Outcomes of Life-span Development of Religious Styles: Changes in Symbolizing Transcendence and in Responding to the Strange

The questions that this project will address are whether, how, why, and when in their lifetime individuals are changing their religion and worldview. We interpret such changes as migrations between developmentally ordered religious styles and religious types. While our previous project (60806) could demonstrate that there is faith development and initially identify predictors and outcomes, this project focuses on two particularly interesting outcomes of faith development: (a) changes in people’s images of God and, in more general and inclusive terms, their symbolization of transcendence, and (b) their changes in prejudice and, with reference to the philosophy of the Alien, their responses to the Strange. We assume that faith development results in a narrative identity that affords a wise and humble response to the Strange we call xenosophia. This research is a contribution to answer these and other key questions using longitudinal data from Germany and the United States that were gathered in previous and current multi-method projects, which were based on faith development interviews (FDI) and questionnaire data (which include measures for personality, well-being, religious schema, mysticism, etc.). This project continues this research into a fourth wave of field work and will add another n = 460 (50% US and 50% German) longitudinal re-interviews with the FDI. This will furnish longitudinal analyses with sufficient statistical power. In addition, we survey general population samples of n = 1,250 in both U.S.A. and Germany using our questionnaire, which now includes scales for intellectual humility, God images, and questions for xenophobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and other prejudice. Thus, we may be able to relate our questions of religious change to a larger population context, and demonstrate the contribution of faith development research to psychological investigation in domains such as wisdom, God images, and prejudice.