John Dupuy on Spiral Dynamics and the Stages of Christian Faith
There are a lot of developmental models out there, but the one we lean on is spiral dynamics. The person carrying it forward today is Don Beck. The original thinker behind it was Clare Graves, who died before the book ever got written. From what I understand, Beck and Cohen gathered up his notes, assembled the whole thing, and released it. One way to use it is to look at the different developmental levels inside Christianity itself.
A good friend of mine, Rollie Stanich, is a devout Christian and also an integralist, and he has a line I like: we see God through colored glasses. That fits spiral dynamics neatly, because every level in the model gets its own color code. Down at the most primitive end you have the earliest stages, and they climb from there.
What catches my attention about the model is its double use. It charts an individual's moral growth from infancy up to whatever height a person reaches, and it also charts how the human species itself has evolved. Read some history with it in mind and patterns jump out. Rome, for instance, reads as very red: power, impulse, I got mine, a grab-and-hold structure. The higher levels grew up out of that soil.
The reason a new level comes online is usually that the one in place stops being enough. The old arrangement can't handle the demands of the moment. Pressure builds, tension keeps rising, and eventually something new has to emerge to carry the weight.
With Christianity, there are three levels below the one I'll start with, but for the sake of keeping this short I'll begin at what spiral dynamics calls blue. That's the mythic, fundamentalist stage of moral development. Here the Bible is the truth, full stop. In the Protestant form it's the King James Version, and every jot, tittle, and semicolon counts as the literal word of God. Nothing else is needed.
At this level there's a steady glance backward, toward the early church, the apostles, Jesus, the way things supposedly were at the start. That beginning gets treated as the picture of perfection. Give me that old time religion, return to the source, and all will be well.
It didn't hold up for a lot of people, though, because history kept intruding. Take the Bubonic plague, the Black Death. Some writers point to it as the spark that pushed the next level into being, the one called orange: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, science, rationalism. People were dying everywhere. It genuinely looked like the end of the world, depending on whose account you trust.
A third of Europe gone, maybe half, and that's before you count other regions. Bodies in the streets. And the prayers, the swinging censers, the bones of saints, the whole apparatus of the old faith, none of it stopped the dying. That failure is part of what cracked the level open and let the next one through.