Psych 210 due by 04/23/2014 6pm
After reading the "adult moral reasoning" section of your text, write a 250 word personal response to your study of "Fowler's stages of faith." The specific sequence of six stages of faith can be found on page 505 of chapter 18. This does not need to be APA style as it is a personal response not a research paper. Remember, there are six stages, include each in your reflection for full credit.
Just as a reminder - please use complete sentences, professional writing (do not use the word "you"), correct punctuation and accurate spelling when writing. Proofread for spelling and typing errors to ensure accuracy and professionalism. Some questions to ask yourself may include, but are not limited to: do you agree with the stages, what stage are you in, where would you like to end up? Break down each stage and reflect on the progression of your own values and how that has changed as you have matured.
Stages of Faith
A similar process may occur for the development of faith. Spiritual
struggles, including “questioning one’s religious/spiritual beliefs,
feeling unsettled about religious or spiritual matters, struggling to
understand evil, illness, and death, feeling angry at God” (Bryant &
Astin, 2008, p. 3), are not unusual for emerging adults. Maturation
may move them past the doctrinaire religion of childhood to a more
flexible, dialectical, postformal faith. To describe this process, James
Fowler (1981, 1986) developed a sequence of six stages of faith,
building on the work of Piaget and Kohlberg:
■ Stage 1: Intuitive-projective faith. Faith is magical, illogical,
imaginative, and filled with fantasy, especially about the power
of God and the mysteries of birth and death. It is typical of
children ages 3 to 7.
■ Stage 2: Mythic-literal faith. Individuals take the myths and sto-
ries of religion literally, believing simplistically in the power of
symbols. God is seen as rewarding those who follow divine laws and punish-
ing others. Stage 2 is typical from ages 7 to 11, but it also characterizes some
adults. Fowler cites a woman who says extra prayers at every opportunity, to
put them “in the bank.”
■ Stage 3: Synthetic-conventional faith. This is a conformist stage. Faith is
conventional, reflecting concern about other people and favoring “what feels
right” over what makes intellectual sense. Fowler quotes a man whose per-
sonal rules include “being truthful with my family. Not trying to cheat them
out of anything. . . . I’m not saying that God or anybody else set my rules. I
really don’t know. It’s what I feel is right.”
■ Stage 4: Individual-reflective faith. Faith is characterized by intellectual
detachment from the values of the culture and from the approval of other
people. College may be a springboard to stage 4, as the young person learns
to question the authority of parents, teachers, and other powerful figures and
to rely instead on his or her own understanding of the world. Faith becomes
an active commitment.
■ Stage 5: Conjunctive faith. Faith incorporates both powerful emotional ideas
(such as the power of prayer and the love of God) and rational conscious
values (such as the worth of life compared with that of property). People are
willing to accept contradictions, obviously a postformal manner of thinking.
Fowler says that this cosmic perspective is seldom achieved before middle age.
■ Stage 6: Universalizing faith. People at this stage have a powerful vision of uni-
versal compassion, justice, and love that compels them to live their lives in a
way that others may think is either saintly or foolish. A transforming experience
is often the gateway to stage 6, as happened to Moses, Muhammad, the
Buddha, and Saint Paul, as well as more recently to Mohandas Gandhi, Martin
Luther King Jr., and Mother Teresa. Stage 6 is rarely achieved.
Although not everyone agrees with Fowler’s particular stages, many people rely
on faith to combat stress, overcome adversity, and analyze challenges. If Fowler
is correct, faith, like other aspects of cognition, progresses from a simple, self-
centered, one-sided perspective to a more complex, altruistic (unselfish), and
many-sided view. Other evidence also suggests that faith develops over the years of
adulthood, with emerging adults less likely than older or younger people to attend
religious services and to pray (Wilhelm et al., 2007), even though most consider
themselves at least as spiritual as they were when younger (Smith & Snell, 2009).
In any case, like almost all forms of thinking and analyzing, faith changes as
life does. Cognition in adulthood is not stagnant. It is difficult, however, to imag-
ine that one’s own thinking, or morality, or faith is less advanced than it will be in
another decade or two. My own experience is one example.