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Accounts of what is real, each set out in its own terms and each with its own page.
All World Views Does God Exist? The Worldview Tree Browse All Entities The Schism RegisterThe Spiritual But Not Religious stream of the Secular Worldviews timeline.
Streams: All of Secular Worldviews Freethought Agnosticism Secularism Spiritual But Not Religious Atheism Humanism
Ralph Waldo Emerson tells Harvard's graduating divinity students in 1838 to cast out conformity and preach from their own souls. The address breaks him with the Unitarian establishment and opens the American lineage of personal spirituality outside the churches.
Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott found the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875, carrying Eastern doctrines of karma and rebirth into Western dress. Theosophy's lodges and its offshoots spread the template of the seeker's path outside the churches across the world.
William James delivers the Gifford Lectures published in 1902 as The Varieties of Religious Experience, studying religion as personal experience rather than institution. The book's sympathy for the individual's inner life becomes a charter text for those who keep the spirituality and leave the churches.
From the 2010s the religiously unaffiliated, the nones of the survey forms, become the fastest-growing category in the United States and much of the West, about a quarter to a third of adults in the Pew counts. Most are not organized atheists; the surveys find belief, practice, and belonging separating, which is the population the spiritual-but-not-religious label names.
