James Fowler, 1942 -

James Fowler, Stages of Faith: 
The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning  
(Harper and Row, 1981) 

On this page you will find first a brief summary of Fowler's main 5 stages.  Below that, there is a set of excerpts from the book itself for those who want a fuller picture of his claims.  And finally, at the bottom here, there is a brief comparison of Fowler's ideas with those of Jean Piaget about intellectual development (and Lawrence Kohlberg on moral development).

Warning:  you may think that Fowler helps to support many of the ideas in the textbook, In the Presence of Mystery.   It would be more accurate to say that the textbook was formed under the influence of Fowler's ideas.  If Fowler is seriously in error, then so is the textbook on a number of points.

A SUMMARY & GUIDE FOR  FOWLER'S STAGES OF FAITH
by MH Barnes

Stage 1.  Intuitive-Projective
That is a fancy name for the pre-school child's tendency to believe anything that a)  adult authority says is so, or  b)  has taken up lodging in the child's mind as a vivid image or idea.  This child is not good at distinguishing reality from "pretend." 
Content: animism, including anthropomorphisms (and theriomorphisms).  
Mode of expression:  brief tales and fact-claims.  
Authority:  older kids and people, especially parents.

Stage 2.  Mythic-Literal
This begins around the age of 7, but develops further as the child matures, and may extend into adulthood.   Stories rather than abstract thought describe reality for the person.  The child is now concerned to distinguish reality from what is only imagined or "pretend."
Content:  whatever the religious tradition proclaims, interpreted very anthropomorphically.
Mode of expression:  longer and more complex tales perhaps
Authority:  older people, especially parents

Stage 3.  Synthetic-Conventional
This is a more mature version of the mythic-literal stage.  At adolescence people become more conscious of others' ideas of them and are deeply concerned about how others think of them.
Content:  whatever the religious tradition proclaims, still anthropomorphically.
Mode of expression:  fully complex tales as in epic myths (or novels)
Authority:  sacred sources, tradition, elders and leaders.

Stage 4.  Individuative-Reflective.
A capacity for critically logical analysis allows a person to take much more individual responsibility for the person's beliefs and norms.  Overconfidence in rationality often leads to dogmatism, however.
Content:  awareness of "ultimate questions"  IF the culture introduces such questions.
Mode of expression:  abstract reflection is added to appreciation of narratives
Authority:  reason;  logic and abstract analysis; often in defense of tradition.

Stage 5.  Conjunctive Faith
An extension of stage 4, built upon more extended experience of the limits of rationality to determine the final and absolute truth.
Content:  awareness of ultimate questions (if the culture introduces them).
Mode of expression:  both abstract reflection and narrative to capture life's complexities.
Authority:  reason and experience, drawing upon resources such as tradition

[The following are excerpts quoted directly from the book.  The relevant page numbers follow each selection.]

Stage 1 Intuitive-Projective faith is the 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 stage most typical of the child of three to seven, it is marked by a relative fluidity of thought patterns. The child is continually encountering novelties for which no stable operations of knowing have been formed. The imaginative process underlying fantasy are unrestrained and uninhibited by logical thought. In league with forms of knowing dominated by perception, imagination in this stage is extremely productive of long-lasting images and feelings (positive and negative) that later, more stable and self-reflective valuing and thinking, will have to order and sort out. This is the stage of first self-awareness. The "self-aware" child is egocentric as regards the perspectives of others. Here we find first awareness of death and sex and of the strong taboos by which cultures and families insulate those powerful areas.

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.

The main factor precipitating transition to the next stage is the emergence of concrete operational thinking. Affectively, the resolution of Oedipal issues or their submersion in latency are important accompanying factors. At the heart of the transition is the child's growing concern to know how things are and to clarify for him- or herself the bases of distinctions between what is real and what only seems to be. (133-34)

                                            * * * *

Stage 2 Mythic-Literal faith is the stage in which the person begins to take on for him- or herself the stories, beliefs, and observances that symbolize belonging to his or her community. Beliefs are appropriated with literal interpretations, as are moral rules and attitudes. Symbols are taken as one-dimensional and literal in meaning. In this stage the rise of concrete operations leads to the curbing and ordering of the previous stage's imaginative composing of the world. The episodic quality of Intuitive-Projective faith gives way to a more linear, narrative construction of coherence and meaning. Story becomes the major way of giving unity and value to experience. This is the faith stage of the school child (though we sometimes find the structures dominant in adolescents and in adults). Marked by increased accuracy in taking the perspective of other persons, those in Stage 2 compose a world based on reciprocal fairness and immanent justice based on reciprocity. The actors in their cosmic stories are anthropomorphic. They can be affected deeply and powerfully by symbolic and dramatic materials and can describe in endlessly detailed narrative what has occurred. They do not, however, step back from the flow of stories to formulate reflective, conceptual meanings. For this stage the meaning is both carried and "trapped" in the narrative.

The new capacity or strength in this stage is the rise of narrative and the emergence of story, drama and myth as ways of finding and giving coherence to experience. The limitations of literalness and an excessive reliance upon reciprocity as a principle for constructing an ultimate environment can result either in an over-controlling, stilted perfectionism or "works righteousness" or in their opposite, an abasing sense of badness embraced because of mistreatment, neglect or the apparent disfavor of significant others.

A factor initiating transition to Stage 3 is the implicit clash or contradictions in stories that leads to reflection on meanings. The transition to formal operational thought makes such reflection possible and necessary. Previous literalism breaks down; new "cognitive conceit" (Elkind) leads to disillusionment with previous teachers and teachings. Conflicts between authoritative stories (Genesis creation versus evolutionary theory) must be faced. The emergence of mutual interpersonal perspective taking ("I see you seeing me; I see me as you see me: I see you seeing
me seeing you.") creates the need for a more personal relationship with the unifying power of the ultimate environment. (149-50)

                                            * * * *

In stage 3 Synthetic-Conventional faith, a person's experience of the world now extends beyond the family. A number of spheres demand attention: family, school or work, peers, street society and media, and perhaps religion. Faith must provide a coherent orientation in the midst of that more complex and diverse range of involvements. Faith must synthesize values and information; it must provide a basis for identity and outlook.

Stage 3 typically has its rise and ascendancy in adolescence, but for many adults it becomes a permanent place of equilibrium. It structures the ultimate environment in iinterpersonal terms. Its images of unifying value and power derive from the extension of qualities experienced in personal relationships. It is a "conformist" stage in the sense that it is acutely tuned to the expectations and judgments of significant others and yet does not have a sure enough grasp on its own identity and autonomous judgment to construct and maintain an independent perspective. While beliefs and values are deeply felt, they typically are tacitly held -- the person "dwells" in them and in the meaning world they mediate. But there has not been occasion to step outside them to reflect on or examine them explicitly or systematically. At Stage 3 a person has an "ideology," a more or less consistent clustering of values and beliefs, but he or she has not objectified it for examination and in a sense is unaware of having it. Differences of outlook with others are experiences as differences in "kind" of person. Authority is located in the incumbents of traditional authority roles (if perceived as personally worthy) or in consensus of a valued, face to face group.

The emergent capacity of this stage is the forming of a personal myth -- the myth of one's own becoming in identity and faith, incorporating one's past and anticipated future in an image of the ultimate environment unified by characteristics of personality.

The dangers or deficiencies in this stage are twofold. The expectations and evaluations of others can be so compellingly internalized (and sacralized) that later autonomy of judgment and action can be jeopardized; or interpersonal betrayals can give rise either to nihilistic despair about a personal principle of ultimate being or to a compensatory intimacy with God unrelated to mundane relations.

Factors contributing to the breakdown of Stage 3 and to readiness for transition may include: serious clashes or contradictions between valued authority sources; marked changes, by officially sanctioned leaders, or policies or practices previously deemed sacred and unbreachable (for example, in the Catholic church changing the mass from Latin to the vernacular, or no longer requiring abstinence from meat on Friday); the encounter with experiences or perspectives that lead to critical reflection on how one's beliefs and values have formed and changed, and on how "relative" they are toone's particular group or background. Frequently the experience of "leaving home" -- emotionally or physically, or both -- precipitates the kind of examination of self,     background, and life-guiding values that gives rise to stage transition at this point.   (172-73)

                                            * * * *

The movement from Stage 3 to Stage 4 Individuative-Reflective faith is particularly critical, for it is in this transition that the late adolescent or adult must begin to take seriously the burden of responsibility for his or her own commitments, lifestyle, beliefs, and attitudes. Where genuine movement toward stage 4 is underway the person must face certain unavoidable tensions: individuality versus being defined by a group or group membership; subjectivity and the power of one's strongly felt but unexamined feelings versus objectivity and the requirement of critical reflection; self-fulfillment or self-actualization as a primary concern versus service to and being
for others; the question of being committed to the relative versus struggle with the possibility of an absolute.

Stage 4 most appropriately takes form in young adulthood (but let us remember that many adults do not construct it and that for a significant group it emerges on in the mid-thirties to forties). This stage is marked by a double development. The self, previously sustained in its identity and faith compositions by an interpersonal circle of significant others, now claims an identify no longer defined by the composite of one's roles or meanings to others. To sustain that new identity it composes a meaning frame conscious of its own boundaries and inner connections and aware of itself as a "world view." Self (identity) and outlook (world view) are differentiated from those of
others and become acknowledged factors in the reactions, interpretations and judgments one makes on actions of the self and others. It expresses its intuitions of coherence in an ultimate environment in terms of an explicit system of meanings. Stage 4 typically translates symbols into conceptual meanings. This is a "demythologizing" stage. It is likely to attend minimally to unconscious factors influencing its judgments and behavior.

Stage 4's ascendant strength has to do with its capacity for critical reflection on identity (self) and outlook (ideology). Its dangers inhere in its strengths: an excessive confidence in the conscious mind and in critical thought and a kind of second narcissism in which the now clearly bounded, reflective self overassimilates "reality" and the perspectives of others into its own world view.

Restless with the self-images and outlook maintained by Stage 4, the person ready for transition find him- or herself attending to what may feel like anarchic and disturbing  inner voices. Elements from a childish past, images and energies from a deeper self,  a gnawing sense of the sterility and flatness of the meanings one serves -- any or all of these may signal readiness for something new. Stories, symbols, myths and paradoxes from one's own or other traditions may insist on breaking in upon the neatness of the previous faith. Disillusionment with one's compromises and recognition that life is more complex than Stage 4's logic of clear distinctions and abstract concepts can comprehend, press one toward a more dialectical and multileveled approach to life truth. (182-83)

                                            * * * *

Stage 5 Conjunctive faith involves the integration into self and outlook of much that was suppressed or unrecognized in the interest of Stage 4's self-certainty and conscious cognitive and affective adaption to reality. This stage develops a "second naivete" (Ricoeur) in which symbolic power is reunited with conceptual meanings. Here there must also be a new reclaiming and reworking of one's past. There must be an opening to the voices of one's "deeper self." Importantly, this involves a critical recognition of one's social unconscious -- the myths, ideal images and prejudices built deeply into the self-system by virtue of one's nurture within a particular social class, religious tradition, ethnic group or the like.

Unusual before mid-life, Stage 5 knows the sacrament of defeat and the reality of irrevocable commitments and acts. What the previous stage struggled to clarify, in terms of the boundaries of self and outlook, this stage now makes porous and permeable. Alive to paradox and the truth in apparent contradictions, this stage strives to unify opposites in mind and experience. It generates and maintains vulnerability to the strange truths of those who are the "other." Ready for closeness to that which is different and threatening to self and outlook (including new depths of experience in spirituality and religious revelation), this stage's commitment to justice is freed from the confines of tribe, class, religious community or nation. And with the seriousness that can arise when life is more than half over, this stage is ready to spend and be spent for the cause of conserving and cultivating the possibility of others' generating identity and meaning.

The new strength of this stage comes in the rise of the ironic imagination -- a capacity to see and be in one's or one's group's most powerful meanings, while simultaneously recognizing that they are relative, partial and inevitably distorting apprehensions of transcendent reality. Its danger lies in the direction of a paralyzing passivity or inaction, giving rise to complacency or cynical withdrawal, due to its paradoxical understanding of truth.

Stage 5 can appreciate symbols, myths and rituals (its own and others') because it  has been grasped, in some measure, by the depth of reality to which they refer. It also sees the divisions of the human family vividly because it has been apprehended by the possibility (and imperative) of an inclusive community of being. But this stage remains divided. It lives and acts between an untransformed world and a transforming vision and loyalties. In some cases this division yields to the call of the radical actualization that we call stage 6. (197-98)

[End of excerpts from Fowler, Stages of Faith]

If you know Jean Piaget's thought, you may be interested in comparing them.  The match-up between Piaget and Fowler is a little rough. Fowler came up with this outline, however, not because he wanted to make his theory match with the others but because this was the result of his own empirical investigations. Like Kohlberg,  Fowler devised a double blind way of "scoring" the responses of people to interview questions. Their answers to the questions were written down, assigned an identifying number, and then three copies of each were made. The copies were assigned to three different scorers, who did not know who did the interviewing, who the interviewees were, and did not know which other two scorers were assigned to the same interview records. When the scorers had completed their work, the three results were then compared. If the three scorers agreed in their interpretation, then a person's response was assigned to a "stage." Fowler did not simply make up the stages. First, using Piaget, Kohlberg, Erikson and others as guides, Fowler devised a tentative faith-scale. Then he tried using this in interviews to see whether people (many of different ages) gave responses that fit into the categories he had devised. On the basis of these early interviews, he adjusted the categories to fit more closely with what people had actually responded. These new categories were then the "stages" to which the responses were assigned.

An easy way to relate Fowler's stages to Piaget, if you are familiar with Piaget's categories, is to think of Stage 1(Intuitive-Projective) as pre-operational; and Stage 2 (Mythic-Literal) as early concrete operational, from about ages 7-10. Stage 3 (Synthetic-Conventional) is a more adult form of concrete operational, more sophisticated, dealing with longer and more complex stories, with a touch of dogmatism (ideological thought). Stage 4 (Individuative-Reflective) is formal operational thought; Stage 5 (Conjunctive) is late formal operational.]