American Jesus author Stephen Prothero considers the growing SBNR (“spiritual but not religious“) movement, as the crowd of independent minds gains a chronicler in Leigh Eric Schmidt, author of the recent history of spirituality, Restless Souls. While Schmidt counters the criticisms often lobbed at such an unorganized, freestyle spirituality — that it’s little more than narcissism, or, more recently, “therapeutic individualism” — Prothero looks another layer below, at the premise of “personal originality” that underlies spirituality: a pretense of uniqueness in personalized worship that denies the deep roots, and cultivated forms, of the religious traditions that often inform spirituality. Or, in other words, the yoga techniques favored by the SBNR are the product of organized, institution-style religion, and spiritualists who deny it are like the “feckless teenager who imagines that his foolish parents have bequeathed him nothing except perhaps a new car.”