THE DEVELOPMENT OF LIVED RELIGION
1Defining religion
Religion is a term that appears to defy definition. It is referred to as one’s relation to God, as personal piety, as faith, as world-view, as belief in a set of doctrines, or as those doctrines themselves. Religion has also been identified with a set of social institutions such as churches or religious orders. Finally, it has been described as a subjective “inner” impulse or projection, which comes to expression in a variety of “outer” objective cultic practices or world religions (Smart 1983; Smith 1963).
Perhaps the reason why religion is described in such diverse ways is that it expresses the totality of our lives and therefore resists being boxed in by any one conceptual framework. What we call religion is itself an expression of the religion we live. My understanding of religion is that it concerns both what is basic to, and what is ultimate in, human life. Religion is that which we live out of and that which we live unto. It involves all that we do from the cradle to beyond the grave. Life is religion. Religion that is not lived is no religion at all.
I do not mean to give a definition of religion in general, because I speak as a Christian rooted in the Protestant Reformation. From John Calvin on, a major theme of the Reformation has been that human life is lived coram deo, that is, lived immediately before the face of God. Humankind is by nature man of God (Calvin 1960, 1.1.2).
G.C.Berkouwer, a Dutch theologian, echoes this conviction when he says
The characteristic of the Biblical view lies precisely in this that man appears as related to God in all his creaturely relationships . . . . , the whole Scriptural witness deals with the whole man in the actuality of his existence . . . , its concern is with the whole man, the full man, the actual man as he stands in God’s sight in a religious bond between the totality of his being and God (1962, 32). (The notion of “man” in this and other quotations, pre-dating the use of inclusive language must be taken in its generic sense as referring to human beings).
My understanding of religion is not an essentialistic view as if religion were an “inner” impulse of the heart, which then expresses itself in “outer” behavior or in social structures. I like the formulation of the sociologist Martin Vrieze, who defines lived religion as ‘coram deo, cum hominibus, im mundo, meaning, “before the face of God, with others, in the world” (1984, 74). Religion is not an otherworldly, privatistic matter, but a matter of concrete relationships in the everyday world we experience.
To say that the totality of human life is lived before the face of God is to imply that everything we do, think, or say is always and everywhere a response to God. Our capacity to live is a responsibility, that is, an ability to respond to the norms for living revealed by God in his creation, in the Bible, and in his Son Jesus Christ.
As a lived response to God religion is a multidimensional phenomenon, manifesting itself in a variety of ways. It has an integrative, a normative, an individual-communal, and a historical-developmental dimension.
Being the alpha and omega of life, religion is often viewed as the integrator of human existence. A number of personality theorists have recognized this function of religion. Alfred Adler (1927) referred to it as a “guiding fiction.” Carl G. Jung (1964) called it the “numinous experience,” for Gorden W. Allport (1960) it was a “unifying philosophy of life,” and for Abraham Maslow (1968) it was a matter of “peak experiences.” Each of these in his own way has understood that religion orders life by offering it a foundation and a direction. Religion provides the conditions that make life possible and itendows life with a unifying goal. Because religion is both basic and ultimate it makes human life whole.
Religion also has a normative dimension. Even the most confirmed relativists have their absolutes whereby they distinguish the good life from the bad life, good persons from bad persons, good behavior from bad behavior. It is generally accepted that religion offers a system of norms or values that allows human beings to make normative decisions. Perhaps the most time-honored function of religion in human life is as the guardian of morality.
We never believe anything by ourselves but always in communion with others. Conversely, no organized religion or ideological camp can maintain itself for long without the heartfelt participation of its members. The way people who are our fellow believers live their religion has a profound effect on the way we live our religion. The individual component of lived religion can be distinguished, but never separated from its communal component. Religion is both private conviction and public display. Together these make up the individual-communal dimension of religion. (First Corinthians 12 describes humankind as a body of which individual persons are members.)
Because of its foundational and directional character religion encompasses human life from the beginning of historical time to the present. It also envelops the life of an individual person from conception to death and even beyond the grave. But the way religion is lived, what is taken to be the basis and goal of life, shifts from one historical period to the next and from one stage of an individual’s life to another. The manner in which religion was lived during the Middle Ages differs markedly from the way itis lived in the modern period of history. Similarly the religion of a child is quite different from the religion of an adult. Religion changes during the course of history and develops over a lifetime.
Contrary to the views of Auguste Comte and of some present-day developmental psychologists, religion is not an archaic phenomenon. Neither is its importance restricted to any one stage of life, such as childhood or old age. Religion is not dependent on historical time or developmental age. These do not determine whether a group or an individual is religious but how they live their religion. Historical and developmental change are dimensions of religion.
2The development of lived religion
The purpose of this article is to explore the manner in which religion changes across the life span, and specifically how itis lived during adulthood. What Soren Kierkegaard(l94l) held to be true for the life of faith holds true for the life of religion as well: It cannot be passed on full-blown from one person to the next. Each generation must travel the arduous road of appropriating a religion anew, with changes occurring along the way from one generation to the next. Developmentally and historically, religion changes over time. This means that itmust be learned, taught, and promoted before itcan be passed on to the next generation. This fact has everything to do with the unfolding of religion across the life span.
Some developmental theorists have attempted to investigate the development of those aspects of human existence that traditionally were the intellectual province of philosophers of religion and theologians, that is, ethics and faith. Notable among them are Lawrence Kohlberg (1963), who researched the development of morality and James \V. Fowler (1981), who studied faith development. In their search both these investigators oriented themselves to a cognitive development model, specifically to the theory of Jean Piaget. This approach allowed Kohlberg and Fowler to draw on a wealth of data already collected by Piaget, but italso means that Kohlberg restricted his investigation to the development of moral judgment and Fowler to the development of the cognition of faith. Both theories describe the development of how morality and faith are thought rather than lived
Kohlberg’s and Fowler’s approach not only makes how and what we think determinative for the manner in which we behave morally and walk in faith, but also itisolates our thinking from the rest of life. From a cognitive standpoint the dynamics of our thought, developmental or otherwise, including our thinking about morality and faith, are entirely internal to our thinking.
The cognitive model, regardless of whether itis applied to artificial intelligence, computer science, information processing, or cognitive development, can deal only with concepts, constructs, models, schema, and representations, or with models of models, representations of representations. It does not deny that there is a lived world in which cognition is situated, from which it also derives its representations in the first place, but itcannot explain how the lived world informs the models we make. From the cognitive model’s vantage point, cognitions are like the monads of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646—1716)—they have no windows to the outside.
Furthermore, cognitive theory reserves only a marginal place for instruction and nurture in human development. As we will see, I view nurture and instruction as integral components of lived religion during adulthood, so I find the cognitive development model unsuited to my purposes. I find myself much more at home within the psychosocial view of development articulated by Erikson and, as will become evident, his notions of “basic trust” and “generativity” have had considerable influence on my thinking.
3Stages ofreligious development
If lived religion encompasses the whole of human life, then it is an abstraction to describe the development of religion as a series of stages through which an individual travels from birth to death. One never lives one’s religion by oneself but always in the company of fellow believers. It is the group (the church, the party, or the movement) that believes and confesses as a community of faith.
Itis true that the way religion is lived differs from one member of the group to the next, but itis precisely in terms of these differences that members affect one another, and, if things are right, complement (build up, I Cor. 12) one another in their faith. This certainly holds true for people at different stages of their religious life. Normally, the unfolding of lived religion in adults complements the development of religion in children and vice versa. Each forms the condition for the other. If we ignore this relational and conditional context of religion by describing its development as a process that occurs internally in individual persons only, then, as we will see, the development of lived religion during adulthood will remain unintelligible.
4Trust:the religion of childhood
In what follows I will attempt to describe the stages of religious development as I understand them. Customarily religious development is described as the development of faith, where “faith” is a substantive noun denoting one’s attitude to life or one’s total way of being in the world. I do not use the term in that way. For me, “faith” (or “trust”) is a descriptive adjective characterizing the development of religious life during childhood. Childhood existence is trust-full existence. With little to show for itself as yet, childhood religion is an open, receptive, naively accepting, hopeful, anticipatory existence. The end products of its development are confidence, safety and hope.
Never again can we experience the unconditional trust we feel during childhood. During the first twelve years or so we learn to rely on the constancy and solidity of our physical world; for example, we come to know that the world we cannot see in the dark is the same world we see when the light is on. During this time we also learn to have confidence in our own abilities. We gain the assurance that we are able to do what is expected of us, and we believe that those in whose care we are entrusted are reliable. Finally, if conditions are favorable we develop a basic trust in a providing God who surrounds the whole of our existence.
Both J. Bowlby (1973) and M. D. S. Ainsworth (1970) have demonstrated that the developmental achievement of trust during childhood is important to the rest of our lives. To say that childhood existence is dependent and vulnerable misses the point. Children do not learn to trust because they are vulnerable. Rather, it is because they trust that they can be appropriately dependent on those responsible for their care, even if this also makes them vulnerable to those caregivers who fail to exercise that responsibility. Pure, childlike faith, unalloyed confidence is a developmental necessity insofar as it provides both the solid foundation for, and the open door to, further stages of growth.
5Commitment: the religion of adolescence
A childlike faith is an immature faith if itpersists unchanged during adolescence. Lived religion demands development as life opens up and unfolds. During adolescence the distinctive character of the development of our religious life is commitment. Adolescence is a time for making choices. Who am I? What is important in my life? What should I do? Whom shall I serve? Where am I going and with whom shall I live? These are the questions of adolescence. Teenagers do not ask these questions merely to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. Rather, these questions betray their heightened awareness that there are difficult decisions to be made up ahead.
The whole of an adolescent’s life is focused on the need to make commitments. Every adolescent act is first of all a choice, even the act of whether or not to make a choice. There is a seriousness about adolescent life that is lacking during childhood. Teenagers are busy making the life they live their own, taking responsibility for what they previously took for granted. There is a kind of ethical, moral finality about every choice teenagers make, at least in their own mind. They are involved in a process, the end product of which is a committed life. If we fail to see the centrality of commitment during this stage of development we will never fathom the struggle that being a teenager represents, nor will we understand why some adolescents have to be dragged into adulthood.
Adolescents who have learned to take life on the chin and to revel in the challenges of such a commitment can be said to be adults. They are now able to take care of themselves and are willing to be responsible for their lives. They have come of age and must be respected for it.
There is a world of difference between the trust-full existence of a child and the committed life-style of a young adult. It is, therefore, an obvious pedagogical mistake to treat an adult as a child or to treat a child as an adult. Some denominations fail to recognize the religious importance of this pedagogical fact. It will need little argument that both trust and commitment, faith and obedience, are essential components of, at least, the Christian religion. But not everyone acknowledges that trust must precede commitment in the order of religious development. It may be possible to demand a decision for Christ of a child who has not yet learned to trust. But it is a pedagogical mistake on both developmental and religious grounds because itcan only yield an anxious obedience at first, and later, a righteousness based on works. Similarly, to expect no more of an adult than childlike trust is to rob the religious dynamic of its developmental fruitfulness. Trust-full faith comes into its own in committed obedience.
6Effective nurture: the religion of early adulthood
Childhood religion finds its endpoint in the committed life of young adulthood but this is not the culmination of religious development. If lived religion were a purely intra-individual affair, its development would end with the achievement of adulthood. Lived religion has a communal structure, however, that cannot be accounted for on the basis of individual development alone. If we believed only for and by ourselves, it would be inexplicable why the faith of others, or the lack thereof, would affect us as profoundly as it does. People mutually influence one another for better or worse by the way they live their religion.
During childhood children naively accept the content of their religion from the significant adults in their lives and anticipate the future development of their religion in terms of the patterns of commitment these adults exhibit. Even adolescents do not live out their religion without being influenced by this communal context. Their choices are fashioned from the options available to them in their culture.
Even though children and teenagers never live their religion by themselves, they may be said to live their religion for themselves. They are as a rule preoccupied with themselves. Children may ask, “How can Ibe safe?” but they never question how their sense of trust affects others. Teenagers may ask, “What do Ibelieve?” but they do not wonder what impact their commitment has on others. Children and teenagers are concerned about the effect others have on them, but they are not concerned about the effect they have on others. In this sense we can characterize the religion of children and adolescents as a purely intra-individual affair.
The religion of adults, however, is different. To be an adult by definition means that one is able to take care of oneself. This implies that one has developed a religious commitment that one can call one’s own. However, for the further development of religion during adulthood it is essential to put this commitment to work for others. Being there for others is inherent to the development of lived religion during adulthood.
There appear to be some developmental factors that distinguish adulthood from both the preceding childhood and adolescent stages and the succeeding stages of life. Researchers of adult development, such as Daniel Levinson (1978), R. L. Gould (1978), and Robert J. Havighurst (1972), all suggest that young adulthood is a period of “making it,”a period of realizing a dream. In addition, Erik Erikson (1963) has shown that this process typically culminates in generativity for mature adults. Adulthood seems to be the period par excellence when, to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, we work in order to love.