Perspective Shift:
- Most people think faith is about what you believe — it’s really about how you make meaning. What we call “faith” isn’t just what we believe about God or religion — it’s how we organize meaning itself. Everyone lives by faith in something. The question is: how complex, inclusive, and coherent is the system holding your ultimate concerns?
- You don’t outgrow your earlier stages. You carry them with you. Each new stage of faith includes and transcends the previous one. Mature development doesn’t discard simplicity or belonging; it reclaims them within wider frames of depth and integration.
- Paradox isn’t a failure of logic but a feature of more complex worldviews. What feels like contradiction at one level can become integration at the next. As faith matures, it becomes less about certainty and more about the capacity to hold tension without collapse.
- Faith development isn’t just personal; it’s civilizational. As humanity faces overlapping global crises, we’re not just lacking better systems — we’re lacking deeper structures of meaning. Updating our faith line isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity for navigating the meaning crisis at the heart of the metacrisis.
- Don’t just ask what someone believes, ask how they’re thinking about their beliefs. Surface content can be misleading. What matters most is the structure of thought behind the belief — its complexity, coherence, and capacity for self-reflection.
- Development isn’t just upward — it’s inward and outward. Faith doesn’t grow by rejecting earlier stages, but by including and transcending them. True growth means honoring our roots while expanding our view — integrating childlike wonder, communal belonging, critical reason, and mystical openness into a fuller expression of meaning.
In this groundbreaking presentation, Brendan Dempsey introduces a comprehensive update and revitalization of James Fowler’s influential Faith Development Theory (FDT). Integrating sophisticated modern measurement tools, particularly the Lectical Assessment System (LAS), Dempsey reveals nuanced insights into how individuals evolve in their meaning-making capacities, ultimate concerns, and existential understanding.
Fowler’s original model, widely adopted within integral and developmental circles, portrayed faith as universal—extending far beyond religious traditions—and progressing through stages from literal, concrete beliefs to complex, reflective, and integrative worldviews. Fowler identified several key stages, including:
- Stage 1: Intuitive-Projective (imaginative and impressionistic; shaped by early experiences and powerful images)
- Stage 2: Mythic-literal (literal and transactional understanding)
- Stage 3: Synthetic-Conventional (community-oriented and traditional)
- Stage 4: Individuative-Reflective (critical, reflective, evidence-based)
- Stage 5: Conjunctive Faith (embracing paradox, symbolic language, and multiple perspectives)
Dempsey’s pioneering research rigorously confirms Fowler’s stages with empirical precision, showcasing a remarkably strong correlation between traditional FDT assessments and contemporary hierarchical complexity metrics. Moreover, Dempsey provides a clear alignment of Fowler’s stages with other integral and developmental frameworks, such as Ken Wilber’s altitudes and Piaget’s cognitive developmental stages. This integration offers an enriched understanding of how Fowler’s insights relate to broader developmental psychology and cultural evolution.
Through meticulous quantitative analysis of original faith-development interview transcripts, complemented by vivid qualitative examples, Dempsey highlights subtle yet profound transitions in developmental stages. He clarifies critical distinctions between content-based and structurally-based assessments, addressing previous scoring pitfalls and demonstrating how developmental stages genuinely reflect deeper cognitive and existential shifts rather than surface-level thematic content alone.
This work carries significant implications for addressing the ongoing meta-crisis by offering empirically grounded strategies to cultivate richer, more integrative forms of meaning-making. The refined model promises profound applications—from tailored educational initiatives and coaching interventions to transformative cultural and institutional strategies aimed at cognitive elites and key influencers.
Whether you’re a researcher, educator, coach, or simply curious about the deeper structures guiding our understanding of reality and meaning, this presentation delivers essential insights and powerful tools to help us collectively navigate today’s complex and rapidly evolving world.
Key Questions
Here are some questions you can contemplate while listening to this discussion. We suggest you take some time to use these as journaling prompts.
- What do I ultimately trust — and how has that trust evolved? Reflect on how your sense of what is most real, true, or guiding has changed over time. What shaped those shifts? Where are you now in your relationship to meaning?
- Am I comfortable questioning my own deeply held beliefs? Are your guiding beliefs inherited, chosen, or examined? What happens when you hold them up to scrutiny — not just intellectually, but existentially?
- Where in my life do I encounter paradox — and how do I respond? Do you collapse tension into certainty, avoid contradiction, or begin to embrace the complexity? What would it mean to hold paradox as a sacred teacher?
- How do I make sense of other people’s beliefs? When others express a very different faith or worldview, do you judge, dismiss, or empathize? Can you sense the developmental structure behind their belief system?
- What kind of faith system am I modeling for others? Whether you’re a parent, teacher, leader, or friend, your relationship to meaning ripples outward. What are you unconsciously teaching others about how to relate to the unknown?
- What stage of faith do I most resist, and why? Is there a particular kind of religiosity or skepticism that triggers you? Could that be an invitation to integrate something you’ve left behind or not yet grown into?
- Am I growing my faith, or defending it? Are your conversations, reading habits, and spiritual practices helping you deepen and expand… or helping you protect and preserve what you already know?
- What would it mean to have a more integrative relationship with the sacred? Beyond belief and doubt, what is your lived relationship with ultimate concern? Can you sense a deeper coherence that includes mystery, science, suffering, and joy?
Be sure to check out Brendan’s initiative at the Institute of Applied Metatheory:
Faith Development Pathway
The Faith Development Pathway (FDP) is a pioneering initiative dedicated to creating the world’s first open-access protocol for the developmental maturation of faith and ultimate concern. Building on James Fowler’s influential stages of faith and advancing them through the neo-Piagetian lens of hierarchical complexity scoring—specifically via the Computerized Lectical Assessment System (CLAS)—the FDP systematically charts the evolving cognitive and existential architecture of human meaning-making. Its goal is to rationally reconstruct the topography of healthy faith development across the lifespan and democratize this knowledge through accessible tools, assessments, and pedagogical applications. By equipping educators, spiritual leaders, curriculum designers, and social innovators with a scientifically rigorous and spiritually attuned developmental framework, the FDP aims to support both horizontal and vertical growth in faith across diverse populations. Envisioned as an incubator for a future Faith Development Institute, the initiative seeks to steward, refine, and disseminate this integrative protocol across disciplines, traditions, and global contexts. [+link]
About Brendan Graham Dempsey
Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer whose work focuses on the meaning crisis and the nature of spirituality in metamodernity. He earned his BA in Religious Studies from the University of Vermont and his MA in Religion and the Arts from Yale University. His work has been deeply influenced by the writings of Ken Wilber and other integral thinkers. He lives in Greensboro Bend, Vermont, where he runs the holistic retreat center Sky Meadow.