes of faith development.
Some of the verified outcomes were what you would expect given the typology: people whose faith type shifted upward became less likely to view God as authoritarian, more likely to reject xenophobia and prejudice, and in general increased their tolerance for ambiguity and openness to revising their viewpoints.
Perhaps more surprising were some of the predictors Chen and Streib’s analysis identified, traits that indicated a person was more likely to undergo later faith development. Openness to experience, and perhaps understandably, makes faith development more likely: it’s hard to imagine growth for those who only desire what they already have. The same was true for people who emphasized fairness, tolerance and rational choice.
More counterintuitive was another finding:
that people who reported low frequency of prayer and few experiences of divine intervention also seemed primed for faith development.
Chen and Streib are careful to emphasize that faith and faith development are separate concepts from religion and religiosity — and that as such “it is not necessarily a contradiction that, in terms of traditional religiosity, less religious people are more likely to engage in progressive faith development.”
But the finding also seems insightful for faith development within religions. The description — of infrequent prayer and feelings of disconnection with the divine becoming the precursor to the transformative growth of faith — calls to mind the idea, which shows up in strains of several major religions, that emptiness can be the precursor to spiritual process. It’s there in the desolation described in John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul, the Sufi idea of fana (self-annihilation), the concept of śūnyatā (emptiness) described in Buddhism and Hinduism, and even in the Kabbalistic idea of tzimtzum, that in order to make room for creation, the infinite God first had to withdraw a bit and leave an empty space.
Still Curious?
Read What makes people change their faith style, and with what consequences?
Nate Barksdale writes about the intersection of science, history, philosophy, faith, and popular culture. He was editor of the magazine re:generation quarterly and is a frequent contributor to History.com.
