Chapter 3

Examining Religious and Spiritual

Development During Childhood
and Adolescence

Chris J. Boyatzis

Abstract What does “spirituality” look like in a child? Does religion make a gen-
uine difference in the lives of children and youth? How do we measure spiritual
and religious development in children and adolescents? How can we characterize
religious and spiritual development in its processes, sequences, and stages? These
are a few daunting challenges facing our field, and I will address them here (to
varying degrees of thoroughness). I first examine the historical neglect and recent
attention regarding spirituality and religion and childhood and adolescence. Second,
I explore definitional challenges inherent in this field. I then offer a selective review
of very recent research literature that illuminates key issues in three emphases in
the field: children’s religious concepts, social dynamics that influence religiosity
and spirituality, and religion’s role in adolescent wellbeing and thriving. In addi-
tion, I problematize some assumptions about religious and spiritual development by
challenging their implicit foundations derived from developmental theory.

What does “spirituality” look like in a child? Does religion make a genuine differ-
ence in the lives of children and youth? How do we measure spiritual and religious
development in children and adolescents? How can we characterize religious and
spiritual development in its processes, sequences, and stages? These are a few daunt-
ing challenges facing our field, and I will address them here (to varying degrees of
thoroughness).
I first examine the historical neglect and recent attention regarding spirituality
and religion and childhood and adolescence. Second, I explore definitional chal-
lenges inherent in this field. I then offer a selective review of very recent research
literature that illuminates key issues in three emphases in the field: children’s
religious concepts, social dynamics that influence religiosity and spirituality, and
religion’s role in adolescent wellbeing and thriving. In addition, I problematize some
assumptions about religious and spiritual development by challenging their implicit
foundations derived from developmental theory.

C.J. Boyatzis (B)

Department of Psychology, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837, USA
e-mail: boyatzis@[Link]

M. de Souza et al. (eds.), International Handbook of Education for Spirituality, 51

Care and Wellbeing, International Handbooks of Religion and Education 3,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4020-9018-9 4,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009
52 C.J. Boyatzis

A New Day for Religious and Spiritual Development

Of the mountainous research conducted on children’s development, a conspicuously
small portion addresses religion and spirituality. A recent PsycINFO search revealed
that less than half of 1% of research on children addressed religion, and an even
smaller proportion addressed spirituality (see also Benson, Roehlkepartain, & Rude,
2003; Boyatzis, 2003a).
Fortunately, scholars are now heeding the call to “honor spiritual development
as a core developmental process that deserves equal standing in the pantheon of
universal developmental processes” (Benson, 2004, p. 50). For example, there were
more dissertations on children and religion from 2000–2005 than in the 1990s,
and more in the 1990s than the previous two decades combined. Dissertations on
children and spirituality have surged, as more than half of the dissertations ever
done on this topic have appeared since 2000. At the other end of the scholarly
pipeline, many volumes have appeared in a brief interval. I highlight one seminal
work that is “must reading”—The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Child-
hood and Adolescence (Roehlkepartain, King, Wagener, & Benson, 2006)—but also
recommend other recent edited volumes (e.g., Allen, 2008; Dowling & Scarlett,
2006; Ratcliff, 2004; Rosengren, Johnson, & Harris, 2000; Yust, Johnson, Sasso, &
Roehlkepartain, 2006). In addition, a journal (International Journal on Children’s
Spirituality) and a spate of special issues have examined child and adolescent spiri-
tuality in various journals: Review of Religious Research (Boyatzis, 2003b), Applied
Developmental Science (King & Boyatzis, 2004), The International Journal for the
Psychology of Religion (Boyatzis, 2006), New Directions for Youth Development
(Benson, Roehlkepartain, & Hong, 2008), and Research in the Social Scientific
Study of Religion (Boyatzis & Hambrick-Dixon, 2008). Finally, the most recent
edition of the prestigious Handbook of child psychology, long viewed as the “bible”
of child development scholarship, has an entire chapter on religious and spiritual
development (by Oser, Scarlett, & Bucher, 2006); in contrast, the preceding edition
in 1998 had, among its thousands of pages, a skimpy three references in the subject
index to religion and spirituality. Therefore, it is clear that religious and spiritual
development is working toward the mainstream like never before.

Defining Spiritual Development is Difficult

A fundamental task for our field is to generate valid definitions of our constructs,
but this is easier said than done. First, there are stubborn historical and semantic
tensions between “spirituality” and “religion”; there are many treatments of these
debates (e.g., Zinnbauer & Pargament, 2005) so they will not be repeated here.
Here I tentatively define religious development as the growth of understanding of
and engagement in an organized religious tradition’s beliefs, creeds, values, and
practices (see also Reich, Oser, & Scarlett, 1999). This definition is inclusive for
children in myriad religions and generates questions about children’s relationships
with the tradition’s divine entity (God, Allah, etc.), how the children understand
3 Examining Religious and Spiritual Development 53

the religion’s formal creeds and doctrines and participate in its formal events (e.g.,
religious worship or milestone events such as a Christian’s first communion, a Jew’s
bar mitzvah, and a Muslim’s first participation in the hajj).
In contrast, it is more difficult to define spirituality, especially “spiritual develop-
ment.” If children develop spiritually, what develops? There has been more effort to
define “spirituality” than “spiritual development” (Roehlkepartain, Benson, King,
& Wagener, 2006). The organizers of the landmark Handbook of Spiritual Develop-
ment in Childhood and Adolescence wisely conclude that “there is no consensus
about what ‘this domain’ (of children’s spirituality) really is” (Roehlkepartain,
Benson, et al., 2006) and went further to say it is “premature—and potentially
dangerous—to propose that a single definition could capture the richness, com-
plexity, and multidimensional nature of spiritual development” (Roehlkepartain,
Benson, et al., 2006, p. 4).
To build an empirically based definition of spirituality, scholars at The Center
for Spiritual Development, situated within the Search Institute in Minnesota, USA,
and funded by the John Templeton Foundation, have collected data on more than
5,000 young people between the ages of 12 and 25 (Search Institute, 2008). These
data arise from surveys and focus groups around the world: Australia, Cameroon,
Canada, India, Thailand, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The
Center is analyzing this data goldmine. Previously, Search Institute scholars offered
this definition: spiritual development is growth in “the intrinsic capacity for self-
transcendence, in which the self is embedded in something greater than the self,
including the sacred . . .. It is shaped both within and outside of religious traditions,
beliefs, and practices” (Benson, Roehlkepartain, & Rude, 2003, pp. 205–206). This
definition seems fruitful because it recognizes spirituality (a) as a natural propensity
(a view consistent with what some have named the “biological argument,” Hay,
Reich, & Utsch, 2006), (b) as socialized and shaped by multiple experiences within
and outside organized religion, and (c) characterized by connection and relationality
to what is beyond the self. On this last point, this definition is not restricted to a
particular religious doctrine or sacred entity and also accommodates the “biolog-
ical argument” claim (Hay & Nye, 1998) that children’s relational consciousness
emerges prior to religious socialization and beliefs: children are spiritual beings
first and then are acculturated (or not) into a religious tradition that narrows intuitive
spiritual dispositions, practices, and experiences. This view suggests, for example,
that God (or some theistic version thereof) is not a priori the only transcendent entity
with which a child experiences a relationship. I find this definition’s inclusiveness
helpful, especially at this embryonic point in the field, and it engenders many ques-
tions: What are the developmental trajectories of a spiritual relationality to whatever
one perceives to transcend the self? What forces and entities beyond the self engage
or attract the child in meaningful (or dysfunctional or dangerous) relationality?
What experiences inside and outside religion foster, and which impede, this self-
transcendent growth? As the study of children’s spiritual development evolves, it
will be crucial to examine how development in this domain is related to and/or
distinct from development in other domains (religion, cognition, emotion, neurol-
ogy, etc.). Finally, in our pre-consensus era, scholars should interrogate their own
54 C.J. Boyatzis

work (and others’) by asking: what are the implications of my (your) definition of
spirituality? What might be systematically excluded by a particular definition? This
kind of intellectual honesty and humility will help the field advance.
I believe one major reason for our current difficulty in defining children’s spiritu-
ality is the long-standing dominance of cognitive-developmental models of growth
that posited an invariant march toward logical, rational thought, and away from
other modes of thought. The post-Enlightenment Piagetian emphasis on rational
thought brought a dismissive attitude toward other forms of knowing. Of course,
many scholars have argued for a more inclusive approach and a richer understand-
ing of children’s spirituality. In his classic, Will Our Children Have Faith?, John
Westerhoff (2000) argued that “two modes of consciousness are possible . . .. One
is intellectual . . .. The other is intuitional . . . experiential, and is characterized by
nonverbal, creative, nonlinear, relational activities. The development and integration
of both modes of consciousness is essential to the spiritual life” (p. 70). Robinson
(1983) also makes this point in his collection of children’s spiritual experience,
The Original Vision: “What I have called the original vision of childhood is no
mere imaginative fancy, but a form of knowledge and one that is essential to the
development of any mature understanding” (p. 16).
These more inclusive views are consistent with claims, described below, by
many contemporary cognitive-developmentalists who no longer embrace a Piage-
tian model (see Johnson & Boyatzis, 2006). The decline of Piagetian assumptions
and the ascent of more inclusive, flexible models will engender a better understand-
ing of children’s spirituality.

Cognitive Approaches to Spiritual Development

Cognitive-developmental theories launched two waves of research on the devel-
opment of religious concepts. In the 1960s, scholars applied Piagetian theory to
children’s concepts of God and prayer (e.g., Elkind, 1970; Goldman, 1964; Long,
Elkind, & Spilka, 1967). A second wave, beginning in the 1990s, was sparked
by new theories of cognitive development that emphasized the intuitive, domain-
specific nature of thinking (Boyer, 1994). Both waves concluded that children’s
religious concepts operate under the same principles and tendencies of nonreligious
cognition.
Recently, Johnson and Boyatzis (2006) suggested that spiritual development
proceeds from intuitive understanding to increasingly reflective thought. Young chil-
dren possess powerful inference mechanisms for intuitively sorting out reality and
the supernatural, and this intuition is integrated with increasing reflection. These
maturations are scaffolded by increasing cultural practices that orient the child to
cultural modes of spiritual knowing and being. Thus, spiritual development arises
not from mere acquisition of knowledge about the transcendent but from increas-
ingly meaningful and organized connections of the self to the “something more”
(see also Johnson, 2000; Roehlkepartain, Benson, et al., 2006).
3 Examining Religious and Spiritual Development 55

The most studied topic in spiritual and religious cognition is children’s con-
cepts of God (e.g., Hyde, 1990), so this review will focus on more recent cognitive
approaches in this research. In contrast to the older view that children possess solely
anthropomorphic notions of God—a big person in the sky—recent research suggests
that children and adults are not so different. Even adults tend to anthropomorphize,
using a “fundamental cognitive bias” (Barrett & Keil, 1996, p. 223) that extends
an intuitive folk psychology to supernatural figures (Boyer, 1994, 2001). In addi-
tion, children and adults hold God concepts featuring both natural and supernatural
properties. Work by Barrett challenges the view that children are unaware of God’s
distinctly supernatural powers (Barrett & Keil, 1996; Barrett & Richert, 2003).
His studies demonstrate that pre-schoolers view God as a special kind of agent
who, unlike other agents, is not constrained by natural laws. In one study (Barrett,
Newman, & Richert, 2003) 5-year-olds believed that their mothers would not imme-
diately understand ambiguous drawings but God would; Woolley and Phelps (2001)
similarly found that most children 5 years and older felt that God “just knows” what
people are praying without needing to hear them. Barrett has posited that children
are prepared conceptually at early ages to view God as unique, not humanlike, which
helps explain why children easily distinguish God’s special status.
These studies fit with broader accounts (see Boyer & Walker, 2000; Johnson
& Boyatzis, 2006, for elaboration) explaining that children (and adults) are drawn
to supernatural agents such as God or angels due to their “counterintuitive” nature
(i.e., they violate ordinary expectations, as in the case of spiritual entities who are
immortal, omniscient, or can pass through physical objects). These counterintuitive
religious beliefs operate within an implicit backdrop of theory of mind, which pro-
vides children or adults with a prepared set of agentic qualities to extend to religious
agents (e.g., “My supernatural God has wishes and thoughts and worries [just like
all beings with minds do]”). The agents’ counterintuitiveness, combined with the
individual’s belief that the agents are real, makes the beliefs all the more salient and
memorable and potent. This salience increases the likelihood of religious beliefs
being transmitted and shared with others.
There are additional perspectives from current cognitive-developmentalists that
challenge the Piaget-inspired account of the march away from immature irrational,
magical thinking to mature rational, abstract, scientific thinking. Children’s (and
adults’) mental processes are believed to include multiple thought processes that co-
exist and often compete (e.g., Subbotsky, 1993; Woolley, 1997). As Woolley (2000)
asserted, “Children’s minds are not inherently one way or another—not inherently
magical nor inherently rational” (pp. 126–127). As Callanan (2005) noted, in the
minds of children and many adults the ontological boundaries between “empirical”
entities (those with an objective evidential basis) and “nonempirical” entities—say,
the differences between animals and angels—are probably much fuzzier and fluid
than scholars who study such things seem to presume.
Researchers have documented cognitive propensities underlying ideas of imma-
terial spirit and life after death, which are widespread across cultures (Bering
& Bjorklund, 2004). Children’s beliefs about the afterlife are connected with an
early distinction between minds and bodies (Bering & Bjorklund, 2004). Children
56 C.J. Boyatzis

know that death stops physical/biological functions but have difficulty imagining
that death similarly ceases all mental and emotional functions. In other words, a
mind–body distinction appears in children’s afterlife beliefs. Such thinking is easily
assimilated with religious beliefs, evident in most traditions, that at death a spirit
or soul exists separately from the body and continues to live. If children possess
early intuitions about the afterlife, or God, or the efficacy of prayer, there are also
surrounding familial and cultural practices that provide ample testimony, dialogue,
and rituals to reify, scaffold, and elaborate them.
Social influences have been shown in numerous studies. For example, Heller
(1986) found that Hindu children, more than Jewish, Baptist, or Roman Catholic
children, described a multifaceted God that feels close and like a person in some
ways yet is also an abstract and intangible form of energy. These Hindu beliefs
reflect their doctrine about different God with different natures and functions. Taken
together, these studies suggest that children extend a folk psychology and theory
of mind to their God images but are influenced by their surrounding cultural and
religious influences.
In an important study, Evans (2000) analyzed children’s beliefs about the ori-
gins of species and of the world in two kinds of families: secular or Christian
fundamentalist; in the latter group children also attended religious schools or were
home-schooled. A striking finding was that young children aged 7–9 in both types of
families—fundamentalist and secular—espoused creationist views of the origin of
species and the world. In secular homes, not until the children reached adolescence
did they begin consistently to espouse their families’ evolutionist cosmologies.
These findings suggest that children are intuitive theists (and challenge the anti-
quated view of children as blank-slate recipients of parental input) who may revise
their implicit theories when exposed to conflicting evidence in parental testimony or
experiences (e.g., trips to science museums) that supports secular scientific accounts
(Harris & Koenig, 2006).
Corroborating evidence comes from studies of children’s and parents’ beliefs
about mythical figures (e.g., Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy). Although these figures are
invoked in very specific circumstances in contrast to the more common yet also
profound uses of religious deities or spirits, mythical figures are like God concepts
in that they include supernatural features and have widespread cultural endorsement.
Parents’ endorsement of mythical characters such as Santa, the Easter Bunny, and
the Tooth Fairy was positively related to their children’s belief in them (Prentice,
Manosevitz, & Hubbs, 1978). However, the correspondence between parents’ and
children’s beliefs was not so strong as to suggest children think what their parents
want them to think. In Prentice et al. (1978), of the parents who encouraged their
children to believe in the Easter Bunny, 23% of their children did not believe, and of
the parents who discouraged the belief 47% of children did believe in the Easter
Bunny. In interviews with fundamentalist Christian families, Clark (1995) also
found that many children believed that Santa was real even though their parents dis-
couraged such belief. Collectively, the data indicate that children are influenced by
cultural norms and parental input but also possess ample independence of thought.
To speak in terms of two venerable ideas, the child is raised by a village, but the
child comes with conceptual propensities and is not a tabula rasa.
3 Examining Religious and Spiritual Development 57

A Social-Ecology Approach to Children’s Spirituality

A social-ecology model (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) illuminates the many influences on
children’s spiritual development by analyzing diverse contexts of growth. Schol-
ars should not only assess different systems that have immediate and proximal
impact (e.g., family, church, peer group, school) but the interactions between them.
Although there are many social contexts in which children develop, length limits
preclude discussion of them, so here the discussion will be on the family and peer
contexts. Although social-ecology models posit that it takes a village to raise a child,
the family is “the first village” of RSD. Readers are referred to other sources on the
family (e.g., Boyatzis, Dollahite, & Marks, 2006) and the focus here will be on some
theories and mechanisms of family influence on religious and spiritual development.
One theoretical framework is a sociocultural model that emphasizes the influ-
ence of knowledgeable adults who use scaffolding and guided participation in
culturally meaningful practices to help the child move to higher understandings
(Vygotsky, 1978). In this view, parents, clergy, and other adults can be seen as men-
tors who guide apprentices—children—to more advanced levels of understanding
and engagement in religious practices, creeds, and modes of expression. A sec-
ond framework is a transactional model of development that posits that children
and parents influence each other (P ←→ C) in recurrent reciprocal exchanges
(Kuczynski, 2003). This characterization of bi-directional family interaction con-
trasts sharply with traditional views that presume parents influence children in a
unilateral P → C fashion; unfortunately this “transmission” model has dominated
socialization research for decades, but scholars now endorse a more dynamic con-
ceptualization of the family as having bi-directional and multidirectional flows of
influence. In transactional models it is difficult to determine when parent influence
ends and child influence begins (in Yeats’ apropos phrase, it is impossible to sep-
arate the dancer from the dance). In the family, whatever input children receive
from their parents not only must be processed through the child’s inherent cogni-
tive structures but may also be mediated through external factors such as sibling
relationships. In this view, children’s beliefs may undergo initial revision due to
parent testimony (Harris & Koenig, 2006) but also may show ongoing revisions due
to “secondary adjustments” through “third-party discussions” that are common in
family life (Kuczynski, 2003, p. 10). Our field knows far too little about these com-
plex and crucial bi- and multidirectional dynamics in which parents and children
influence each other’s spiritual growth. When these dynamics are examined, it is
likely (see Boyatzis, 2004) that some families reveal a distinct “parent-as-mentor,
child-as-apprentice” role structure; in other families, there may be more fluidity
between these roles. In some families the child may be viewed as something of a
“spiritual savant.” The typical family may display all of these interactional config-
urations at different times in a child’s (and parent’s) maturation and in response
to specific topics under discussion. For example, we might expect that parents and
children would use very different communication styles and roles when discussing,
at one time, a worship ritual at church or temple but, at another time, ruminating
on exactly what happens to us when we die. The prevalence and psychological
functions of these various communication styles must be studied.
58 C.J. Boyatzis

Within these dynamics, it is likely that parents influence their children as in

other realms, through induction of beliefs, disciplinary tactics, rewards and pun-
ishments, and behavioral modeling. Recent work on parent–child communication
confirms that parents do not typically try explicitly to teach specific beliefs but
instead offer more subtly piecemeal fragments of knowledge (Boyatzis & Jan-
icki, 2003; Callanan, 2005; Harris & Koenig, 2006). Other processes that have
been recently proposed are parents’ spiritual modeling and children’s spiritual
observational learning (Bandura, 2003; Silberman, 2003). For example, work from
England has underscored the power of parental modeling as a key influence on the
prayer behavior of children (Francis & Brown, 1990) and adolescents (Francis &
Brown, 1991). Retrospective reports from religious adults confirm that “embed-
ded routines”—regular family rituals such as mealtime prayer—were frequent in
their childhoods and helped form the narrative structure of religious meaning in
family life (Wuthnow, 1999). Scholars must attend more to how children influ-
ence their parents in these activities. This child→parent dynamic is a dark void
in our literature.
Ongoing conversation about religion may also be an important mechanism
through which parents and children influence each other and co-construct religious
and spiritual meanings (see Boyatzis, 2004). One study of Christian families with
children ages 3–12 used surveys and diaries of parent–child conversations about
religious topics and found that children are active participants—they initiate and
terminate about half of conversations, they speak as much as parents do, and they
ask questions and offer their own views (Boyatzis & Janicki, 2003). The data chal-
lenge the view that children are passive recipients who merely consume parental
input and instead show the family to have reciprocal influence; these findings also
support the claim that children ask questions to actively seek adult input, especially
on issues that children find puzzling (Harris & Koenig, 2005). Adults’ retrospective
reports also suggest that conversations about religion in childhood were important
family interactions (Dudley & Wisbey, 2000; Wuthnow, 1999). Recent qualita-
tive work (Dollahite & Thatcher, 2008) on highly religious Jewish, Christian, and
Muslim families shows that when family conversations about religious issues are
youth-centered (vs. parent-centered), the experience for both children and parents is
more positive.
A social-ecology approach allows the scientist to assess various social contexts in
which children’s religion and spirituality develops; this approach also often entails
the use of multiple measures of multiple religious and spiritual constructs. This is
sorely needed in the field, as one review of research found that more than 80% of
studies on religion and family used only one- or two-item measures of religiosity
(Mahoney, Pargament, Swank, & Tarakeshwar, 2001). Let me illustrate the value of
multiple measures of related constructs.
Parents with conservative Christian affiliations approve of spanking and use it
more often with their children, but research has shown that a stronger predictor of
spanking (than religious affiliation per se) is the parents’ theological conservatism
(e.g., Biblical literalism, thinking that children possess original sin) (Gershoff,
Miller, & Holden, 1999). Of course, it should not surprise us that continuous
3 Examining Religious and Spiritual Development 59

psychological variables would be more informative than nominal/categorical ones.

This religiosity-spanking link has been further elucidated by a superb recent study.
Murray-Swank, Mahoney, and Pargament (2006) measured several indices of reli-
gious belief in mothers including their theological conservatism (vs. liberalism)
and their sanctification of their roles as parents. Sanctification refers to how much
mothers imbued their roles with sacred and holy qualities and saw themselves as
doing “God’s work.” The results illuminated the value of using multiple measures.
Neither conservatism nor sanctification was related independently to the mothers’
use of spanking. However, regressions showed that spanking was predicted by the
interaction between mothers’ conservatism and sanctification scores. Specifically,
mothers who were theologically conservative were more likely than other conserva-
tive mothers to spank their children if they also viewed their parent role as sacred and
holy; in contrast, mothers who were theologically liberal were less likely than other
liberal mothers to spank their children if they also viewed their role as sacred and
holy. Thus, “the link between sanctifying one’s role as a parent and using corporal
punishment . . . was moderated by how conservative or liberal a mother was in her
interpretation of the Bible” (p. 283).
Thus, our scientific understanding of religious and spiritual development will be
enriched by multiple measures of multiple relevant religious constructs. This work
will be especially helpful to measure the interactions between variables.
A social-ecology approach also examines interactions between different social
contexts in children’s lives. Schwartz (2006) measured adolescent spirituality in
relation to parent and peer religiosity. Data were collected at a large international
Christian youth conference in Canada; campers were 16 years old on average and
provided data on religious belief and commitment and “perceived faith support”
from parents and friends, with items such as “my parents (friends) and I talk about
how we are doing as Christians” and “my parents (friends) show me what it means to
be an authentic Christian.” Not surprisingly, the teenagers’ own religiosity was pre-
dicted by their parents’ and friends’ religiosity; teens with stronger faith had parents
and peers with stronger faith. But the interesting finding was that parents’ influence
was mediated by friends’ religiosity: After controlling for friends’ faith support, par-
ents’ faith support predicted teens’ religiosity less strongly. Thus, our understanding
of adolescent spirituality is enriched by measuring the interplay of different contexts
in which youth develop. This conclusion emerges from a national study of US youth
by Gunnoe and Moore (2002) on childhood and adolescent predictors of religiosity
in early adulthood. Mothers’ religiosity and religious training in childhood were
predictors of young adult religiosity, but one of the most potent predictors was the
frequency of worship attendance by one’s peers during adolescence.
In a similar study, Regnerus, C. Smith, and B. Smith (2004) analyzed data from
the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a database of youth from
grades 7 to 12. The surveys included two religiosity outcomes for youth: worship
attendance and importance of religion. Relative influences were computed of the
religiosity of parents, peers, the youths’ schools, and the local county norms (of wor-
ship attendance). As expected, teens’ worship attendance was related most strongly
to their parents’ attendance but peers’ religiosity and local county worship norms
60 C.J. Boyatzis

also had strong relations to youth attendance. Also, the importance of religion in
the youths’ schools turned out to be the strongest predictor of the importance that
the adolescent subjects themselves placed on religion. Together, these studies con-
firm the value of a social-ecology approach that analyzes links between multiple
influences on youth religiosity.
Nevertheless, let us remember that “the map is not the territory.” Large-scale
survey studies are invaluable for charting structural relations between variables, but
truly knowing how and why these variables affect each other is another matter.
Deeper work—in-depth qualitative work with multiple informants within multi-
ple social contexts—is needed to understand the dynamics between individuals’
religious and spiritual development and their social and interpersonal contexts. I
concur with the proposal for the “need for qualitative and quantitative studies that
go both deep and wide” (Roehlkepartain & Patel, 2006, p. 333). In my view, truly
to understand the richness of children’s and adolescents’ religiosity and spirituality,
our field requires time-intensive, qualitative work (see Boyatzis & Newman, 2004;
Coles, 1990; Hay & Nye, 1998).

Adolescent Wellbeing

A major research area is adolescent wellbeing and positive development. Here I

describe recent studies that help us further understand religion’s role in adolescent
wellbeing and begin to address why religion might matter in teenagers’ lives.
In a study that illustrates the value of studying multiple social contexts in
teenagers’ lives, Regnerus and Elder (2003) found that youth who live in high-
poverty areas were more likely to stay on track academically if they were also high in
church attendance. In contrast, those youth living in the same high-poverty areas and
who were low in church attendance were more likely to fall behind academically.
Thus, religious involvement can ameliorate broader risk factors such as community
poverty.
Although longitudinal design is unfortunately rare in our field, Kerestes, Youniss,
and Metz (2004) studied American youth from grades 10–12 (roughly 15–16 and
17–18 years of age). Changes in youth religiosity across that interval were linked
to changes in risk behaviors (e.g., drug use) and civic involvement (e.g., desire
to perform volunteer service). The most positive behavioral profile (high civic
involvement, low drug use) occurred in the youth who scored as highly religious
at both grade levels. The more telling finding from the longitudinal design was
that youth who went from high to low religiosity over that 2-year interval also
sharply increased in use of marijuana and alcohol, whereas going from low to high
religiosity was linked to higher desire for civic involvement.
While the above study echoes the common findings that religion is linked
in healthy ways to adolescent wellbeing, some studies are revealing why. For
example, Furrow, King, and White (2004) assessed identity, meaning, and proso-
cial concerns in a diverse sample of 800 American public high school students.
Structural equation analyses supported a model in which religious identity was
3 Examining Religious and Spiritual Development 61

significantly linked to stronger and more positive “personal meaning,” which in

turn predicted higher prosocial concern. This concern was manifested in higher
scores for personal responsibility, empathy, and helpfulness toward others. In a
national survey of 20,000 American adolescents, Wagener, Furrow, King, Leffert,
and Benson (2003) found that teenagers’ religious involvement made a positive
impact on their wellbeing through the mediating mechanism of giving the youth
exposure to increased social capital and developmental assets within the religious
community. Social engagements with youth and adults in religious communities, in
turn, reduced youth’s risk behaviors and increased their psychosocial thriving and
wellbeing.
In conclusion, it seems that involvement with religion can promote many aspects
of adolescent wellbeing and identity and enhance one’s sense of purpose and mean-
ing in life and thus service toward others. This is a clear example of a strong
connection between “religion” and “spirituality,” in that engagement with organized
religious tradition (and all that entails in beliefs, rituals, community, etc.) seems to
promote a greater sense of personal connectedness with what is beyond the self and
a deeper understanding of the self. Thus, youth who are engaged in a value-laden
and moral context that religion can provide will emerge with an enhanced spiri-
tual sensibility that promotes attitudes and actions to contribute to the greater good
(Lerner, Dowling, & Anderson, 2003).

Moving Beyond Stage Theory

The paradigm of cognitive-developmentalism and its focus on age-related cognitive

processing has dominated the study of children’s religious and spiritual develop-
ment and still underlies many scholars’ thinking (Spilka, Hood, Hunsberger, &
Gorsuch, 2003). I assert that this cognitive-developmental hegemony has impeded
our understanding of religious and spiritual development (see Boyatzis, 2005). As
developmental psychology has substantially outgrown stage theory (see Overton,
1998), the study of children’s spiritual and religious development should as well.
An “obsession with stages” impedes our understanding of both the gradualness and
the “complexity and uniqueness of individual religious development” (Spilka et al.,
2003, p. 85).
Another problem with cognitive-developmental stage theory is that its narrow
focus on the “typical kid at a given age” fails to account for the substantial vari-
ability between and within individuals at any given age. Individuals—children and
adolescents—enjoy sudden spiritual gains and spurts (due to dramatic experiences
or revelatory insights) as well as regressions (due to trauma or despair); for many
people, including children and teens, there are long seasons of stillness. Different
individuals experience a different mix of these different experiences—growth, loss,
stasis—at different times, in different ways, due to different causes, and with differ-
ent consequences. An egregious flaw of stage theories is their failure to account for
these varieties of religious and spiritual experiences within and between individuals
at any age.
62 C.J. Boyatzis

For some empirical meat in this critique, consider one of our most famous the-
ories: James Fowler’s stages of faith (Fowler, 1981). While this emphasizes modal
stages characteristic of each age, Fowler’s own data prove that variability commonly
occurs within a single age. Drawing from Fowler’s data (1981, Table B.3), while
72% of children in middle childhood possessed the “age-appropriate” mythic-literal
faith, in that age group children scored in four different stages or combined adjacent
stages. In the subsequent stage of synthetic-conventional faith (allegedly typical of
teenagers), only 50% of adolescents sampled scored in this stage, and teens in this
sample scored in five different stages or substages. (The variability is even greater
at older ages.) I find it disappointing that Fowler, a truly great theorist whose book
is a monumental achievement, has yet to recognize this empirical problem in his
stage theory (see, e.g., Fowler & Dell, 2006). Let us question our veneration of
stage theories that lump into tidy ages the myriad messy diversities of religiosity
and spirituality.
Stage theory has constrained our understanding of children’s spirituality and thus
our work with children. I assume that religious educators and youth ministers have
ample experiences with children who were considerably more mature spiritually
than some (or many) older individuals, who, in contrast to standard theorizing,
seemed less mature then they “should” have been. (Fowler has now recognized these
possibilities; Fowler & Dell, 2006.) Consequently, our grasp of young children’s
spirituality and our modes of religious education and faith formation have been
impeded due to mistaken assumptions of stage theory.
Let me note that it is indeed likely that specific domains of religion or spirituality
reflect stage-like change (e.g., in God concepts, feelings about and understanding
of prayer). However, these changes are not yoked so tightly to specific age ranges
to justify calling them developmental stages. Stage models often have assumptions
of wide-sweeping changes in the holistic cognitive structures children use. Most
research supports an alternative view that cognitive changes are not so far-reaching
and holistic as they are more narrow, specific, and local, or domain specific (Over-
ton, 1998). Therefore, my hope is that scholars will spend more time exploring
developmental sequences in different domains. I assume that individual domains
show sequential growth that is at times incremental and orderly and other times more
random with growth punctuated by stasis or regression. Looking across domains,
there may be little uniform change (as predicted by older stage theories) but instead
variation in trajectories of domains due to factors such as children’s own cognitive
propensities, family influences, local cultural support, and so on.
A theoretical framework that would enhance our field is Siegler’s (e.g., 1994,
1996) overlapping waves model. Siegler analyzes children’s “on-line” cognitive
processes to solve individual mathematical problems. Based on years of research,
Siegler argues that at any moment children have available to themselves several
ways of thinking. These are strategies that compete with each other, and over time
and experience (as some yield more parsimonious or palatable answers), some ways
of thinking will become more common while others less common, and some will
oscillate frequently. This model seems more consonant with children’s actual think-
ing than do theories that posit children growing dramatically in sweeping change
3 Examining Religious and Spiritual Development 63

from one global stage to another. Siegler’s claim that “cognitive change is better
thought of in terms of changing distributions of ways of thinking than in terms of
sudden shifts from one way of thinking to another” (Siegler, 1994, p. 3) seems to
describe how children (and adults) often vacillate in their religious views and beliefs
and spiritual connectedness to what is beyond them, perhaps never totally jettisoning
one way of thinking but prioritizing some ways more than others at various times.
In some circumstances, one form of thinking can become dominant that might not
show up in other circumstances (e.g., a parent using prayer to plead for God to “help
me out just this one time” in, say, the case of a sick child). In sum, the complexities
of thought and behavior require us to move beyond stage theory. As leading theorists
in developmental psychology have said, “the inability of stage theory to account for
. . . variability has led to a virtual abandonment of stage theory as a framework for
research and interpretation” (Fischer & Bidell, 1998, p. 470).

Conclusion

Children’s religious and spiritual development is receiving attention from scholars

like never before. While much work has revealed valuable lessons about religious
and spiritual development, we have a lot to learn, and I have attempted here to
identify recent areas of growth, empirical works that are yielding valuable informa-
tion and pointing us in good directions, and theoretical contentions that call us to
replace some long-standing but erroneous ways of thinking. We will need more
sophisticated theories and measures than used in the past to move forward to a
deeper understanding of a dimension of life that, though challenging to understand,
is central to child development and our humanity.

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Biographical details
Professor Chris J Boyatzis is Professor of Psychology at Bucknell University,
Lewisburg, USA