normally. They also depend on healthy development. If developmen- tal processes do not unfold well, then the other foundational processes noted above, on whose interaction a healthy human depends, cannot function as they should. Therefore, a well- conceived understanding of religiousness and spirituality requires an examination of what develop- ment means in the context of the psychological roots, or beginnings, of what became meaning system processes. This understanding enables not only a deeper grasp of developmental processes in childhood and adolescent religiousness and spirituality, but also of every topic involv- ing religiousness and spirituality throughout adulthood. Thus, Chapter 5 highlights research on religiousness and spirituality in childhood and adolescence; it closes with a presentation of lifespan models. Chapters 6–11 then address substantive topics on religiousness and spirituality as they are manifested in myriad ways throughout one’s life.
Foundations of Root Capabilities
This prelude to Chapters 5–11 examines the origin and development of key psychological processes that are the substrates, or roots, of what makes it possible for us to make meaning, be religious, and seek that which we mark as spiritual. In order to explain what I mean by the development of the substrates of meaning systems and therefore set the stage for the psychological capacity for religiousness and spirituality, let us walk through a series of illustrations of aspects of human and animal functioning for which the development of some form of meaning mak- ing, assessment, and remaking is an essential aspect. The sequence will go from the micro to the macro level of analysis. Each step represents an instance of meaning system properties identifiably more developed than the ones before it. The human propensity for meaning making, religiousness, and spirituality is increased as one goes up the steps from a relatively rudimentary system to complex human global meaning sys- tems (Paloutzian & Mukai, 2017; Park, 2010).
Seeing
Consider perceptual processes. Visual meaning does not come from the human eye making a photograph of an object that is “really out there” and depositing it in exact, unchanging form into your occipital cortex. Instead, certain wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, called light, bounce off an object (let us assume it is a red apple) and
enter your eye through the pupil. Then they strike rods and cones in the retina, whose network of cells partially processes the smattering of stimulation and transduces it to neural impulses that follow the visual pathway in the brain. From this barrage of information a percept is con- structed. Our perceptual system has made a meaningful percept out of a barrage of wavelengths of light: a delicious red apple that we can eat or throw. Percepts are meanings made. They are also central to the further appraisal of perceptual information as global meaning systems become more complex and include other components such as goals, attitudes and values, identity, and worldview. And the construction of symbols as meaningful percepts is inherent in religiousness and spirituality.
The above example, indicating that perception requires the visual, auditory, or other sensory system to have well- functioning meaning- making capabilities, can be seen as somewhat unidirectional,1 in the sense that stimuli enter the system from the outside and are appraised and interpreted after a pattern based on them is constructed inside. But let us go up the ladder of complexity only one small step, and we will begin to see how a process that appears to us only slightly more complex requires a more developed meaning- making and appraisal potential.
Learning
Meaning- making and assessment functions are important for the way animals learn to respond to ambiguous stimuli and learn the location of food in a maze (or in their natural habitat). For example, in the first trial run in a T-maze, a rat is in a completely unknown environment and has no clue about whether food is located down the left or right arm of the maze. But after several trials and errors the rat has made the “correct” meaning out of the ambiguous stimulus series to which it has been exposed and has learned to turn left at the choice point to receive food reinforcement. It has “connected the dots” (i.e., figured out or “perceived” the pattern) between running down the runway, see- ing the choice point, executing one turn and not the other, and finding food in the goal box. Operant conditioning, a process of learning by reinforcement, is another instance of meaning making. And given that it requires not only perceptual capability but also the application of sensory– motor, neuromuscular, and appraisal- of- success skills over and above sense perception, the meaning system processes in this example
1 Actually, it is not unidirectional, as there is both bottom- up and top-down pro- cessing. See any textbook on sensation and perception for more clarification.
can be understood as more developed than those for vision only. And learning patterns and relationships is inherent in all known religious and spiritual systems. One is hard pressed to imagine the transmission of these systems from one generation to the next without the new gen- eration learning from their elders the relevant attitudes and beliefs, val- ues, goals, overall purposes, meaning of individual identity, and locus of ultimate concerns.
Intuiting
Next, consider the case of a rabbit sitting in the middle of a clearing in a forest. Evolutionary processes are relevant in this example. All of a sudden, the rabbit hears the leaves at one edge of the clearing rustle and stir; the rabbit looks and sees the leaves shake. Is it the wind? A hungry lion? A human hunter? The rabbit is confronted with an ambiguous stimulus complex, a circumstance of uncertainty its response to which could mean living or dying (and thereby reproducing or not). If you were the rabbit, what would you do? Evolutionary processes have selected for rabbits the behaviors of running and hiding upon confronting such ambiguous stimuli. Of course, many times that response may be techni- cally unnecessary because the rustling leaves may be due to the wind.
But it is evolutionarily unfair to call the response an error because if the rustling leaves are hiding a lion, the rabbit will die. A rabbit gets to make an “error” (not running away) in this situation only once.
Because of selection processes such as those operating in this rab- bit scenario, many organisms evolved to respond to possible danger with safety- enhancing reactions. What meaning system capabilities are needed for a rabbit to have evolved this way? I hesitate to apply words appropriate for humans to other animals, but it may not be inappropri- ate to say that the rabbit has had to develop the “rabbit analogue” to the human capability to conceptualize alternative possible outcomes from a specific set of ambiguous circumstances, and to engage in the process of believing one of those conceptualizations as a potential danger. The rabbit might also feel what humans would call anxious arousal. In this example, the rabbit has to be able to “imagine” that there is a lion there whose bite is lethal or a human whose arrow is deadly, and that it will be safe if it moves to another location. That is, the rabbit has to have developed what in humans we would call the ability to “intuit” or guess what might be there, engage in the process of believing that intuition, and then choose the appropriate response to that process. This means
that the rabbit has evolved to make meanings that are often technically not required, because by doing so it is more likely to live and reproduce.
Of course, in the above characterization of what evolution is select- ing in the rabbit, I may have assumed too much cognitive processing and intelligence on the rabbit’s part. Do I really suggest the rabbit is capable of imagining anything? I don’t know, and offer it only as an analogue to make the point about constructing meaning out of ambiguous stimuli.
The rabbit cannot see the threat, but there are stimuli that trigger its reaction to flee. An equally plausible process may be that the ambigu- ity of the stimuli triggers anxiety and the anxiety carries the mean- ing “danger,” and that the rabbit’s fleeing the scene helps the anxiety (and the danger meaning) to dissipate. Or, perhaps more plausible, the anxiety process and a rudimentary imaginative process coevolve and over time make up part of an overall meaning making, appraisal, and response capability.
Certain evolved meaning system intuitions yield responses that facilitate survival. Of course there are many developmental steps on the ladder going from a rabbit to a human, but the fundamental meaning making processes are the same because evolutionary processes select for them. And if human beings, like the rabbit, have developed the abil- ity to intuit possible danger that is unseen, then I do not see it as sur- prising that they can also intuit other beings, such as a god, gods, or other forces, which they also cannot see but to which they nevertheless respond.
Implementing
It is known that some birds and nonhuman primates can use tools. In order for them to do this, they must have developed complex layers of meaning system processes. Take, for example, the way an animal can mold a stick or a rock into a tool and then use that tool to trap or
“prepare” food to be eaten later. In order to use objects in this way, the animal has to be capable of psychologically going into the future, even if only by a small amount. Using implements in a way that “saves” or
“prepares” food for a subsequent dining experience requires some rudi- ments of what in human terms we would call time perception— the abil- ity to “see” ahead, plan accordingly, and then remember to perform the appropriate behaviors at the appointed time. Such mental abilities allow for layers of meaning making over and above those that are phylogeneti- cally older. One starts to consider that such developments constitute the
ability to remember and imagine— processes at the core of how religions and spiritualities function at the level of both the individual and the group.
Remembering
For the nonhuman animal to perform the behavior of forming and using a tool to save or prepare food for future consumption, the more complex memory systems would have had to develop. But even human memory is based on meaning making. It is now known that a memory is not
“retrieved” in the form in which it was initially stored, but is instead
“reconstructed” (i.e., a meaning- remaking process) and can actually be changed by that very process, that is, the meaning that was made and called a memory can be reconsolidated and stored in a new form (Debiec, LeDoux, & Nader, 2002). Thus, as the capacity to remember extends further, its interactions with the elements of the meaning system become more complicated. And it thereby fosters further development of that system.
Imagining
In Chapter 3, I briefly discussed Bellah’s (2011) theory that human reli- giousness has its roots in play and imagination (Burghardt, 2005, in press). It does seem that whenever humans developed what came to be called religions, the capability of imagination was concurrent with it and probably a requirement for it. We can add to this same time period the development of human language as we know it, humans living in complex social groups, and the establishment of what Park (2010, 2013) calls global meaning systems— complex blends of conscious worldviews, values, specific goals and larger purposes, visions for the future, and identities, as well as the tendency to infer the content of others’ minds (what psychologists call theory of mind [ToM]). This means that people became able to not only remember and imagine what they had done before. They also became able to imagine things that had never been, remember (reconstruct) those imaginings, and imagine paths to take and goals to pursue in order make those things actual. Religious ritu- als, believing that deities have minds, and the ability to make imaginary worlds (as when children play “doctor and nurse” according to imagi- nary rules [Taves, 2013]) are all manifestations of such processes. The
ability to mentally construct and manipulate symbols thus became fun- damental to what humans now do to make meaning out of ambiguity and establish global meaning systems. Whatever else religions might be, they help serve that function in the human mind (Burris & Raif, 2015).
Social Interdependence
It seems almost self- evident that religions are social and that the rudi- mentary capabilities summarized above set the stage for, and are inher- ent in, the social manifestations of religion and spirituality throughout the lifespan. But it is in the social contexts, in groupness, that some people express whatever is spiritual or religious to them in the most profound ways— sometimes in cases of violence and killing and at other times in cases of forgiving and loving. Current events provide us with plenty of both to see. The point here is that the blend of the evolved capabilities noted above seems to manifest in a full and complex form as humans express their religiousness and spirituality in aggregates, instead of as isolates. Although this idea is implicit in all the chapters that follow, it seems especially important in certain discussions in Chap- ters 7, 8, 11, and 12.
Summary
The development of meaning system processes are fundamental to the acquisition and development of religiousness and spirituality in the same sense that the development of motivation, perception, behavior acqui- sition, cognition, social influence, and personality dynamics are. The evolved capabilities that lie at the root of human behaviors, including religiousness and spirituality, alone and in combination with each other, are among the essentials of meaning making, appraisal, and response capabilities. They include seeing, learning, intuiting, implementing, remembering, and imagining. Each capability is essential and interacts with and depends upon the others. These interactions give rise to the religious and spiritual meanings people ascribe to things and the goals and behaviors they invoke to fulfill them.
The rest of this book documents how central such processes are to religiousness in all its manifestations and by any definition, spirituali- ties in all their variations, with their myriad and conflicting assump- tions, and all related issues of equal importance.
FURTHER RE ADING
Bellah, R. N. (2011). Religion in human evolution: From the paleolithic to the axial age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.—Chapters 2 and 10 have good discussions of the role of evolved capacities of imagination and play in religiousness.
Burghardt, G. M. (in press). The origins, evolution, and interconnections of play and ritual: Setting the stage. In C. Renfrew, I. Morley, & M. Boyd (Eds.), Play, ritual and belief in animals and in early human societies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Paloutzian, R. F., & Mukai, K. J. (2017). Believing, remembering, and imagin- ing: The roots and fruits of meanings made and remade. In H.-F. Angel, L.
Oviedo, R. F. Paloutzian, R. Seitz, & A. L. C. Runihov (Eds.), Process of believing: The acquisition, maintenance, and change in creditions. Heidel- berg, Springer.
Taves, A. (2013). Building blocks of sacralities: A new basis for comparison across cultures and religions. In R. F. Paloutzian & C. L. Park (Eds.), Handbook of the psychology of religion and spirituality (2nd ed., pp. 138–161). New York:
Guilford Press.
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Models of Religiousness and Spirituality in Children Cognitively Oriented Research on Child Religious Development
Learning, Attachment, and Socialization of Religion Interdependence and Religiousness
Adolescents and Young Adults Two Lifespan Models Seniorhood Research Snapshots
Take-Home Messages Further Reading
W
hen exploring what preschool children thought about the concept“soul,” Boyatzis (1997) found that 20% said that furniture had soul, 40% said plants did, and 45% said cats and dogs did. With respect to humans, who had soul was dependent upon age: babies, 48% (similar to cats and dogs); children, 64%; parents, 75%. Highlighting that these answers were from young children, the question emerges, “What do pro- cesses of psychological development have to do with what or how people think about religious or spiritual matters?” Do children have spiritual lives as we think of them? If so, how can this be? If not, then what should we make of children’s verbalizations and behaviors that look spiritual or reli- gious to us?
In Chapter 1 we dealt with the problems involved in trying to define religion and spirituality. Here I add the task of defining development. The
developmental Processes
in Religiousness and spirituality
concept develop can be contrasted with the concept envelop. The first means to expand outward in specialized ways, the second means to fold over and enclose inward. Development involves change over time but does not equal it. For example, the animal life form called a sponge, a multicelled animal that lives in seabeds, multiplies its number of cells over time. But we do not say the sponge develops, although it changes. This is because the process is one of mere replication of cells with no hierarchical structure, no specialization so that some cells perform one function and other cells per- form others, allowing the organism as a whole to change so that it becomes made up of “higher” levels and layers of organization. In a sponge, there is no higher layer of function that comes to overlay lower-level functions. In contrast, the human body, as well as human religiousness and spirituality, is highly developed. A sponge, no matter how many cells replicate in it, does not develop; it just gets bigger.
To illustrate with one more example, both crickets and humans have a brain, but a human brain is massively more developed than a cricket brain. This difference in development is not due to a difference in size but because the human brain has developed to have specialized functions for subsets of cells, with layers of function that overlay and that lie within each other.
To put the idea of development into an even larger context, each step in the sequence of capabilities that constitute the psychological substrates enabling religiousness and spirituality (seeing, learning, intuiting, imple- menting, remembering, imagining), summarized in the Prelude to Part II, develops from what came before it. Each requires the others for the opera- tion of well- functioning meaning making, appraisal, and remaking capabil- ities, which are part of what religions and spiritualities are. Thus, each step in the sequence of substrates is not only a manifestation of development;
it is also an additional foundational step in the continuing psychological development essential to forming, believing, appraising, and responding to what religions and spiritualities put into one’s life.
Therefore, let us examine religiousness and spirituality in human development. We begin with snapshots of the development of religiousness or spirituality in children. Psychological ideas about religious development have historically relied on knowledge from cognitive– developmental psy- chology, but this has changed in recent years as our understanding of child and adolescent religiousness has expanded to draw from various psycho- logical models (Chapter 3). In what follows we shall first explore basic observations, research, and stage models of religiousness derived within a cognitive approach. Then we will expand the orbit of understanding to include more recent approaches, still with our eye on childhood. Then we will explore some novel research on religiousness and spirituality in ado- lescence. Finally, we will examine models of lifespan generic faith develop- ment and of making religious judgments.