015: Mormon Stages of Faith with Tom Kimball and Dan Wotherspoon Pt. 1 | Ep. 2030

Hello and welcome to the Mormon Stories podcast. My name is John DeLynne. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you've been enjoying the podcasts. For those of you who are able to listen to the Todd Compton series on polygamy, I hope you enjoyed it. As always, we really appreciate your feedback. Please send all feedback to MormonStories.com or check out MormonStories.org

or LDS Liberation Front for places to comment. Today we are very excited to have two very special guests. My guests today are Dan Wotherspoon and Tom Kimball. Hey guys, thanks Thanks for coming in. Hey John, thanks for having us.

Let me introduce both of you guys a little bit. Dan Wotherspoon, many of you will recognize him as the editor of Sunstone Magazine. You have a more swankified title though, you Dan. I'm also executive director of the Sunstone Education Foundation.

Okay, that sounds a little bit swankified. There you go. And you have a graduate degree, right? I have, yeah, both a master's and a PhD in religion.

Your PhD is from Claremont graduate university and your master's is from as you Arizona State, okay? And so so welcome Dan. Thanks Tom Tom Tom Kimble is Is it what's your title signature? I'm just the chief book Hocker at signature books. I'm the guy who makes the phone call So Tom kind of sales color work guys. He sales marketing and evangelism and signature books

in Salt Lake City, Utah and also a big fan of Mormon studies. So welcome to you both. Thank you. Just for our listeners' sake, the topic that we have for you today is one

it's quite interesting, it's definitely interesting to me. There's a fellow named James Fowler, who has written on the topic which he likes to call stages of faith. But the basic introduction that I'd like to set up is the following.

Many people in Mormonism who move beyond sort of the Sunday school correlated early years of a testimony, oftentimes when they bump up into church history or have tough issues within the church, or just mature basically, often come to a crisis of faith. And those who frequent the internet and various forums and blogs on the internet

often jump into this exploration that can often lead to a complete erosion of their faith as they knew it. And many of us Mormons who go through this cycle tend to think that it's an experience that's quite unique to Mormonism. And the truth is, is that this fellow named James Fowler has studied lots of

religions and has a lot to teach us about the various stages of faith. There is analysis that's been done that says that as a human being progresses through their faith in their respective religions or whatever it is that there are common things that happen to them as they as they progress and develop and

grow. And so that's pretty much what we're going to talk about today. So to begin I'd like to turn the time over to Dan Witherspoon to start. And Dan's Dan's going to give us sort of a James Fowler Stages of Faith 101, an introduction to who James Fowler was and how he came up with these stages.

So Dan, tell us more. Alright, thanks. James Fowler's book Stages of Faith came out, I believe, in 1986. It's definitely in the mid-80s.

I first encountered it in 1988 as a grad student at Arizona State. It was in a course called Methods where you basically look at religion from all sorts of different perspectives and his was presented as part of a psychological approach to religion, looking at religion from psychological, informed by psychological theories.

Anyway, Fowler and his group for years just conducted interviews with literally thousands of people. And from these questionnaires that they put out there, they began to group people and notice that there were certain meta-things.

Even though you may be interviewing a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist, and things like that, there were sort of these categories and ways of thinking that were beyond each individual tradition that they sort of began to look at as stages or waves or movements within the life of a person of faith.

And they interviewed children right on to people in their 80s and 90s. And what they basically came up with was a schema of different, again I'll just use the word stage, but these aren't hard and fast levels. It's not like you're in stage three, then you're in stage four, then you're

stage five all at once. It's just sort of a gradual progression throughout your life of the way you make meaning and the way you learn to value the world and your place within it. So that's what stage theories are now. The individual stage is like, I can start going through in a minute.

They're not real things, but they're ways in which to quantify and reach the experience that you're having. And Fowler, again, his work is specifically on faith, but it's in conversation with Piaget, who was the famous theorist of child development.

Also Eric Erickson, who taught James Fowler. Lawrence Colberg did sort of the same thing with moral development. How is it that we develop our ethics? Carol Gilligan was a student of Colberg, and she talked about the way we value

or we see the world in terms of justice or care. So he's in conversation with all these things, but he's specifically focused on faith. And so this is just one aspect of development,

a theory, even though it certainly touches bases and has roots in all of them. So tell us about the stages. Well, the basic schema starts with birth.

And he kind of has something that he kind of considers a pre-stage, which is basically the first task of life as a child coming out of the womb is you just get a felt character for the universe.

Mom is holding me, she puts me down, does she come back? Yes, I learned to count on mom as a steady presence in my life. It's this, before language emerges,

you sort of get a sense of whether the universe is a friendly place or not, whether it kind of welcomes your presence or if you feel like an intrusion.

So this is, things can break down at this stage,