01.16.08
Regarding Religion - What Type of Believer Are You?
This is something I wrote to publish elsewhere on the net - for people who have not yet read anything I have posted here. I am including it here as a simple introduction for any new readers on the blog. As I am starting to use new terminology, it will also serve as a refresher for readers who have been with me from the beginning. MPJ
Simplifying the works I have read by various stage theorists on spiritual and religious growth, I have reduced the possible stages to four.
You didn’t know people could “grow” in terms of religious belief and spirituality? Yes, it was a surprise to me too – when I first read about this some seventeen years ago. Since then, I have been doing a lot of reading on it, and the idea has been deepening in importance in my mind. It has come to the point where I feel I must simplify this idea to introduce and share it with others who may not be following the research.
There is a perspective about religion that is seriously missing from our society. Sharing the concept of growth stages is my way of trying to ease some of the religious tensions that exist these days.
What if you learned that all these people with differing beliefs, who so vehemently argue against each other – the fundamentalists versus the agnostics versus the humanists – the moderate believers against the atheists – were just examples of people existing at different stages? What if all the strife were simply due to the fact that people are looking at the issue from different levels of belief, different points of development in their spiritual status?
Well, there have been some serious researchers working on this and though many use different terms, if you look at the heart of what they are saying, they have mostly come to similar conclusions. (For further details on the researchers, see the “Resource Report” on my blog: BeliefStagesandGrowth.com. They however write in such complex terms that I have decided to simplify the concept to four general levels – some would have us call them stages, some would call them styles. Either way, I feel the distinctions are important to understand.
The four levels are;
the Lawless – 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 not even realize the way they approach others lacks integrity 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 behavior in most of us. The term chaotic applies also to these people because they are not governed by any principle of goodness 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 – drug addiction, for example. 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. The Lawless 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.
The Faithful - these are people who, 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 the rules are broken. Because it is structure these people seek, they will become very upset if that structure changes. M. Scott Peck called 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.) The Faithful 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. The Faithful group includes most “born-agains” and fundamentalists. In one way or another, most “born-agains” jumped into the religion of their choice to escape the chaos of their former (Lawless) 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! At the more moderate end of this group, you also have most traditional believers in the average church, and probably most people who just fell into their religion because they were raised in it and they believe what their parents taught them was true.
The Rational – these are people who have an internalized 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. As they are not in need of many rules themselves, they may be hard-pressed to understand why the Faithful group is. They 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 folks were brought up in a traditional religion but at some point decided they could not accept certain parts of their faith, or all of it. Some may have walked away from traditional religion and others may remain members but are not fully committed emotionally. Most agnostics and atheists belong to this category. 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 group we are calling the Faithful – 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.
The Mystic – this is a much more difficult level to write about. 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 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 do 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 (the Faithful), who need simple, clear-cut dogmatic structures and have little taste for the unknown and the unknowable. While Stage IV (the Mystics) men and women will enter religion in order to approach mystery, people in Stage II (the Faithful,) to a considerable extent, enter religion in order to escape from it.” (Peck, “The Different Drum” p.193) While the Faithful become extremely unbuttoned if something occurs to upset their view of the universe – or even just the Mass in Latin – Mystics 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 the Faithful and the Rationals need to protect the certainty of their worldview, they are threatened when exposed to views that are different from theirs. Their certainty is important to them so they tend not to associate freely with people of other stages. Mystics 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 Mystics 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.
The Faithful versus the Mystics - In many cases, the Faithful are very hard to distinguish from the Mystics. Often, they attend the same churches. They speak the same way, but there is a world of difference in the meaning of the words they use. For example when they use the word God, the Faithful are most likely speaking about a separate (usually male) being up in the sky somewhere, whereas the Mystics are mostly speaking about something that is a part of themselves and of all creation. The Faithful are in need of being certain that THEIR God is the only true one where everyone else’s is false. Mystics, on the other hand, are more likely to appreciate the uncertainty of a continually unfolding mystery regarding their existence and are not in need of a definite explanation of how they got here or where they are going next.
The Lawless versus the Rationals - Then the Lawless people can sound a lot like the Rational group. Both might seem overly self-aggrandizing, worldly…..and maybe not too religious. But the Rational person has surpassed the need for the type of religious certainty of the Faithful, yet has not come to appreciate the mystery as the Mystic does. The Rational person probably does not think or speak too much about religion or god, or may even be a complete non-believer. On the other hand, the Lawless person – if he belongs to a church at all, it would be only for the social contacts perhaps or at the very least his participation would be a sham – not grounded in any real need for what that church offers. The Lawless suffers from the chaos of not having any grounding faith, not having any structure governing his existence. He is not submitted to anything other than his own desires – and hence suffers much – either outwardly or inwardly. In contrast, the Rational generally is not in need of the external structure of a church. His source of governance comes from within. Generally he manages to hold his life together quite well – even if he is totally without religious belief.
My purpose in pointing all this out is to say that if the only reason we all believe different things is that we exist at different levels – can’t we all stop the hate messages about people with different beliefs? Can’t the Rationals and the Mystics just see that the Faithful really do need the structured faith they so tightly cling to? Can‘t the Faithful see that the Rationals don’t need to “be saved,” don’t need to be called evil…..or killed for their lack of belief? Can’t we just honor the fact that people choose (or accept) their beliefs based on their psychological make-up? Can’t we all grow beyond the need to accuse others of being evil just because they don’t believe as we do?
…….Can’t we all just get along?…….