Conventional and Synthesized Faith
Index to this Study

The Challenges of Faith in
the Quest for Cosmic Citizenship

In this stage faith attitudes are synthesized from one’s own experience combined with the attitudes expressed within one’s significant social communities.   The emergent strength of this stage is the forming of identity and the shaping of a personal faith.  In many people this stage is sustained throughout life.

Stage 3 Personal Values

In Stage 3, values center on the support of roles which we imagine ourselves to be playing in the social environment.  Moral judgment is based largely on interpersonal expectations and implicit understandings reached between people.

Stage 3 Social Values

In stage 3, other persons are known and evaluated in terms of their supposed personal qualities and interpersonal ways of relating. 

Our self-image is increasingly derived from roles we imagine ourselves to be playing in our families and in our peer relationships.  In a strongly religious person, identity at this stage is usually derived from an imagined role in a powerful mythological story or drama.

Stage 3 Supportive Stories

The forming of a personal myth is a primary element of this stage -- the myth of our own becoming.  We create this personal myth by incorporating stories of our past and anticipated future into our understanding of the world.

Because at this stage our religious hunger is for a God who knows, accepts and confirms our deepest self, with its developing myth of personal identity and faith, it is not surprising that many of the images for transcendence that appeal to us in this stage have the characteristics of a divinely personal significant other, such as a personal saint, angel, companion or other divine being.

Stage 3 Faith Experience

In this stage, the growing extensions of social boundaries lead to the synthesis of a world view derived from stories and symbols of the family, religion of the family, peer group beliefs, and mass media.

At this stage, faith must provide a coherent orientation in the midst of an increasingly complex and diverse range of involvements.  Faith must unify values and information; and it must provide a basis for temporal identity.

Stage 3 faith typically has its rise and ascendancy in adolescence, but for the majority of people it becomes a permanent place of equilibrium.  It is a “conformist” stage in the sense that it is acutely tuned to the expectations and judgments of other people.  It does not yet have a sure enough grasp on its own identity and autonomous judgment to construct and maintain an independent perspective.

At Stage 3 we acquire an “ideology,” a more or less consistent clustering of values and beliefs, but we have not examined it and in a sense are unaware of having it.  Differences of outlook with others are experienced as differences in “kind” of person.

Stage 3 Faith Challenges

At this stage, formal operational thinking, with its new capacity for reflection on our own thought and ways of experiencing, invites us mentally to step outside the flow of life’s river and to analyze the process.  From a vantage point on the river bank, we can take a look at the flow of the river as a whole.

Faith at this stage is “synthetic” in that it is non-analytical;  It develops as a result of choosing various meanings and values which exist in the social environment and which are implemented in the behaviors of significant persons in our social communities. 

A discussion of values and beliefs by a Stage 3 person is a means of asserting his or her solidarity with the community which is considered one's own and from which social identity is derived.  This person does not discuss values in order to be sure that they accurately reflect cosmic reality.  Rather, in discussions he or she seeks to establish a sense of commonality with significant other individuals or members of a significant community.  In fact, at this stage intellectual analysis of the elements of faith is often viewed as a lack of faith, a failure of faith, or a betrayal of faith. 

The dangers or deficiencies in this stage are twofold.  The expectations and evaluations of others can be so compellingly internalized that later autonomy of judgment and action can be jeopardized.  Interpersonal betrayals may give rise either to despair about the possiblities of a personal God or to a compensatory intimacy with God which is not really related to practical matters of daily life.

Factors contributing to the breakdown of Stage 3 and to readiness for transition may include: serious clashes or contradictions between valued authority sources, or the encounter with experiences or perspectives that lead to critical reflection on how our beliefs and values have formed and changed, and on how “relative” they are to our particular group, education or background.