In one model of religiosity, pioneered by Brian McLaren, there are four stages: Simplicity, Complexity, Perplexity, and Harmony.* The first is simplicity, where the world is black and white and your religion is the one true path. The second is complexity, where the world may not be black and white, but your religious system has a series of tools, rules, rituals, hierarchies etc. to deal with a myriad of situations. This is a pharisaical model of religion. Stage three is perplexity. It is more of an individual experience but represents a deconstruction of the complexity of stage two. This is where we aren’t sure what we believe and if those rules and rituals were really serving us or if they were getting in the way. In the way of what? This is also the stage where we may question what even is divinity or even reality. The fourth stage is harmony and humility, where we find a way to hold the complexity and the perplexity and even the simplicity all together in a way that is healthy for both individuals and communities, recognizing that we don’t have all the answers. Sometimes we get so good at harmony, that we can slip back into simplicity until the gray of the world catches up with us again and we have something new to be perplexed about, so in that way these stages can be somewhat cyclical. Still, I think that once you have gone through all four, your journeys back through the cycle are qualitatively different, making it more of a spiral than a cycle. You never go back to true universal simplicity, but you may find new parts of your spiritual life that you want to examine and deconstruct.
These stages represent an individual’s journey, but can also be used to talk about religions, religious communities, and religious organizations. I have had the experience of walking into a stage one church and the message is beautifully simple, but I know that at this time in my life, that no longer feeds my soul. I feel similarly looking into stage two religions. The ritual is beautiful and the theology is complex and I can see how you could spend a lifetime there in the complexity, but at this point in my life, it just isn’t fulfilling. In stage three you might find community in atheist YouTube, or deconstruction reddit boards. It’s been my experience that those only feed you for so long. You can’t build a life deconstructing, you must at some point pick up the pieces and construct a life. Where are the stage four spaces?
What this means for finding community
Here’s the rub though: stage four is only found through the other stages, and to be a space that can support you through your life course, it must also include the tools to support those at stages one through three? Or should it? Perhaps your initial thought might be that we shouldn’t regress to the earlier stages. That maybe being a stage four religion will help to only attract stage four congregants. My challenge to that is, what about children?
We all need to move through these stages, and we have no choice but to start at the beginning. Indeed, it is not healthy to push children down the path. Very young children NEED black and white thinking. They need stories with good guys and bad guys to orient their morality and to feel safe in the world. They need simple attachment figures. God can be an important and healthy attachment figure, but not if we present a stage two God with rules and requirements nor a stage four God that is mysterious or even inscrutable. Yes, this means that as we teach children about spirituality we are not sharing the whole of our understanding and that can feel almost dishonest. I like to relate it to how we teach kids about science. We don’t jump to quantum mechanics. We teach simple Newtonian gravity first: what goes up must come down. Then we might expand that to understanding that gravity is not just what keeps things on earth, but also what keeps the earth bound to the sun and there are a number of complex equations to describe it all. Then we might introduce Einstein and relativity. At this point, students usually have some resistance, or should I say perplexity, because they realize that this understanding they have had is terribly incomplete and even misleading when it comes to grand scales. If they move past that, then we get to the cutting edge of quantum gravity and the search for the graviton and a grand unifying theory where we don’t have all the answers, which sounds a lot like harmony and humility. We don’t feel guilty or like we have lied about gravity when we teach that what goes up must come down, even if we know that there is an asterisk about escape velocity there. We know that would just be confusing at first and that there is time to get to all the complexity once we have a foundation to build upon. Spirituality is much the same. Yes, a simple God and simple morality isn’t the whole story, but it is a lot of the story, and we will get to the asterisks later.
It can feel like we are just giving children beliefs that they will later just need to deconstruct, and especially for those of us who went through a difficult faith transition ourselves, we would rather save them the trouble by sharing the wisdom we have, maybe even let them skip ahead of that chaotic stage of perplexity straight to harmony. Unfortunately, that’s just not possible. The good news is that while you can’t change the “hard”, you can change the “alone”. Everyone must walk their own spiritual path and we can’t skip the hard parts, but we can walk with them through the hard parts.
So what does this mean for our communities? It means that as a stage four religion or group, we still have to find a way to access the previous stages so that we are serving all of our community members, not just children, but also adults all along the path. I’m not sure exactly what that looks like, but I think I have found a community with many who are also at that stage four and who have the humility to recognize that my truth and their truth might be different and there is space for all of our individual expressions of spirituality and we can learn from one another even in our differences. There are some stage one and two folks in this community, and while they don’t alsways “get” other perspectives, they have the freedom to move through their stages as needed. Harmony in music is not when everyone is singing the same note. It is when there are two or more notes played together that create something beautiful between them.
*https://brianmclaren.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Four-Stages-1.pdf
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