As a person grows up, he should decide many things: what is his faith, vocation, political view, and gender role. The experience shows that even adults do not always have a solid understanding of who they are. The most active phase of self-identification begins at the age of 12. In this essay, I express my thoughts on faith and describe how I came to this point.
According to Smith and Denton (2005), 84 percent of Americans from 13 to 17 years old believe in God. At the same time, the survey conducted by the Pew Research Center reveals that only 63 percent of adults believe in God in the US (Pew Research Center, 2014). Thus, some people lose their trust in God as they get older. I thought of God for the first time at the age of 7, and these thoughts are closely related to an accident. Despite the fact that my parents are religious, this accident made me think that there is no God because, otherwise, he would not let such terrible things happen. This decision corresponds to the concept of foreclosure proclaimed by Marcia (1966) because I did not think of any alternatives to Gods existence and faith.
At the age of 12, I have experienced identity diffusion because I was not sure what is my attitude to faith and did not spend much time thinking of it. At the age of about 14, I had an identity moratorium because my commitment was absent, and I had no interest in identifying my faith (Marcia, 1966). Approximately at the age of 18, I overcame the crisis and reached identity achievement. Since that time, I believe that there is no sense in belonging to a particular confession because since God is one, why should he care whether a person is a Catholic, a Protestant, or a Muslim. Furthermore, God is not a person, as it is depicted in Michelangelos fresco “The Creation of Adam.” Instead, God is about the energy of the unfathomable universe and lives inside of every person.
To conclude, it is challenging to answer whether faith helped or hindered my journey to identity achievement. That is because faith itself was the objective of my journey. It is interesting to see whether my attitude to religion and faith will change in 10 years. Still, now I feel satisfied with my views because they help me cope with difficulties.
References
Smith, C. & Denton, M. L. (2005). Soul searching: The religious and spiritual lives of American Teenagers. Oxford.
Marcia, J. E. (1966). Development and validation of ego identity status, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3, 551-558.
Pew Research Center (2014). Belief in God. Web.