Religious Development...for Dummies

There have been several people seriously researching the topic of religious development. They however write on a level that only the most serious reader would persevere with. Pragmatic person that I am, I figure that as long as they write on a very complex academic level, only the very serious student will ever appreciate their findings.

Though I am neither an academic nor a theologian, my purpose in these writings is to try and make some complex topics more understandable for the general public. I feel if more people understood the concepts these researchers are coming up with, there would be less strife and fragmentation in our society, more understanding among those who may believe differently from us.

In the first place, there is this guy James Fowler. A Harvard-trained theologian and academic, he wrote a book called Stages of Faith. Through extensive interviews with countless actual individuals, he came up with six stages a person moves through in the process of becoming spiritually mature. <!–more–> I don’t imagine for a minute that his stages mirror everyone’s experience. But I do believe they have a lot of validity for many of us – if we just calm down and give them a chance. He labels his stages I through VI.

I will get back to Fowler in a minute, but first I want to throw out some other names. Ken Wilber is a sort of current-day philosopher. He has outlined something far, far more complex than Dr. Fowler. He has taken on the task of synthesizing works from all sorts of stage theorists and put them together into a very complex matrix, mixed with his own work. His construct involves not just faith and spirituality, but all fields of human endeavor, behavior, and consciousness on a personal level and on a societal level as well. His key concept is what he calls AQAL – this means all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states and all types. He insists development – growth must proceed in a balanced way in the individual and in society and in all areas. He has written volumes on this concept and I am not about to try and summarize any details from his work because it is very complex. To exclude a large part of Wilber’s work and just dwell on that part that is germane to this simplified discussion, I will say only that he labels his stages in colors. It is a bit confusing as you read him because at some times he uses the color stages that come from Clare Graves Spiral Dynamics and some other times – such as in his latest book Integral Spirituality - he uses color levels mirroring the colors of the rainbow, starting with the infrared end representing the lowest level of development. He also claims that we really don’t yet know what the highest level of development might be as we are not sure how much higher a person is capable of developing. He has aptly declared that we are only capable of understanding the highest level we have personally attained. Beyond our own level, we cannot fully understand/believe/appreciate any higher levels. (Note: This is an important concept – see my article They All Are Right)

While the writings of Fowler and Wilbur seem destined to convince perhaps the top twenty percent of the population (in terms of intelligence) that personal growth - spiritual and otherwise – proceeds in a very specific and complex fashion, I personally would be delighted to simply convince the middle sixty percent of the population that personal growth in fact does occur! Because I have done a lot of reading on the topic of spiritual development, I have chosen to expound on only on that type of growth, as opposed to all the others. (Wilber’s list of other lines of growth include: Cognitive, Self, Values, Moral, Interpersonal, Needs, Kinesthetic, Emotional, and Aesthetic.)



Now, taking yet another writer, M. Scott Peck was a psychiatrist who did a lot of writing about what he observed while working with his patients. His may not be the most scholarly of research, but it comes from good “seat of the pants” observation and I believe what he wrote holds true for a large part of our society in the

US today. It is thanks to him that I was even introduced to the concept of spiritual development and that I was able to make any sense out of it. Had I jumped in feet first to reading either Wilbur or Fowler, I would most likely have put their books down after the first glance. It was Scott Peck who put spiritual development is such simple terms that it interested even me – a confirmed atheist at the time. Peck has cut the number of stages down to just four, which of course enhances the simplicity of the concept. Further, he only considers the adult stages – which more of us reading this can relate to. Fowler on the other hand starts with childhood stages and they may not ring as true for those of us just beginning to learn about growth. Wilber’s stages also start at a primitive level none of us will (hopefully!) recognize in the adults of our acquaintance. To me, all the above mentioned writers seem to be saying the same thing, though approaching the concept from different sides. To keep the discussion as simple as possible, I am going to outline Peck’s stages. I do this because I believe his breakdown is the easiest for anyone to recognize and relate to from their own experience in our society. I realize and fully appreciate the fact that Dr. Fowler has put a tremendously greater amount of research into this concept than Dr. Peck ever did. I also realize that I am riding roughshod over the elegance of the complex matrices Ken Wilber has laid out. He will probably hate the fact that I am reducing a part of his work to such simple terms. But again, I am doing this for the sake of non-academics who may have only a passing interest in this topic and who would not recognize the truth of the patterns set out if all they had to read on it was the complex works of Fowler and Wilber. As I am outlining Peck’s four stages, I will throw in comments where appropriate to let you see the correspondence with Fowler and Wilbur’s stages. That these guys all came up with similar concepts independently should lend credence to the concept that spiritual development is real and happens to many people. Peck’s Stage IPeck started with a stage he called Chaotic / Antisocial. These are people who are totally unprincipled. The main factor governing their behavior is their own will. They are hard to spot because they may be very charming and may get very far in life, just on the strength of their devotion to their own goals – or even just on their charisma. They may even believe they behave lovingly toward others but in reality, their actions almost always have an underlying self-serving goal and they are often manipulative in their dealings with others. The word antisocial applies because these people are not inhibited by the normal strictures of conscience that govern the behavior of most of us. The term chaotic applies also to these people because they are not governed by any type of principle and their behavior and view of the world can swing widely from one extreme to the other from day to day. Their own will can swing widely and so with it goes their life. Although some do manage to reach high places in life, most are more often living in some type of difficulty. While outwardly they may not show it, inwardly their life is a place of torment and fear. These people may or may not actually follow any religion. If they do, it is only because they feel they have something to gain from it. They probably give little or no thought to what they actually believe. Ken Wilber calls this stage magic and designates it by the color red. Apparently, there have been and still may exist societies in which the predominant characteristics of the average person fall within this stage. Dr. Fowler’s research does not have a stage that correlates well with this one because he starts with childhood stages and assumes normal progression throughout life from one stage to the next, whereas what Peck and Wilber are talking about are more likely situations where development of an adult has been arrested at this stage. Stage ones hopefully make up a very small percentage of our society but it would be very hard to know as it is hard to recognize them except in extreme cases. Sometimes though, one of them will have an experience – usually something drastic and sudden - that causes them to get a glimpse of their own chaos and pain. Suddenly they decide to submit themselves to some higher principle for governance. They latch onto some sort of external structure that will save them from their former ways. This experience can be a life changing event that catapults them up to the next stage – Peck’s Stage 2.

Peck’s Stage II

Peck called his second stage Formal/ institutional. These people, it would seem, have a view that human nature is basically bad. To save themselves from the chaos (from the former stage) that they feel they would fall into without support, these people latch onto a synthetic type of belief that includes lots of rules and punishments if rules are broken. Because it is the structure these people seek, they will become very upset if that structure changes. Peck calls this concept “letter of the law” - these people follow the law to the letter, clinging tightly to a literal interpretation of whatever rules are set out (the bible for example.) Stage 2’s are dependent upon some form of external structure governing their behavior. In many cases this is a form of organized religion – but it could be some other social structure like the military, a cult or even jail. Ken Wilber calls this stage amber (although some individuals here may show some characteristics from his “red” level) and relates it in his graphs correlating the work of lots of developmental researchers with Piaget’s Concrete/Operational, Graves’ Blue (TruthForce) Loevinger Cook-Greuter’s Conformist stage. Dr. Fowler has some crossover here between his Mythic/literal Faith and his Synthetic-Conventional Faith (his stages two and three.) In one way or another, most born agains jumped into the religion of their choice to escape the chaos of their former lives. This is a good move for these people to make!! Obviously once they have made this move, their lives improve drastically. They now have a structure that gives them rules to live by. They have a community of people who see things as they do. Life is suddenly good. It is no wonder these people are such avid evangelizers – they want to share the goodness that so drastically improved their life and they can hardly understand why anyone would not want to do the same! Without doing any research, my own intuition tells me that Peck’s stage two encompasses some of Wilber’s reds and Fowler’s Mythic/Literalists at the lower end and at the higher end it is more similar to Wilber’s Amber and Fowler’s Synthetic-Conventionalists. Again intuitively, I say those at the lower redder end are more like today’s’ fundamentalists and are characterized by fear that without the structures that hold them they may fall backwards into the prior stage. And those at the upper (more amber) end are more moderate in their need for structure, but are motivated more by a need for stability than from fear. Again from my own observations and experience, these people have a great need for certainty. They must know that what they believe is right. In many cases they also feel the need to preach to others and try to save them.

Peck’s Stage III

Peck called his stage three Skeptic/Individual. According to Peck, what is required to grow from stage two to stage three is having been brought up in the stable atmosphere provided by solid stage two parents. Such a person may have an internal personal structure allowing them to govern their own existence without the need for the strictures of a church or other institution to provide all the rules. He or she may be deeply devoted to principles of goodness such as truth or justice and are so strongly attached to these principles that they can be self-governing. In many cases these people will be agnostics or atheists. It is interesting to note that Peck, in the end a supposedly religious man, saw these folks as principled despite their lack of religion while Wilber calls them scientific (orange) and presupposes they are mainly dedicated to finding worldly success – possibly at the expense of principle! Nonetheless, this is the same stage. These are the truth-seekers – not willing to accept a God because anyone else says so. While these people are not motivated by fear and have less need of stability than the prior stage, they do share one trait with the former stage – the need for certainty. Perhaps no one so vocal as the confirmed atheist who has transcended the need for the silly magical beliefs and Father God of the prior stage. They are anything but antisocial. Many are deeply involved in various social causes and tend to make excellent parents.

Peck’s Stage IV

Peck’s fourth stage is called Mystic/Communal. We walk on very shaky ground in discussing this stage. In the first place, there is no clear distinction between how we can describe those in this stage who follow a traditional religion and those who are spiritual in some way or another but do not, so to speak, follow a God with a capital G. One can assume Fowler in his Stages 5 (Conjunctive Faith) and 6 (Universalizing Faith) refers mostly to the more usual definitions of religion. But Wilber’s upper stages could be attained by non-believers alike and according to him is best attained through meditation and exposure to elevated states of mind. Surely this has little to do with regular religion. Peck on the other hand, just called these people mystical and it can be assumed he is including both the religious kind and the experiential kind. Furthermore, if people of this sort speak of God, whether they use a capital G or not, and whether they actually use that term or not, they are largely not speaking of a being that is external to themselves, but rather of something that is a part of them – a part of the human spirit – or possibly a part of the spirit of all consciousness. One trait that exists in common is that all these folks seem to sense the interconnectedness of all of life. Some would say “we all are one.” And some are much less drastic in their pronouncements but realize that anything done against another person, country, religion, animal, etc. is an action against oneself. Another major commonality in this stage is that the person does not need certainty! “They love mystery, in dramatic contrast to those in Stage II, who need simple, clear-cut dogmatic structures and have little taste for the unknown and unknowable. While Stage IV men and women will enter religion in order to approach mystery, people in Stage II, to a considerable extent, enter religion in order to escape from it.” (Peck, “The Different Drum” 193) While Stage twos become extremely unbuttoned if something occurs to upset their view of the universe – or even just the Mass in Latin – Stage fours wonder in the vastness of the possibilities out there and are not threatened when something occurs that allows them to stretch their understanding and their consciousness to include new concepts. Because people in stages two and three need to protect the certainty of their worldview, they are threatened when exposed to views that are different from theirs. Their certainty is more important to them than individuals so they tend not to associate freely with people of other stages. Stage fours however do not need to preserve a particular worldview and are constantly in search of expanding their views. Thus they have no problem associating and valuing people who hold different views than they do because certainty is not important to them. Paradox is a concept better understood by stage fours than by others. For example, these folks are not upset if scientific information comes along that disproves the basic myths of their beliefs. They can accept conflicting data without the need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. For further explanation about this stage, see my piece Walter Clark’s Criteria of Mature Religion. He is saying the same thing as Peck and Fowler, and even Wilber – but I think the listed bullet points may be more understandable than some other explanations.

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There are several important things to keep in mind in considering these stages.

For one thing, they refer only to spirituality and not so much to morality, intelligence, achievement or ever value as a human being.

Secondly, the stage system is not a means of evaluating a given individual. Any given person has a right to exist forever at any stage he chooses.

Third, all these people are necessary to a society – for a very general whitewashing: the stage 2’s provide our structure, the stage 3’s our science and stage 4’s our mystery.

Fourth, we really don’t know how many stages there may be above the ones our current researchers have discovered so far. Growth may be infinitely unlimited. No person at any stage should ever consider that their personal growth is now complete! There is always room to go farther.

Fifth, my purpose in pointing these out is to allow the possibility that a person may live a better life if they allow the possibility of growth. Understanding that growth happens along spiritual lines might alert a person to chances for growth in other lines as well. Ken Wilber claims that society as a whole is evolving through various stages as the critical mass of individuals within it move along. Perhaps knowledge of growth may allow our society as a whole to move along to the next step.

FOR MORE ON THIS TOPIC, SEE MY BLOG: BELIEF STAGES AND GROWTH.COM