Growing Up

On Outgrowing Faith

When people say that believers should “grow up,” it is often dismissed as condescension—but in a developmental sense, it’s almost precisely right. Most adults never truly grow up. Not psychologically. They remain, as Robert Kegan observed, at Stage 3: the Socialized Mind—defined by conformity, sustained by belonging, and bounded by the invisible perimeter of shared norms. Their moral sense is derivative: they are good because others around them expect them to be. They live by imitation, not authorship.

To reach Stage 4—the Self-Authoring Mind—is to cross a developmental Rubicon. It means internalizing the tools of judgment and building one’s own moral calculus. You no longer borrow coherence from tribe or scripture; you construct it yourself. A Stage 4 individual does not merely parrot decency but reasons it. They can critique their culture without losing their compass, because the compass was forged, not inherited.

Beyond that lies Stage 5—the Self-Transforming Mind—where even one’s self-authored framework becomes a subject of reflection. Here, identity is fluid but not unprincipled: coherence itself becomes an evolving project. The mature mind holds multiple systems in tension, aware that each is a lens rather than a law.

Religions, ideologies, and corporate cultures all conspire—perhaps unwittingly—to keep people at Stage 3. They offer certainty, purpose, and belonging, but at the cost of intellectual independence. Institutions reward obedience over originality because obedience scales. Growth, by contrast, is metabolically expensive.

To “grow up” in this sense is not to discard morality but to reconstruct it. It is to trade comfort for coherence, validation for integrity. The enlightened heretic does not reject decency; he re-authors it.

A cleaner, more accurate version of that old taunt might be this:

“Faith is how we first borrow morality; maturity is how we later earn it.”

Maturity is not the death of belief; it is the ongoing act of re‑creating it—transforming values from inheritance into intention.