Descending the spiritual ladder

Are faith stages and spiritual development models just a ladder for our ego to climb?

When I first heard about Fowler’s Stages of Faith eight years ago, it felt like being gifted with the keys to enlightenment at last.

I had always been told that spiritual maturation meant becoming more and more certain in my faith, but I was becoming less and less certain. What was wrong with me?

Then in comes James Fowler saying, “No. You are not digressing spiritually, you are actually progressing.”

Eureka! Cue the angelic cherubs tooting their flutes in my direction.

you’re still special

Learning about these faith stages was a total game changer for me. If you are unfamiliar with Fowler’s faith stages, here’s a very brief synopsis:

Stages 0-2 are the literal belief stages of childhood.

Stage 3 is characterized by conformity to an external religious authority.

Stage 4 moves from an external faith to an internal one. Stage fours experience pain, grief and anger as they process the harms of stage 3. (Stage four is often thought to be the “angry phase” of a faith crisis.¹)

Stage 5 transcends the dogmatic spirituality of both stages 3 and 4. Stage fives know truth doesn’t come from just one source and lean into paradox, nuance and compassion for all.

Stage 6 is full enlightenment- a merging of the self with universal community. Throwing flower petals down at the rest of us mere mortals. (Kidding. But Fowler did say almost no one reaches Stage 6.)

This made so much more sense to me than the spiritual models I had been given that said perfect obedience is the ultimate goal. So I ripped down the poster in the back of my brain of the Plan of Salvation (Celestial Kingdom or bust) and taped up Fowler’s Faith stages (universal enlightenment or bust).

Where it has remained. The edges are yellow, the tape losing its stick, but it’s never really been taken down.

This past weekend though, I attended a retreat where a model of Fowler’s Faith Stages was again presented to me.

For some reason this time, the stages did not illicit singing baby cherubs. Maybe because I’ve developed an allergy to hierarchies, maybe because I never take off my skeptic glasses when it comes to spirituality, but for whatever reason, when I saw the stages this time, all I saw was yet another egoic spiritual ladder.

Those are awfully familiar to me.

Isn’t it curious I thought, that every spiritual model I’ve ever been handed, my people and I just so happen to be at the top?

As a Mormon, I was on the covenant path, the Celestial Path, the straight and narrow ladder to God. We had the watchman on the tower high above everyone else. We alone had access to the tippy top heaven.

Me on my Celestial Path with exclusive access to the heaven’s hottest club.

This was the model of the atonement I taught on my mission. We are all in stuck in the spiritual death pit (due to fall of men and sin) unless we climb the ladder of faith, baptism, repentance, enduring to the end that only we had access to.

Then when I was a progressive Mormon and freshly post-Mormon, us in the middle alone were free from fundamentalist thinking. The active Mormons were close-minded and fundamentalists. The cynical ex-mormons flipped the script upside down, but were just as close-minded and fundamentalist as the Mormons! It was us folks in the middle who alone could see all sides who were the elevated, open-minded special ones.

This way of thinking overlapped with Fowler’s Faith stages. Over the conformity stage 3, over the angry deconstructing stage 4. I am a stage 5. Hair flip.

Even nihilism isn’t safe from hierarchical models. Nihilism king Frederik Nietzsche, in his book Human, All Too Human describes what it is to become “the wanderer” away from all the institutions, dogmas and certainties you were handed (I’m on board). But then in Human, All Too Human Part II, he describes the wanderer as wandering above civilization, viewing the dreary constitutions and religions below from above (must we always enter in “above”ness?).²

“There are certain signs that you have gone further and higher.” - Nietzsche

original painting= “Wanderer above a sea of fog” by Caspar Frederick

Very convenient for me, no? No matter where I am, what the model- religious, non-religious, spiritual, non-spiritual- me and my people are on top.

Where are the feminine models for spirituality?

I’ve had enough of ladders.

I’m a ladder skeptic.

Also, when looking at various models of faith expansion:

• Brian McLaren’s four stages of faith development: SIMPLICITY → COMPLEXITY → PERPLEXITY → HARMONY

• James Fowler’s faith stages

• Scott Peck’s stages of spiritual growth: formal/institutional → skeptic/individual → mystic/communal

I couldn’t help but think of what I learned researching how women’s spiritual development differs from men’s: the spiritual work of men is to lose the self, but the spiritual work of women is to build the self.

In all of these models a loss of self/merging with the whole is the end goal. All written by men.

I also couldn’t help but notice they all include hierarchy- putting some people above others, which all feels very familiar, and very….. masculine.

This week as I was pondering what a more feminine model of spirituality would look like, I came across an article about Carol Gilligan.

Carol Gilligan was friends with James Fowler at Harvard. They ran in the same circle. Carol also happened to be Lawrence Kohlberg’s research assistance. Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development happened to greatly influence Fowler’s work. But Carol couldn’t help but notice that neither Fowler nor Kohlberg took women into account in their research (which was all conducted on white males).

So she wrote a book called In a Different Voice which traced how the morality trajectory often looks very different for men than it does for women³. Masculine theories of morality value independence, whereas feminine theories value interdependence. Masculine models are vertical, feminine are horizontal.

Which reminded me a lot of Rianne Eisler’s work studying patriarchal systems vs matriarchal systems. In The Chalice and The Blade, Eisler describes domination systems vs partnership systems. In domination systems, somebody has to be on top and somebody has to be on bottom. Hierarchy.

In partnership systems, hierarchies are flattened. We strive to work as equals in partnership.

Before this weekend, I hadn’t viewed faith stages in terms of dominator vs partnership modalities, but I am now.

And yes, I understand that all top tiers of spirituality models include treating people with equality as partners, but still, must spiritual differences be ranked in a hierarchy? Of rankings Rianne Eisler says,

“It is evident that there is another logical alternative: that there can be societies in which difference is not necessarily equated with inferiority or superiority.”

No inferiority. No superiority. Now that feels spiritual to me.

Put me with the spiritual dummy dums please

I’ve done enough striving for ascension in my life. I’d like to now to slide down the railing of all those staircase models up there.

You can catch me in the Telestial Kingdom with the sinners hanging in the pit of spiritual death, amongst the spiritual losers in Fowler’s lower stages, and walking about underneath Nietzsche’s mountain with the plebeians.

If I’m headed in any direction I want it to be horizontal towards my fellow humans, not vertically above them towards enlightenment.

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What about you? Have Fowler’s Faith Stages played into your journey? Have they served you? Do they serve you still? Are you feeling over vertical spiritual ascents? Or still find them helpful?

1. I loathe the term “angry phase.” Carry on.

2. K but also I LOVE his work on The Wanderer, just a bit deflated that being “above” others is a part of it- even if its a small part.

3. Naturally Kohlberg’s theories are discussed in every psychology course, Fowler’s theories are discussed in every faith crisis podcast, and I had never heard of Carol Gilligan until this week. Tracks.