"Fowler drew on respected theories in developmental psychology to examine the process through which people acquire religious belief systems. Fowler discovered that individuals progress through a series of stages in the course of their faith development. Most people follow the same sequence of development, although some individuals pass through a given stage more rapidly than others (and many find no reason to move past the fourth stage). The first three stages correspond to the early stages in our cognitive development. Stage One, primal faith, represents a young child's earliest relationship with the world. It therefore mostly consists of paralinguistic dispositions toward trust or anxiety. About the age of four, children enter into Stage Two, in which they begin to acquire religious ideas by observing and learning from their parents. Stage Three begins as children gradually adopt the attitudes and moral rules of their community. Religious ideas in this stage are one-dimensional and literal. largely acquired from the stories and rituals they have been taught. By early childhood, they enter into Stage Four, the stage of conventional faith. Adopting their community's religious heritage provides mental and emotional stability. And by accepting their community's shared faith, they benefit from a state of solidarity or communal belonging.

Many remain in Stage Four for the rest of their lives. But, according to Fowler, it is inevitable that some individuals will question the authority behind their community's conventional beliefs. Stage Five begins the moment people begin to accept responsibility for thinking through religious and moral issues on their own. Fowler calls this "the individuating process" whereby people tailor a religious outlook to fit their individual intellectual standards. This stage requires a qualitatively new awareness of oneself as responsible for making personal decisions about what one truly does- or does not- believe. Whereas Stage Four consists largely of submission to authority, Stage Five entails active attempts to arrive at personal opinions concerning the tensions in religious faith: the relative versus the absolute, the individual versus the community, self-fulfillment versus service to others, the demands of reason versus the the need for emotional security. Many of the choices made in Stage Five are ideological, meaning that they they embrace only one side of each pair at the expense of acknowledging the important truths expressed in the other.

Fowler's Stage Six moves beyond polarities and recognizes the truth in positions other than one's own. This stage recognizes that life itself  contains polarities. It is alert to paradox and the need for multiple interpretations of reality. Symbols, myths, scientific method, logical analysis, and scriptural stories- some of which were repudiated in Stage Five- are newly appropriated as complementary vehicles for grasping the truth. "