Religious Identity

Psychology and Identity Formation

In his theory of the eight stages of psychosocial development, Erik Erikson identified religion as an important resource for identity formation. Each of Erikson's stages is marked by a conflict between a polarity that, when negotiated, results in the person recognizing an attendant virtue. For example, the infant stage is marked by a conflict between trust and mistrust that is resolved in hope, whereas an early childhood stage that shifts between industry and inferiority results in competence. Erikson concluded that in order to negotiate each stage successfully, a person must hold the elements of each polarity in tension, rather than rejecting either.

The fifth stage, fidelity, addresses a person's teenage years, which are lived along a polarity of identity and role confusion. In these years, a person selfconsciously asks questions like “Who am I?” “Who do people think I am?” and “How do I fit in?” To successfully negotiate the fifth stage, a person needs to develop an identity that steadfastly coheres to an ideology. Identity and ideology are linked, according to Erikson, for ideology provides a way to make sense of life and a worldview coherent enough to inspire a person's total commitment—or fidelity—and to allay identity confusion. Erikson pointed out that the kind of questions an adolescent typically asks in the fidelity stage (e.g., “Who am I?”) often leads to questions about a transcendent, such as “Is there an ultimate arbiter of which identities are authentic?” or “Is there one transcendent meaning that subsumes disparate identities?”

Religion may also provide the source of ideology, a necessary ingredient for adolescent identity construction. Erikson offered Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther as two examples of people who underwent identity crises that were finally resolved when religion provided an ideological anchor for identity. Erikson depicted Luther as torn between his father's expectations for him to be a lawyer and his own desire to become a monk. When Luther [Page 632]contravened his earthly father's wishes and joined a monastery, he discovered his identity as the son of the heavenly Father. Similarly, Erikson discussed Gandhi's discovery of Hindu and Jain teaching when he was in his early 20s as providing him with the resources he would use to take a nonviolent stand against colonialism in South Africa and India. Although Erikson comes close to collapsing religion with ideology, he emphasized the capacity of religion to be the object of fidelity and thus an important resource for identity formation.

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