James Fowler gives a very good description of the distinction between "faith", "religion", and "beliefs" in Religion and the Clinical Practice of Psychology (ed. Edward Shafranske, 1996, pp. 168-169):
"Faith-development theory and research have focused on a multidimensional construct for faith that sees it as foundation to social relations, to personal identity, and to the making of personal and cultural meanings (Fowler, 1980, 1981, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1991). My claim is that faith is a generic feature of human beings. To make this claim credible, I must take some care to distinguish faith from two related patterns of human action that are often treated as synonymous with faith; belief and religion. Belief, in the modern period, has come increasingly mean the giving of intellectual assent to propositional statements that codify the doctrines or ideological claims of a particular tradition or group. Although belief may be an aspect of a person's or a group's faith, it is only a part. Faith includes unconscious dynamics as well as conscious awareness. It includes deep-seated emotional dimensions as well as cognitive operations and content. Faith is both more personal and more existentially defining than belief, understood in this modern sense.
Religion, as distinguished from faith, may be thought of as a cumulative tradition composed from the myriad beliefs and practices that have expressed and formed the faith of individuals in the past and present. The components of a cumulative tradition can include art and architecture; symbols, rituals, narrative, and myth; scriptures, doctrines, ethical teachings, and music; practices of justice and mercy; and much more. Elements from a cumulative tradition can be the souce of awakening and forming for the faith consciousness of individuals in the present. A current generation's drawing on and being formed by elements from a cumulative tradition make for a reciprocity of mutual vitalization and commitment. In the long evolution of humankind, the tie between faith and religion has generally been inextricable. It is only in the modern period, where many people have separated themselves from religious communities and religious faith, that religious faith needs to be distinguished from faith in a more generic and universal sense.
Faith, understood in this more inclusive sense, may be characterized as an integral, centering process, underlying the formation of the beliefs, values, and meanings, that (a) gives coherence and direction to people's lives; (b) links them in shared trusts and loyalties with others; (c) grounds their personal stances and communal loyalties in a sense of relatedness to a larger frame of reference; and (d) enables them to face and deal with the limit conditions of human life, relying on that which has the quality of ultimacy in their lives.
The foregoing characterization of faith is meant to be as formal as possible. It aims to include descriptions of religious faith as well as the explicit faith orientations of individuals and groups who can be described as secular or eclectic in their belief and value orientations. The non-content-specific characterizations of faith correlates with the formal intent of the descriptions of the stages of faith. The stages aim to describe patterned operations of knowing and valuing that underlie consciousness. The varying stages of faith can be differentiated in relation to the degrees of complexity, of comprehensiveness, of internal differentiation, and of moral inclusiveness that their operations of knowing and valuing manifest. In continuity with the constructive developmental tradition, faith stages are held to be invariant, sequential, and hierarchical."
