Presentation on Faith Development,Moral Development,& Nontheistic Judaism: A Construct Validity Study. For Psychology of Religion Couse, Candler School of Theology, December 2016, by J.R. Atkins, MBA

1. Faith Development,
Moral Development,
& Nontheistic Judaism:
A Construct Validity Study
BY DR. JOHN SNAREY
PRESENTED BY J.R. ATKINS, MBA
DECEMBER 1, 2016

2. Overview
• James Fowler’s construct is evaluated from a nontheistic perspective
• 3 groups of Jewish nonthesis who founded an Israeli Kibbutz
• 60 participants
• 4 broad theoretical assumptions were tested
1. Stages of faith development are not reducible to or solely determined by
stages of moral development
2. Stages of faith development are structural wholes
3. Variations in level of faith development significantly predict relevant outcomes
4. Stages of faith development are cross-culturally universal

3. Israeli Kibbutzim
• Kibbutz means group in Hebrew. It is a modest name for something unique: a
voluntary democratic community where people live and work together on a
non-competitive basis. Its aim is to generate an economically and socially
independent society founded on principles of communal ownership of property,
social justice, and equality.
• The first kibbutzim (plural of kibbutz) were organized by idealistic young
Zionists who came to Palestine in the beginning of the 20th Century.Their
dream was not just to settle the land it, but to build a whole new kind of society.
Despite many hardships, they succeeded in creating a social system and a way
of life which has played a crucial role in the development of the State of Israel
both culturally and politically.
• Today some 270 kibbutzim, varying in size from 80 to over 2,000 people, are
scattered throughout Israel. With a total populace of around 120,000 they
represent about 2.8 percent of Israel’s population.1
1. http://kibbutzprogramcenter.org/about-kibbutz/

4. Israeli Kibbutzim continued
http://www.kibbutz.org.il/cgi-webaxy/item?131312

5. • Most Kibbutz mark Jewish Holidays
• Some as non-religious, nontheistic, seasonal themed, Jewish
historical events
• The Kibbutz in the study was more consistently atheistic and
socialistic (284)
• The Kibbutz residence although atheist were still Jewish atheist
• Kibbutz RamatYedidim was the study Kibbutz
• A homogeneous secular experience of Judaism (287)
Israeli Kibbutzim continued

6. Procedure
• Subjects were interviewed individually in their homes in Israel, US & Canada
• Each interview was tape recorded and transcribed latter
• The research instrument assessed
• Faith Development
• Moral Judgement
• Ego Development
• Demographic Background
• The use of Ethnic-Religious Symbols
Interview Record Transcribe Score

7. • Faith Development – Subjects were interviewed regarding centers of
meaning and values that guide their life using Fowlers standard semiclinical
nondirective procedure (287)
• Moral Judgement – Subjects took Kohlberg’s moral judgement interview
(Form A) with 3 dilemmas (288)
• Ego Development – Subjects completed Loevinger’s sentence competition
test with 36 incomplete sentences (288)
• Background Info – Subjects completed a basic questionnaire (288)
• Jewish Artifact Observations – Observed by interviewer while in the subjects
home and 1 of 3 classifications applied: absent, primary conspicuous literal,
or unobtrusive-metaphorical (289)
Procedure, continued

8. Results
• 5% of the Kubutz founders considered themselves religious
• 18% - Stage 3 of Faith Development
• 8% - Between Stages 3 & 4
• 43% - Stage 4 of Faith Development
• 5% - Between Stages 4 & 5
• 15% - Sage 5 of Faith Development
(289)

9. Criterion Validity
• Developmental Criteria
• The correlation of Faith Development with Moral Development was .597
• The correlation of Ego Development with Moral Development was .467
 Both represent positive correlations that are statistically significant
• Social Status Criteria
• Significant correlations were found between faith stage and
• Levels of Education
• Occupation
• Social Class
• Work complexity
• Correlation between faith development and sex was weak and nonsignificant
(292)

10. • Ethnic-religious Criteria – can variations in level of faith development
be differentiated by
• Orthodoxy of the subjects family of origin
 Faith development among Orthodox Jewish families was significantly different from
that of non-Orthodox Jews
• Current communities of residence
 Israeli cities provided less support for faith development then kibbutz communities
• Current use of ethnic-religious symbols at home
 2 of 3 categories were observed
Primarily conspicuous-literal symbols at 75.5%
Primarily unobtrusive-metaphorical symbols 24.5% (294)
• Universality – the assumption the model is applicable to all people
• Comparing the stage distribution of the kubutz founders with stage
development for a similar group
 The kibbutz founders compare very favorably to others such as Protestant, Catholic and
Jewish subjects (295)
Criterion Validity, continued

11. Faith Development in Relation to Moral Development
• From Kohlberg’s work there is an expectation that moral
development scores will always be higher than or equal to faith
development scores (295-297)
41.6% of the subjects received the same moral development and faith
development stage scores
26.6% of the subjects scored higher in moral development than faith
development
31.6% of the subjects scored lower in moral development and in faith
development
41.6
26.6
31.6
Same
Higher Moral Dev
Higher Faith Dev

12. • Discussion - Although only 5% of the founders considered themselves
religious, all of them spontaneously discussed topics of implicit religious
relevance. (298)
• StructuralWholeness
• The correlations between all 7 aspects were positive
• Reliability coefficient was quite high
• No subject made use of adjacent stages
• Developmental Criteria
• The correlations between faith development and both ego and moral development
were positive and statistically significant.
• Faith development was NOT significantly correlated with age possibly due to the
limited age range of the sample, ages 51 to 57. (299)
Findings

13. • It appears that Fowlers model and measure is able to capture the
thinking of the person whose religious orientation and background is
quite different from those of his original sample. In this study, the
faith of non-Christians was not undervalued by Fowler’s model (301).
• 2 Caveats:
1. Drawing conclusions based on comparisons between small, non-random,
globally defined samples is fraught with difficulties.
2. Faith development research has not been conducted in a sufficiently wide
range of socio-religious populations to jeopardize this assumption
• The highest stage in Fowler’s model seems to have the same status
as the highest stage in Kohlberg’s model (301).
• According to Fowler, faith development is a more comprehensive
construct that includes moral development.This is consistent with
the finds of this study as well (302).
Findings, continued

14. Conclusion
• According to Fowler, without Kohlberg’s work there would be no theory of
faith development (303).
• This study set out to test the basic assumptions underlying Fowlers
construct.The results lead to tentative support to the power and generality
of the model.
• There is ample opportunity for further examination of the validity of
Fowlers construct (303).
J.R.Atkins, MBA
December 1, 2016
Candler School ofTheology