Focusing on Fowler's (1981) faith development theory (FDT), this article presents a modification of structural-developmental theory of religion. The primacy of cognitive development as motor and guideline of religious development is called into question. The new model, the typology of religious styles, is aimed at accounting more fully for the life-history-and life-world-relatedness of religion, at its principal interactive, interpersonal origin and shape. Thus the phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1988) and Ricoeur (1985Ricoeur ( /1988Ricoeur ( , 1990Ricoeur ( /1992) who provide philosophical perspectives, Noam's (1985Noam's ( , 1988aNoam's ( , 1988bNoam's ( , 1988cNoam's ( , 1990 developmental perspective, which is based on interpersonality, as well as Rizzuto's (1979Rizzuto's ( , 1991 view of the psychodynamic development of religion, play a significant role for the reformulation. An overview of styles is described and illustrated in a figure. References to results of empirical research are included, and an explanation of fundamentalism is outlined that follows from the religious styles perspective.In Fowler's (1981) faith development theory (FDT), we have, on the one hand, an indispensable explanatory tool for the religious diversity of modernity and postmodern times-a diversity that is becoming even more diverse, as inner (biographical) and outer (societal) religious plurality is growing-spawning from new religious and fundamentalist orientations to a deep but rather diffuse hunger for spirituality. On the other hand, the faith development paradigm, with its focus on religious cognition and its almost unquestioned adoption of the structural-develop-