Ego Development & Religious Worldviews
Much like the individuals who hold them, religious worldviews can be classed at greater or lesser stages of ego awareness and development.
The Ego and Stage Theory
The psychoanalytic ego is classically defined as the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and unconscious and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity. It can be understood as the part of the mind which makes sense of and categorizes all of one’s experiences, constructing a self-identity in the process.
Stage Theory is a model proposing that the ego undergoes “development occurring in a series of distinct, sequential stages that are qualitatively different.” These stages have been categorized by the work of Susanne Cook-Greuter in her paper 9 Stages Of Increasing Embrace In Ego Development: A Full Spectrum Theory of Vertical Growth and Meaning Making.
Over the course of these stages, it becomes more and more clear to the subject the workings of their ego and the constructedness of their worldview. Everyone operates at a greater or lesser level of ego-awareness. Ego awareness is not a direct result of IQ or the ability to parse a lot of data or recognize patterns. Ego awareness arises from an ability to engage with one’s own process of meaning making.
This sort of development lends to an ever-expanding concept of one's self and one’s place in the grand scheme. Individuals tend to possess “gravity stages” in which they primarily reside, with expansions into later stages, or retreat into earlier stages during periods of creativity/exploration, or stress/overwhelm, respectively.
Because of the nature of ego development, earlier stages are not capable of understanding the level of awareness of later stages, the same way you can’t fit a gallon into a 12 oz bottle. Does this make later stages better or more virtuous? No – it’s actually a hallmark of intermediate stages to automatically think later stages are somehow preferable. Each stage possesses its own flaws, setbacks, and questions that it must grapple with. The benefit of a later stage is their ability to more clearly see the processes of the ego, why they believe what they believe and behave the way they behave etc. It’s not uncommon to witness an ever increasing compassion and universal scope of awareness as a result– understanding oneself often leads to greater understanding of others. The downside of later stages is that the questions they grapple with become increasingly paradoxical, even unanswerable.
Brief Stage Dive
The ego develops from the Symbiotic (“Dependent Infant”), fused entirely with others, to the Impulsive (“Impulsive Rebel” to “Impulsive Explorer”), acting on desires and early consequence awareness. Next is the Self-Protective (“Opportunist” to “Manipulator”), focused on self-interest and rule navigation, followed by the Conformist (“Group Member” to “Inner Conformist”), where belonging and social norms dominate. The Self-Aware (“Conscious Self” to “Differentiator”) begins reflecting on motives and individuality, leading to the Conscientious (“Achiever” to “Strategist”), guided by internalized values. The Individualistic / Pluralist (“Pluralist” to “Construct-Aware”) embraces complexity, ambiguity, and multiple perspectives, evolving into the Autonomous (“Autonomous Thinker” to “Alchemist to Magician”), marked by self-authorship, inner freedom, and empathy, and culminating in the rare Integrated (“Wizard / Sage / Self-Transcendent”), where wisdom, compassion, and unified awareness define the henceforth most fully developed ego.
Religious Worldviews
Religions are a lot like philosophies, some more systematic, others more ethereal and sensual. Each attempts to, in greater or lesser detail, give an account for metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology. On the level of systems, religions act as a sort of readymade worldview, each with their own set of prescribed behaviors, doctrines, rituals, and tools that one can plug into in order to derive a sense of grounding and direction.
Even if a person couldn’t detail the metaphysical schema of their religion, they nevertheless are likely to gain through osmosis all the things that their religion and its metaphysical schema might imply. In other words, a person does not have to consciously possess their worldview in order for that to be their worldview and for them to be deriving meaningful content from it. It is pretty obvious when you consider religion and philosophy from this standpoint, how each would have a profound effect on a person’s stage development.
Religion’s Connection to Ego Development
In my study of comparative religion, I have noted a tendency of individuals and particularly exemplars of certain religious worldviews to aggregate at varying levels of stage development, and it is my goal to offer an introduction to these patterns of development among various religious worldviews.
Now this is not to say that religious worldviews are deterministic in producing stage outcomes for individuals; only that certain worldviews seem conducive to greater or lesser progress in the stages, and that certain stage outcomes are more reliably produced in some religious worldviews than others, when faithfully practiced. Not only this, but the core tenets of various confessions, as we will see, are emblematic of certain stages of development.
Of course, there are exceptions – it’s not uncommon for people to practice religion in an insincere, shallow, or downright hypocritical way. But exceptions often prove rather than disprove the rule. And again, we will derive much more in our study of worldviews if we look at the general rule in comparison to exemplary and outlier cases, comparing the two and seeing if their stage is the result (or in spite) of their religious practice. Side note: I’m not opposed to the idea that a religion which frequently produces hypocrites is likely false, contradictory, or incomplete in some way. This would seem to suggest something in the interplay between this proposed worldview’s ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology which are inconsistent, therefore producing cognitive dissonance or doublethink. After all, we are told “you will know them by their fruits.”
Religion is such a broad topic, it is difficult to jump in and begin to systematically and without prejudice classify where each one fits in where. To begin, we could describe the general trend of an individual within any given religious worldview as they progress through the stages, or in other words, how each stage relates to its religious worldview.
The symbiotic relationship, that of the pre-conscious child, is one in which no noticeable religious worldview is present. Meaning making has not begun, as the individual has not even come to differentiate itself from its own mother. In the impulsive stage, religion could be said to still be a peripheral concern at most, and not even on the radar most likely. All of experience is unconscious and yet mystically charged for the toddler– objects pop in and out of existence and nothing is yet codified into a coherent framework of what is real. In the self-protective stage, some religious ideas can begin to develop, but often only in the manner of superstition or pain avoidance. My nephew (5) said “You want to go up, you don’t want to go down.” You could say animism, the religious idea imbuing insensate material objects (trees, rocks, rivers) with spirits and personalities, is commonly found in this stage. “Rule navigation” is the primary concern here. In the case of the primitive or the superstitious individual, this could literally amount to a pre-scientific experimentation developing into ritual, in which certain laws of the universe are inferred, experimented, and later codified. At the conformist stage, one begins to accept the prevailing religious worldview of one’s society, as social bonds strengthen and there begins to be trust between one’s self and social environment. Whatever is the norm is thought reliable. Whatever is outside of this is generally not trusted. Many people I know today who do not identify with Christianity today grew up Baptist like me, simply because everyone in our town grew up that way. But at the self-aware stage, one gains the insight for the first time that they believe what they believe primarily because they were born somewhere where other people believe it, and that there exists some personal choice in carrying on the matter. At this point, the choice to defect is presented, and individuals begin to consider if they would wish to continue or discontinue their adherence. At the conscientious stage, the individual has likely made a choice between which religious worldviews they do and do not adhere to, whether consciously or unconsciously, carrying on or discarding their inherited religious worldview and embracing an identity they truly believe is their own decision, even though at this point it is still largely derived from the prevailing social context, albeit a significantly broader one than they experienced in their youth. At the individualist stage, they begin to develop a unique sense of self even within and apart from their selected religious worldview, and may experience a deepening or rejection of certain prescribed values within their religious worldview. It is common here for denominationalist or sectarian interests to come to the front of one’s concerns. At the autonomous stage, one begins to understand the difficulty in finding one’s way, and is perhaps more forgiving toward people that don’t see things the same way as they do. They are content at the idea that perhaps in time, others will come to find their way as well. In spite of this, they are willing to adhere to their religious worldview as a matter of principle, trusting that what they have discovered is true, albeit difficult for others to understand. The ego transcendent stage is perhaps the most difficult to classify, as it tends to be the stage at which sages and prophets are said to reside. There appears to be a deep integration with the object of worship, insofar as the religious worldview permits.
Now, I have described the basic relation of each stage to its religious worldview without any context or critique of the stage theory model itself. My goal here is not to present the stage theory as indisputable fact or to critique it, but rather as one already outlined model which we can use to understand the proceeding religious worldviews and personalities.
Stages Represented in Religious Worldviews
Stages 1-3 and 4-6 are termed the Pre-Conventional and Conventional stages, respectively. Each stage possesses substages, and they appear to rotate between an embrace and/or rejection of group dynamics.
Pre-conventional stages refer to stages which make up a very small percent of the population, reflecting babies, children, adolescents, and criminal/psychotic individuals with an immature or greatly stunted developmental stage. Because of this, we will not focus much on them for the sake of analyzing their religious thought.
Conventional stages refer to stages which the vast majority – perhaps 85-90% of the population – occupy. At these stages, the individual undergoes what could be considered a normative religious development, with limited engagement in the more hidden traditions of a given religious worldview. They may possess some cursory knowledge of a religion’s history, creeds, or practices, and for the most part can be considered normative, cultural observers of the religion, not unlike the common believer you’d find in a local service. Because of the size of this population, they range drastically in their level of ceremonial involvement, personal devotion, and ego development.
The Post-conventional stages become exceedingly rare in their representation, and also happen to exemplify the “fruits” of particular religious worldviews more readily, as a result of their prolonged practice, study, and/or radical adherence.
For example, a Hindu or Buddhist teacher(1) may very frequently occupy the substage known as the pluralist, by the fact that they insist, consistent with their belief in the Advaita Vedanta tradition, that “all religions are essentially the same.” This is common for the pluralist stage, mainly because the pluralist struggles to reconcile the vast breadth of experiences with the particularity of certain truth claims. To an individual at this stage of development, Advaita Vedanta rings true because it is consonant with their stage of development, and it is impossible for them to conceive that while all religious viewpoints may possess some truth, some may be more coherent, internally consistent, or well-informed than others.
In his work God is Not One, Stephen Prothero counters this exact claim of the pluralist by stating:
“This is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue. For more than a generation we have followed scholars and sages down the rabbit hole into a fantasy world in which all gods are one. This wishful thinking is motivated in part by an understandable rejection of the exclusivist missionary view that only you and your kind will make it to heaven or Paradise. For most of world history, human beings have seen religious rivals as inferior to themselves – practitioners of empty rituals, perpetrators of bogus miracles, purveyors of fanciful myths. The Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century popularized the ideal of religious tolerance… But the idea of religious unity is wishful thinking nonetheless, and it has not made the world a safer place.”
A pluralistic religion would then reliably produce individuals who generally have a ceiling for development around the pluralist stage.
On the contrary, a particularist religion, such as the more conservative denominations of Christianity, may result in an entirely different normative progress along the sequential stages. There is evidence particularism in religious worldviews represents a sort of double-edged sword, either resulting in a closing off of potential threats to the worldview, or a transcendence and integration of critical attacks in order to strengthen and deepen the particularist self-identity. The former could be exemplified in the backwoods preacher who not only asserts Southern Baptist theology to solely be the true religion, but denies that there exists any truth outside of this particular religious expression. In this view, anything outside is immediately reviled and considered a threat. The latter represents a getting-past-the pluralistic viewpoint, in which all possibilities have been considered, and yet one has been selected as being particularly true or exceptional in its possession of truth. An Eastern Orthodox writer Frederica Mathewes-Greene puts it like this:
“I grasped that we are so indoctrinated by our culture that we can't trust our standards of evaluation. We can only gain wisdom that transcends time by exiting our time, entering an ancient path, and accepting it on its own terms; we only learn by submitting to something bigger than we are. The faith I was building out of my prejudices and preconceptions could never be bigger than I was. I was constructing a safe, tidy, unsurprising God who could never transform me, but would only confirm my residence in that familiar bog I called home. I had to have more than that… It is not too scandalous to urge people to choose one of the ancient paths and stick to it. What is more awkward is the next thing that happens: People begin to perceive that different paths teach different things about reality, and some of these teachings are mutually exclusive. If Christianity teaches that Jesus is the only Son of God, and Islam teaches that He is a prophet among other prophets, both cannot be true.”
“Our culture is inclined to extend this insight to a fallacious conclusion: that where religions agree with us, with our current ideas, is truth, and where they disagree is falsehood. This belief is a modern invention, a quirk of our culture, and though innocently well-meaning is finally imperialistic. We are likely to perceive and approve those 'points of agreement' that accord with our popular idea of what religion ought to be, and dismiss, or simply miss, those that confuse us or violate our imagined universal faith. Worse, in the process of pursuing this notion we fail to get at the heart of what committed spiritual faith is like: it is commitment to something specific. It is not vague good-neighborly sentiments that prompt a pleasant smile. There is currently popular reluctance to forming any particular ideas about spiritual reality; the journey is deemed more important than the destination. Yet the journey must be going somewhere, it must be aiming to arrive sometime, or it's mere idle wandering. If we prefer uncertainty to conclusions, our questing is insincere. We're playing a game rather than truly seeking. A person may seek long years for a spouse, but on the wedding day we rejoice with them that the search… Our current culture mistrusts fervor; we think it means danger to those following other paths.”
It has been stated in a previous essay, but is worth repeating: how can these two classifications of religious worldviews – pluralism and particularism – be anything but mutually exclusive? For the one states that all religions are true, and the other states that only itself is true – would the pluralist then affirm that the particularist claims, essential to the proper expression of the latter religion, be true? Or are other religions only true insofar as they adhere to the pluralist worldview, thereby transforming it into a particularist worldview? It is obvious here that stage theory is correct when it asserts that each stage has its own particular concerns, questions, and paradoxes.
Examples abound, and there are no shortage of religious expressions to parse out. The above bifurcation is just one significant example which can be used to easily classify different religious worldviews at higher or lower levels of resolution. A higher resolution investigation would involve looking at the particularist or pluralist interpretations across a single religion. For example: how do these categories play out if we only consider Christian denominations?
Christian Denominationalism and Stage Theory
There is inherent difficulty in delineating between Christian and non-Christian sects in a study of religion, because as stage theory shows us, the interpretive lens plays a great deal into how data are interpreted, and which data are worth interpreting. For example, do we include Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, two groups that claim to follow Jesus Christ and yet have radically different interpretations of his status as God? These groups might even claim they are more Christian than the normative groups historically identified as Christian, at least according to their paradigm and interpretive lens; so how do we begin? Herein lies the problem of any study of religion; the interpretive lens of the scholar is taken for granted. Trying to assume for oneself an “objective” lens only means to be fatally blind to one's bias. Prothero even says such:
“Some scholars of religion are religious, of course, but there is no faith requirement for the job, just as it is not necessary to be a sculptor or painter to be an art historian. Of course, scholars of religion often allow their own theological biases to slip into their work, speaking about religion in two ways at once. The problem with Godthink of either the New Atheist or the perennial philosophy variety is that each camp fails to see what should be obvious to any outsider—that theirs are theological positions too. When Richard Dawkins calls religion delusional, he is speaking as a theologian, not as an objective reporter. When Huston Smith calls all religions one, he is doing theology too.”
And so if you will forgive me, I am going to define Christianity as that tradition which was represented in the first thousand years of Church history, after Christ’s ascendance, and which produced the Bible as it is currently known. In my interpretive framework, this is the Eastern Orthodox Church of today. I have no fear that by telling you such I might harm your ability to follow what I am saying; if anything I hope it will endear you to my perspective on account of my transparency(2). The Eastern Orthodox church is peculiar to the rest of what has historically been called “Christendom” in that it possesses that same particularist stance of the early church, present in the earliest councils and writers representative of that church. It sees “ecumenism” or the unity of various denominations– apart from a visible institution and sound doctrine– through dialogue, cooperation, and prayer as a serious compromise as to the purity of its doctrine, identity, and boundaries as a religion.
The Roman Catholic Church has steadily moved in a direction toward ecumenism ever since Vatican II, formerly viewing itself as the sole possessor of the fullness of truth, and gradually upending this stance in order to offer reconciliation and unification with various groups they previously declared schismatic and/or heretical. Protestants (who they killed and who were killing each other not so long ago) they termed “separated brethren.” Muslims, too (who they killed and were killed by not long ago) they claim worship the same God as Christians. Hindus, too, they claim “adore the one God.”
Protestantism, by its nature, has to maintain that there can be no one visible entity in which the fullness of the faith resides: that the church is really an invisible institution spread across many denominations, and that the sole binding authority is sola scriptura or “the Bible alone.” If asked how they know what true doctrine is, they would say the Bible attests to true doctrine. But obviously with so many denominations, the question is “who is interpreting the Bible correctly?” It’s a fair question, with a variety of answers, the most of which are a way of saying: “the Scriptures interpret themselves – Scripture is self-interpreting.”
Except this gets back to the earlier critique which stage theory provides: everything interpreted has its interpreter. A book is not sentient, and therefore cannot interpret. We don’t do this with the US Constitution– the supreme court is the living body with the normative authority to interpret the document. This position also takes for granted that we can know what the texts of Scripture are. The table of contents of the Bible is obviously not considered Scripture. Some consistent Protestants have gone on record saying “it is a fallible list of infallible books.” But if the whole is fallible, in what sense can the parts be said to be infallible? What we see here from the standpoint of stage theory is the classic conventional stage of awareness in which the individual takes for granted that things are as they seem and if we can only assemble the facts, we will have truth. This assumes a lot of things which it is impossible to question at the conventional stage, but become more readily apparent to the one who has breached some level of self-awareness, in which they realize the constructedness of worldviews, their own ability to self-deceive, and the impossibility of coming to a purely empirical realization of truth.
The problem when this (or any worldview-threatening question) is brought to their attention is that they often do not understand the nature of the question being posed. We mentioned earlier that an earlier stage cannot conceptualize the mode of awareness possessed by a later stage. Because of this, even when presented with the argument which ought to present someone with a later-stage view, the earlier stage is unlikely to grasp the full scope or implications of the question, potentially not even realizing it as paradigm shattering. Sometimes they will simply not understand the critique, and other times it will produce an emotional spiral as the ego tries to maintain control and reassert its grasp on its current conception of self and surroundings. The ego is a tricky thing, and avoids detection if possible. A challenge to one’s maps of meaning-making is perceived as a direct threat to the self, and so emotional volatility in this case is inevitable. Just consider – how many of us came to our current beliefs after one conversation in which our views were rationally, radically challenged? This is not the nature of religious conversion whatsoever. Oftentimes, religious conversion and development to a later stage happen gradually over the course of many years or even decades – and then, before we can take note of it – all at once.
For fear of being wrong, many at the conventional stages may opt into what they believe to be a safe “third option” for modern day Christians – so-called non-denominationalism. What they do not realize is that to be nondenom usually just entails being dishonest and cognitively dissonant about one’s own position. I used to be a non-denom Bible church (Baptist) while I was still parsing out the essential (and necessary) differences between Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy. I don’t mean to say that all nondenom people are bad, but only that they are operating at a level where they have not yet considered the full implications of their position, and therefore cannot claim a full “self-awareness” as it relates to one’s religious worldview.
Earlier we spoke about the case of the pluralist versus the particularist. Ecumenists and nondenoms are very similar, in that they wish to bypass the scandal of the particular in order to offer everyone around them the olive branch and say “your religious expression is as valid as mine.” The problem becomes pretty clear in practice: communion is being passed around, and two believers side by side disagree about the nature of that communion. One says “this grape juice and cracker are God,” and the other says “that is grape juice and a cracker.” Either your neighbor is an idolater or a blasphemer, both of which the Bible clearly condemns and says to have no fellowship with, no matter your interpretive framework. But within the religious worldview of ecumenism/nondenominationalism, there’s no clear indication which is which. Do you see the problem here? Who decides who is right? Is it up to our individual conscience? How can we know which one of us is deceived, if both of us are claiming the Holy Spirit and the Bible and lots of midnight prayer as their epistemological principle? This is akin to the criterionless choice of Kierkegaard– the either/or – in which no one can guarantee your religious worldview for you, and refusing to make a decision between the plural and the particular means you’ve already made your decision in favor of the plural.
Conclusion
Worldviews are lenses through which we make sense of our self and surroundings. All religious experience, if it can be codified or grafted into a web of like-minded beliefs, tends to develop into a cornerstone component for the development of one’s worldview. To neglect the process through which one’s worldview is formed– or how one’s religion is selected, felt, navigated, interpreted– is not a state of objectivity and neutrality, but just another phase of development in their self-awareness and belief. Of course, as Cook-Greuter is at pains to remind us, “everyone has a right to be at the stage they are at.” But that doesn’t mean the critique of a later stage is something to be ignored. The difficulty, however, in cross-stage dialogue is a result of our inability to relate, in our present stage, to who we may eventually become. For “he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one.”
An argument could be made that Advaita Vedanta teachers, Buddhist sages, etc., could be commonly classed in the unitive (stage 9) of development as a result of their belief in doctrines such as “non-duality.” Along with this is the assumption that because of its essentially non-non-dual metaphysics, Christianity is somehow “less developed.” Of course this is because the field of religious psychology is very much flooded with Buddhists by virtue of the fact that it is a by and large atheistic (in most of its forms) religion which is supremely preoccupied with the psychological and so of course would attract fit ilk. Ken Wilber, a philosopher greatly preoccupied with the subject of stage theory and himself a practicing Buddhist, wrote a book titled Integral Spirituality, in which the argument is made that any religious practitioner sufficiently developed would need to admit all religions are true, which is obviously untrue and warrants a refutation in the near future.
Side note: I learned this trick from my teacher, Mr. Pegues. He once told our World History class: “You all should know I am a conservative, and that will influence the way I present this material. I hope you will take that and recognize that every story is told with some bias, and it’s your job to be cognizant of that bias.”
