Religious development has always been an important part of the psychology of religion. Two quite separate topics need to be covered. One is to examine the development of religion itself, through childhood and into the life-span, and to see what generalizations can be reached about that. The other is to examine how more general aspects of psychosocial development in children influence religion, both in childhood itself, but also what lifelong influences it has on adult religiousness. We will examine these two rather different topics in turn.

So, first we will consider how religion itself develops. One approach to religious development has made use of stage development theories. I will examine that first in children, and then see how it extends to adults. It is probably fair to say that it is no longer an approach that is at the cutting edge of work on religious development, but it raises interesting issues that are worth examining.

It cannot be assumed in advance that it will be possible to make many generalizations about religious “development” at all. Certainly people's religiousness changes over time; that is not in dispute. However, if we are to reach any generalizations about what can properly be called religious development, those changes in religiousness will need to follow a fairly standard pattern. That is an empirical matter; it may or may not be so. In fact, I will suggest that we can reach such generalizations about the development of religion, but only for one very specific aspect of religion (intellectual understanding of religion), and only in childhood, not in adulthood.

Stages of Religious Development in Children

The most researched aspect of children's religion is the development of intellectual understanding. This seems to follow the general scheme that Jean Piaget established for most forms of intellectual development. One of the earliest applications to the religious area was Ronald Goldman's research on the interpretation of Bible stories (Goldman, 1968). The phases that children's understanding of this material go through are roughly:

Other aspects of religious understanding, such as views about prayer, seem to show a similar pattern. This pattern of development in religious understanding is well replicated and seems to be near universal (see Hood et al., 2009).