They Came in By Twosies, Twosies
You’re Not Deconstructing, You’re Growing, Part 3
Do you have fond memories of Sunday school? Do you remember that child-like wonder at the epic stories of the Bible?
Did anyone ever tell you that you’re supposed to maintain that child-like faith - but twisted that into meaning that you must believe whatever someone in authority tells you?
In his 1981 book Stages of Faith, theologian James Fowler described the universal process of spiritual growth that people experience. Note: these stages can be applicable to all faiths, but I am particularly interested in how this impacts the rise of Christian Nationalism.
Building on previous research and after interviewing 600 individuals, he noted there are six stages that people can move through.
I didn’t discover Fowler’s work until I was years into my own project on developing a discipleship strategy to help people grow in faith and found others using his work as a framework, then building around it with their observations. I’m doing something similar here.
This post will look at the stages found in childhood, which are similar to cognitive development stages.
Stage 1 is the Intuitive-Projective Stage when young children (generally 3 - 7 years old) begin to use their imagination, but struggle to know what is real and what is not.
Stage 2 is the Mythic-Literal Stage (pre-adolescence). These are the Sunday school years when kids are taught a lot of stories but are often unable to draw deeper meaning beyond what is presented at face value.
I’ve had a lot of conversations with people over the years who learned Bible stories as children but never revisited them as adults. Sometimes, this can leave the story stuck in our 8 year-old brain.
We know the story and we know what it meant when we were 8, but when we’re 8, we are unable to see the layers, so Noah was a righteous man who built an ark and saved all the animals on earth from the Great Flood.
I think of it like movies that we see when we’re kids, then watch again as adults. My favorite example is always The Sound of Music. As a child, it was a movie about a nun who became a nanny, taught the kids to sing, and then married their dad.
Later, it was the love story between Maria and Georg.
Now, I understand it as a warning against dehumanization and fascism (See Lesson Seventeen).
The movie never changed. As I grew up, I learned more about myself and the world and I matured.
Our relationship with the Bible and with our faith should be the same. We’re not supposed to leave these stories in our 8 year-old brains; they’re supposed to grow with us.
Most people move beyond the mythic-literal stage into stage 3, which is all about community.
Next Week: “My Lighthouse”