Spiritual, But Not Religious

Unknown, 1969

A way of describing oneself as not foolish enough to be religious, but really profound regardless.

So achingly fashionable it has its own acronyms (SBNR, SBNA, or “Spiritual but not affiliated”). The idea is so broad is impossible to attribute to one book or paper, but is more in line with the New Age (of Aquarius) Movement which emerged after the Beatles’ popularisation of Hinduism around the time of Woodstock and the creation of the Esalen Institute in 1962 to promote the “Human Potential Movement”. Most recently canonised by Sven Erlandson’s 2000 book of the same name.

• https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&content=spiritual+not+religious
• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=spiritual+not+religious
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Age
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esalen_Institute
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Potential_Movement
• https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Spiritual_But_Not_Religious.html?id=pq80PQAACAAJ