Relationship Perception and the Stages of Faith
September 25th, 2006
A friend and I were having lunch outside (it was beautiful out today, for a change) and he posed the question to me, “Do you think there is a relationship between the way people view marriage and the way they relate to God?” It wasn’t a question about moral authority or religiously derived moral obligations; rather, it was a question of perception. Ultimately, I think it’s a question of faith development.
Perhaps one of my favorite books is James Fowler’s Stages of Faith which explores the development of faith in humans using Lawrence Kohlberg’s model of human moral development. He posits that there are six stages of faith development from infancy and undifferentiated faith up through universalizing faith, which is rarely if ever actually seen in humankind. Fowler argues that most people don’t advance beyond the level of synthetic-conventional faith—we don’t typically ask too many questions about our faith, about God, about deeply held social values that we have inherited from our peers. He argues that most people just accept these things as they are given to us; we aren’t concerned with probing the depths of social constructs or understanding how or why we believe what we believe. For most people, it is enough to have something upon which to rest theirs hearts—analyzing those values isn’t ultimately important.
It has long been a thesis of mine that how people perceive God directly influences how they decide to “be” in the world, and how they relate to other people. People who perceive God as primarily manifest in the material world, people for whom God is here and now, are more likely to approach everyday life with a sense of connection, relation, kinship. If their moral self, inspired by their personal faith, is genuinely integrated into their civic self and their daily actions, these people will be approach relationships with the deference and respect normally given to God, for every human interaction is potential interaction with the sacred. Conversely, theology that teaches God as removed, distant and transcendent from human beings and human activities makes it more difficult for the individual to see God in the mundane, and makes it easier to treat interactions as unimportant, as separate from any kind of interaction with or understanding of God.
But perhaps, just as there are stages of development of our understanding of and relationship with God, there are stages of human development that pertain to relationships and interactions. Just as humans are capable of moving through certain conventional understanding of faith values and god values, we are also capable of moving through conventional understanding of relationships.
But unlike faith, which academia and postmodernism have begun to dissect in front of public eyes, encouraging individuals to question and explore, understanding and perception of human relationships has perhaps not transformed into a platform which necessitates challenge. While it may be standard for people to question the validity of the traditional ideas of the western God, western morals, and western faith, it is not quite as standard to question the premises that serve as the foundation for western relationships, especially romantic relationships. Yet faith is nothing more than a relationship of values: a relationship between values, action, life, and the individual. If faith is nothing more than a particular kind of relationship, is it not feasible that there might also be stages of understanding human relationships?
The “enlightened” are encouraged to ask questions about God: to doubt, to prod, to assign new faces to God. But in the area of human relationships, we aren’t as encouraged to ask questions. In this arena, so many of us are still entrenched in the traditional view of relationships borne out of the Abrahamic traditions that, like monotheism in general, laud the importance of a single relationship above all else. The entire self should be oriented toward the maintenance and longevity of a single, committed, romantic relationship. The interesting thing about this, of course, is that in America, this ideal has proven to be far less achievable than we would like to believe. It isn’t that this idea is impossible. The problem is that this idea is only likely suitable for a small subset of people. The reality is that people change. Relationships change. Relationships, like people, are entities unto themselves. They take on lives of their own, responding not only to the individuals comprised within but also to culture, zeitgeist. As the relationship grows and people change, it is completely understandable that any relationship, no matter how perfect it may have been at its inception, may cease to satisfy some or even all of the participants at some point in time. And yet, for some reason, we are expected to believe in the ideal of an eternal relationship that sustains the soul for all of eternity, or at the very least for the duration of a lifetime.
We accept this premise unquestioningly.
The majority of us seem to be stuck in this stage of relationship development. We continue to believe, despite any evidence to the contrary, that human beings are meant to mate for life, or that we are meant to commit our entire lives to one person, forsaking the love of another because we believe we have found something everlasting in another person. At the very least, we aren’t at the stage of questioning whether or not these givens are or should be true. If postmodernism has encouraged us to form our own faith, to consider our beliefs, to create a religion pertinent to our experience and not “the history of theirs”, why should we stop short at examining the relationship between ourselves and those we love? Moreover, if postmodern, romantic theology encourages the individual to see God not as a thing transcendent but as an active verb here amongst us, why would we not stop to reconsider the very relationship that anchor us to God?
Can we ever truly advance our understanding of God if we don’t advance our understanding of the relationships that draw us toward it?
If we truly are stuck in a stage of synthetic-conventional relationship development that doesn’t ask questions and merely thrives on what has been handed down to us, where might we be if we set out sights on something deeper, more complex, more forgiving? Where might we be at the next level of development? What sort of deep-seated satisfaction might be had from questioning our most basic understanding of human relationships, romantic or otherwise? Do we not owe it to ourselves, and ultimately to God, to ask deeper questions?
Is it fear that prevents us?
If the sixth stage of universalizing faith were to be aligned with a sixth stage of human relationship, would it be a universal human connection? Is that really possible? By not questioning, we are avoiding responsiblity for our choices and impact on others. Perhaps it is not fear that prevents us, but the boundless possibilities of that complete universal human connnection. Perhaps we would simply be too exhausted to contemplate how that would change us.
For every human person there are already existing many relationships.The question is how to become more concious of these relationships and improve them for their own development and that of others.
Attukaren Antonisamy