There are distinct steps of mental development, reflected in religious thought and speech, that one climbs in making the transition from a child to an adult way of thinking religiously. The general character of these devel- opmental steps is common to all cognitive stage models. We can think of ascending this sequence of steps as an increasing ability to think in complex ways about religious or spiritual matters.
The Basic Picture
Cognitive and emotional processes at relatively early stages of development are at work in the meanings children learn to “see” in symbols (verbal, physical, ritual), the feelings they learn to attach to them, and the behaviors they learn to associate with them. Because children have not yet devel- oped to the adult level, their minds do not work as adult minds do. They
do not attribute the same meanings as adults to key symbols, such as the words god, soul, afterlife, religion, and spirituality. Thus, for psychological understanding we need to not only identify these differences developmen- tally, but also to clarify how our theoretical ideas apply to explaining them.
Intimately linked to a child’s perception is the child’s language. It is through words and other symbols that religious and spiritual beliefs, rules, and experiences become specific points of reference in children’s minds.
Their meanings are manifest through memory. Words are symbolic pegs on which children hang selected thoughts, and words gain meaning through experience. But unlike the adult, who has a large store of language and memory to draw on in order to understand and modify the meaning of new words, the child must learn the meaning of every new word from scratch. A consequence of this is that words initially have only concrete, limited mean- ings. At first there can be but little verbal abstraction to general classes and little conscious tendency to think in terms of general principles (such as kindness, goodness, etc.) or nonphysical entities (e.g., God, heaven), even though the assumption of an existent caregiver, even if physically absent, is crucial. At the beginning, children of necessity can understand a word to represent only concrete (experienced) things or acts. But they begin to infer abstract rules very quickly. The meaning children attribute to words is at first much more literal rather than figurative, though in time they develop a paradigm of figurative meaning alongside literal meaning.
This issue of concreteness versus abstractness becomes especially important as it pertains to questions about religious language and sym- bols. Because early on children think in concrete terms, religious language for them connotes concrete entities. Thus, the term God for a young child is likely to mean big person. If God is called Father, the child thinks in terms of an oversized, more powerful father who is basically similar to the child’s actual father. Depending upon the language with which the child has heard God referred to and the child’s perceptions of those purported to have Godlike attributes (e.g., Santa Claus), the child may have the mental impression that God is a big old person in the sky. Questions asked about God by children in grades K–3 reveal the way they think: “Does God die like everyone else?” “How does God pick up people that are dead?” They also ask about how God makes himself, how he gets up in the sky, how he makes things, how and when he was born, how old he is, whether he is married, and whether he is Christian or Jewish (Zeligs, 1974). One Muslim child told me that she “knew” that Allah spoke her language, Arabic. Box 5.1 illustrates how youngsters communicate with God, via letter, about the earth, friends, and religion.
The meaning of prayer is also simple for young children. Often prayer is understood to be a tool used to get something— especially when nothing else works. For example, I have observed 4-year-old youngsters playing a game of marbles. When one child did not get to make the desired move, the
child blurted out, “Next time I’m going to pray before I throw the dice!”
Prayer was apparently seen as a type of force—a tool to be used to produce a desired outcome. Only when the child reaches a higher level of cognitive ability will this and other religious or spiritual practices become infused with deeper meaning.
With the introductory summary of a cognitive– developmental approach presented, let us now go into greater detail in two lines of research that illustrate it. First let’s look at research on how religious concepts develop in children. Then we will take a look at what praying sounds like across those same years.
Research on Stages of Religious Concepts
The results of several studies of religious thinking are generally consistent with a three-stage model. In one early study, Harms (1944) asked several thousand children covering the full childhood age range to draw their idea of God. He also discussed this with them and thus obtained verbal (written or spoken) statements about what they thought God was like. He concluded that there were three stages:
1. Ages 3 to 6 years were called the fairytale stage. At this stage reli- gion, as reflected in ideas about God, seemed to be at the same level as stories about giants, talking animals, ghosts, angels with wings, and Santa Claus. It appeared difficult for a child at this stage to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. A further, practical complication is that adults sometimes tell the child that an actual fantasy is a reality (as is sometimes the case in the United States with Santa Claus), so that the difficulty in distinguishing fantasy from reality becomes even greater.
BOX 5.1. Children’s Letters to God, from Heller (1987) Dear God,
Why did you give Jesus such a hard time? My dad is rough on me too.
So I know what it’s like. Maybe you both could ease up?
Mark [age 11]
Dear Ms. God:
I believe that you are a woman. In fact I am sure for sure. I think that is why the rivers and sky and birds are so beautiful.
If by some flook you are a boy please do note take it out on me. Boys should not hit girls.
Trisha [age 11]
2. The second stage was between 7 and 12, and was called the realis- tic stage. Here the child tended to concretize religious concepts. God and angels were seen as real persons. They were superhuman but influenced events on earth, like the gods of ancient Greece. Religious symbols began to acquire meaning. The children’s drawings included institutional symbols such as the Cross, Star of David, drawings of churches, and so forth. At this stage, children began to differentiate obvious fantasy. For example, they began to realize that Santa Claus was a fantasy.
3. Ages 13 to 18 were called the individualistic stage. This stage was characterized by the greatest diversity, and was broken down into three cat- egories. One group held conventional religious ideas and basically adhered to the mainline religion of their group. A second group was more mystical.
Their drawings contained fewer of the traditional religious symbols and more of the abstract expressions such as a sunset or light in the clouds.
A third group expressed religion through symbols of religions and cults that they had imagined and/or learned something about but had never experienced— such as religions of foreign or primitive cultures or ancient religions.
Goldman (1964) conducted landmark research on religious develop- ment. He used an interview method in which children were asked questions relating to religious pictures and Bible stories. Ten boys and 10 girls at each age from 6 to 16 were interviewed (a total of 200 white, Protestant British children). Like Harms, Goldman concluded that there were three stages of religious development. Goldman’s stages parallel Harms’s very closely but are couched in distinctively Piagetian terms. His first stage (up to 7–8 years) was called “preoperational intuitive thought.” It was characterized by unsystematic and fragmentary religious thinking, illustrated by lack of understanding of religious material due to not being able to consider all the evidence involved in a religious story. For example, the question “Why was Moses afraid to look at God?” (Exodus 3:6) received answers like “Because God had a funny face” (p. 52). The second stage (ages 7–8 to 13–14), labeled
“concrete operational thought” (obviously Piagetian again), was typified by the children focusing on specific details of pictures and stories. When asked why Moses was afraid to look at God, children at this stage referred to aspects of the story itself but in a concrete way: “Because it was a ball of fire. He thought it might burn him” or “It was a bright light and to look at it might blind him” (p. 56). Goldman’s third stage (ages 13–14 and up) was called “formal (abstract) operational thought.” Goldman’s interviews with this age group contained evidence of hypothetical and abstract religious thought. For example, Moses was said to be afraid to look at God because
“God is holy and the world is sinful” or “The awesomeness and almighti- ness of God would make Moses feel like a worm in comparison” (p. 60).
Goldman’s research caused controversy because it seemed to have implications for how children should be taught a religion. That is, the results might be interpreted to mean that inculcating young children with a literal interpretation of the Bible could, in the long run, be counterproduc- tive. Children’s minds were constructed so that (so the argument went) they were prone to accept literalism only up to a certain point. When, through the natural course of development, their minds moved to higher levels of functioning, they would be inclined to reject the literal teaching of their past. Two (uncertain) consequences might follow: the youth might then either retain the beliefs but in a nonliteral way, or reject them. And both of these outcomes would be seen as negative by those who insist on a literal approach as the only true one. Hyde (1990) reports that Goldman even received “abusive, anonymous letters” by some who were critical of his conclusions.
Building on Goldman’s work, Pealting (1974, 1977) created the Think- ing about the Bible (TAB) test. Goldman’s method involved “semiclinical”
interviews that yielded much verbal material that had to be content ana- lyzed. Pealting took the stories Goldman used and wrote four questions for each one. Each question had four response options. Of the four response options (of which the subject had to choose the most and the least accept- able), one represented each of the following levels of religious thinking: very concrete, concrete, abstract, and very abstract. The answers for the two concrete categories were combined, and the answers for the two abstract categories were combined. This yielded two scores, one for abstract and one for concrete religious thinking.
Pealting (1974) got results that were in general similar to those of Goldman. The TAB was given to 1,994 students in Episcopalian schools, from grades 4 to 12. There was a linear increase in abstract thinking scores across the grade levels, as would be expected based on Goldman’s results.
It was somewhat unclear whether the data showed plateaus in strict accor- dance with a stage model, or whether they showed a gradual incline in abstract religious thinking. This lack of clarity could easily be due to the difference between the two techniques— Goldman’s interview method and Pealting’s scaling method. The general direction of the results was suffi- ciently robust to be replicated in Finland by Tamminen (1991) with youth ages 9–20. This crosscultural replication suggests robustness of the trends and is clearly reflected in the data in Figure 5.1.
Research on Stages of Prayer
Long, Elkind, and Spilka (1967) studied religious developmental stages by asking children about prayer. They asked 160 boys and girls ages 5–12 questions such as “Do you pray?” “Does your family pray?” “Do all boys and girls pray?” “Do dogs and cats pray?” “What is prayer?” “Can you pray
for more than one thing?” “What must you do if your prayer is answered?
If it is not?” “Where do prayers come from?” “Where do prayers go?” They also asked children to respond to the following incomplete statements: “I usually pray when . . . ” “Sometimes I pray for . . . ” “When I pray I feel . . . ” “When I see someone praying I . . . ”
Their results suggested that religious development, as traced via chil- dren’s statements about prayer, appears to evolve across three stages:
1. Global, undifferentiated stage (ages 5–7). Here the child’s under- standing of prayer was very rudimentary and vague: “A prayer is about God, rabbits, dogs and fairies and deer, and Santa Claus and turkey and pheasants, and Jesus and Mary and Mary’s little baby.”
“A prayer is God bless people who want to say God bless. Now I lay me down to sleep” (p. 104).
2. Concrete, differentiated stage (7–9 years). Here prayer was under- stood as uttering verbal requests, as distinct from expressing a deeper thought or feeling that would underlie them in older children.
FIGURE 5.1. Total Abstract Scale Score on the Thinking about the Bible Test (TAB) across the grade levels for the studies by Pealting, Laabs, and Tamminen.
Abstract scale scores can range from 36 to 60. From Tamminen (1991, p. 105).
Reprinted with permission from the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
3. Abstract, differentiated stage (ages 11–12). Here prayer behavior was an external expression of an internal activity that, in essence, was conversation with God. Concrete requests were proportionally less prevalent. Prayer was sharing of intimacies— a way to commu- nicate with God.
Although there are differences between Long et al.’s research and that of Tamminen (1991) (e.g., the stage at which the shift from petitionary prayer to nonpetitionary prayer took place—such differences can be attrib- uted to cultural factors), the overall theme that emerged from the findings was similar. For example, Tamminen found that from grade 3 to grade 9 (American grades 4–10) there was a slight decrease from 30 to 24%
in the proportion of answers to the question “I think prayer is . . . ” that were concrete in nature, such as asking for something from God. Con- versely, across that same age range there was an increase from 19 to 40%
in the proportion of answers that were more abstract, such as conversation with God or general reliance on God. Similar trends resulted when the youngsters were asked, “Has God answered your prayers in some way or other? . . . If so, please write about the occasion(s).” From Finnish grades 3–9 there was a decrease from 22 to 10% in the proportion of concrete answers (“help in illness”) and an increase in the more abstract answers (“the spiritual effect of prayer”). Extending the findings, in response to being questioned about the effect of prayer, the youngest (ages 7–10) mostly saw God as acting directly, whereas the children ages 11–12 were more likely to see God as acting indirectly, for example, through medica- tion or circumstances. Overall, the general pattern of this set of findings suggested that they could attributed to basic psychological processes, and that individual differences among the findings of various studies could be attributed to unique features of the religious subgroup being studied or to cultural variations.
Reflection
The findings from these two lines of developmental research— on reli- gious concepts and on prayer— are so consistent with each other that one is tempted to conclude that religious development is as simple as it is por- trayed in the three-step model presented above, and that there is not much else to learn about it. However, this is not so. Research on the develop- ment of religiousness and spirituality has gone further and added to the preceding picture in two important ways. First, far more is involved than cognition only; learning, attachment processes, and socialization are all features essential to gaining a fuller understanding of the subject. Second, development does not stop at the end of childhood; it continues throughout the lifespan. We pick up these two topics in subsequent sections.