Episode 135: Undifferentiated Faith part 1

I didn’t release an episode for several weeks. I felt overwhelmed, stuck, and needed space. In hindsight, I see it as giving myself the gift this creative block was offering me—rest, time away, and a break from thinking about something that brings up a lot of mixed and sometimes heavy emotions.

During this time, I had been reading James Fowler as part of my study on the stages of faith. He talks about undifferentiated faith, and it really piqued my interest. What exactly is undifferentiated faith?

Some context is helpful here. The first stage Fowler discusses is actually what he calls a pre-stage—Stage Zero—“infancy and undifferentiated faith.”

On page 120 of The Stages of Faith, Fowler writes:

“We are wonderfully endowed with innate potential for adapting to this new world, but the activation and elaboration of our adaptive capacities depends both on the progress of our overall maturation and on the way the persons or conditions of our environment greet us and beckon us into interaction.”

Further down the page, he continues:

“… if there is no person or persons with whom we can achieve a dependable complementary relationship of mutuality, our trust of the world and in ourselves can be outweighed by distrust and infantile despair.”

Paraphrasing: Gradually, infants begin to understand that objects in their environment exist separately from them—even when they are out of sight. In the beginning, the breast or bottle, mother’s face, and objects grasped and tasted feel like extensions of the infant, miraculously appearing when needed.

Fowler says:

“A primal ‘fall’ into consciousness occurs as our interaction with persons and objects enables us cognitively to construct what Piaget calls the ‘schema of object permanence.’”

A schema is like a simple framework or diagram—a very early “language of images.” At this point, we don’t yet have verbal language.

By 7–8 months, babies can form and retain mental images of missing objects or people. They’re on their way to knowing that they are separate from those they love and beginning to experience themselves as central in a world of “others.” In other words, they are beginning to realize they are separate entities.

Fowler describes this realization as traumatic:

“Some think that our primal innocence gives way to the first split of conscious and unconscious as we experience the new anxiety… of remembering our mothers when absent… and the panic about whether they will return.”

In other words, innocence is lost as we become conscious of our separateness from others, particularly caregivers, when they are absent and we’re unsure if or when they’ll return.

Fowler notes that this panic is so severe it is repressed by our first psychic defenses and “forgotten.” This healthy forgetting is made possible by the mother’s or caregiver’s timely returns. When the caregiver returns—calling the baby’s name, offering their eyes and face—the child is reconfirmed in being, restored to well-being, and reassured of their centrality in a world that is becoming more separate.

This is the beginning of the formation of trust: in caregivers, in the environment, in the self, and eventually in the larger world of meaning. Fowler adds that these early experiences also lay the groundwork for our images of worthy womanhood, manhood—and I’ll add, personhood.

So why is this important? Why dedicate a podcast episode to it?

Fowler gives us a clue:

“Those observers are correct, I believe, who tell us that our first pre-images of God have their origins here. Particularly they are composed from our first experiences of mutuality—in feeding, diaper changing, holding, meeting needs—in which we form the rudimentary awareness of self as separate from and dependent upon the immensely powerful others who were present at our first consciousness and who ‘knew us’ with recognizing eyes and reconfirming smiles at our first self-knowing.”

These pre-images form before language, before concepts, and coincide with the emergence of consciousness.

To understand more deeply, I looked up “undifferentiated.”

• In biology, it refers to cells or tissues that haven’t yet specialized.

• Merriam-Webster defines it as “not divided or able to be divided into different elements, types, etc.”

Fowler explains:

“In the pre-stage called undifferentiated faith, the seeds of trust, courage, hope, and love are fused in an undifferentiated way and contended with sensed threats of abandonment, inconsistencies, and deprivations in an infant’s environment. Though really a pre-stage—largely inaccessible to empirical research—the quality of mutuality and the strength of trust, autonomy, hope, and courage (or their opposites) developed in this phase underlie—or threaten to undermine—all that comes later in faith development.”

In other words, the infant doesn’t yet distinguish between trust, courage, hope, and love. They are all planted simultaneously, and they compete with the inevitable panic that comes from realizing they are separate beings with limited control over their world—separation from caregivers, feeding from the breast or bottle, etc.

This is where the conceptualization of trust begins. The quality of mutuality—the foundation of relationships—forms in this phase and becomes the basis of all faith development to come.

What happens here matters. It’s worth examining, because it informs our journey later in life and even in the present moment.

That’s all I’ll share for today. I’ll pick this back up in Part 2. Thanks for listening.

Differentiation in Nature

In nature, undifferentiated entities are common.

• In the early stages, cells all look alike. Only when they mature do they differentiate into specialized forms.

• Plants can look similar in their early growth stages—sometimes it’s hard to distinguish weeds from vegetables or flowers. What one region calls a weed, another may consider useful or beautiful. Oleanders, morning glory, and ferns are examples.

• Acorns planted by squirrels can feel like a nuisance in a suburban yard, but in a forest they’re essential for growth.

One summer, my tomato plants thrived with heavy rainfall—but so did the hornworms. These fat, spiky caterpillars nearly destroyed the plants. It’s hard to tell what a caterpillar will become: a moth or a butterfly. Butterflies are pollinators, helpful and beautiful. Moths are often destructive.

After trying unsuccessfully to get rid of them, I eventually learned hornworms’ “blood” is green. Fascinating, and a little gross. The bottom line: the tomatoes survived and thrived.

Nature teaches us that differentiation is the only way to true growth. It brings balance and tension—not opposition, but a push and pull.

So too with faith.

When we are young, our faith looks alike. But as we grow, our paths naturally differentiate. When someone follows the natural course of their growth and is told “no” or even shamed, communities are weakened. By stifling differentiation in faith development, we miss the beauty, the lessons, and the deeper cementing of faith that tension and contradiction can bring.

When we interfere, diversity is erased. Growth is stunted. Potential is interrupted.

So what do we do instead?

• Encourage curiosity.

• Invite and even celebrate questions.

• Normalize doubts by creating safe spaces to talk about them.

These are the first steps toward critical thinking—the pathway of thought leaders. Leaders who honor the past while learning from it, who respect the present while holding hope for the future, and who take bold action to create it.