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       If only I knew then what I still don't know.

      —Douglas Dunn, The Year's Afternoon, 2000

      “Ask a cosmopolitan friend or a young person to describe his or her religion and you are likely to get ‘I'm spiritual but not religious,’” conservative provocateur Laura Ingraham writes in her recent jeremiad bemoaning the nation's cultural decay, Of Thee I Zing (2011). Predictably, Ingraham finds this popular self-description both vapid and dismaying: “‘The spiritual but not religious' moniker has become so trendy, it now has its own acronym: S-B-N-R. How about this one: S-T-U-P-I-D?” Not exactly sophisticated criticism, but Ingraham flogs the “SBNR crowd” long enough to make an inadvertently telling swipe about how they constitute a bunch of erratic dabblers. “Perpetually dipping their hands into the Whitman Sampler of Faith,” Ingraham jabs, “these searchers taste each flavor, but never stay long enough to savor any one in particular.”¹

      It is safe to say that Ingraham did not have Walt Whitman on her mind when she made that allusion, but rather a big box of chocolates. Reaching for a popular product logo, the Whitman's Sampler®, Ingraham played with the stereotyped image of the country's unmoored religious seekers as fickle consumers possessed by an insatiable appetite for variety. That censure, a commonplace of cultural criticism, has been around a long while now, and it comes not just from the right wing. Deriding the spiritual-but-not-religious demographic for its flighty tastes—say, a yearning for “tofu prepared by Tibetan virgins,” as Katha Pollitt put it in the pages of The Nation magazine in 2007—seems just as likely to happen on the other side of the political spectrum. “Avoid weasel words. Like ‘spirituality,’” Pollitt bluntly advised her fellow liberals. “It's religion.” Do not fall for the spiritual as some stylish, gently lit alternative to the religious, Pollitt was saying. It is all bad—just in case anyone on the secular left was tempted to think otherwise.²

      Restless Souls tried in its first incarnation in 2005 to provide space to think differently about the Walt Whitman Sampler of Faith—the American invention and hallowing of “spirituality” as something loftier and more open-ended than “religion.” Now, seven years on, the design for this second edition remains much the same. I still think the tradition that flows from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lydia Maria Child, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Sarah Farmer, William James, Rufus Jones, Howard Thurman, Max Ehrmann, and company is worthy of serious consideration as an important variety of American liberalism, but I am concerned far more with the roots of this religious outlook than with its current political consequence. It was common enough over the last three decades, and especially in the first years of this century, to imagine that the renewal of the religious left was just what the country needed as a counterweight to the rise of the religious right. As I reflect now on this second edition, I would readily admit that such a perspective had particular resonance during President George W. Bush's ascendancy, when Restless Souls was under initial construction. A veritable flotilla of academics and pundits raised the flag for “spiritual progressives” in hopes that such religious liberals might reawaken and coalesce into a more vital political force.³ On second look, I would leave such present-day potentialities for others to stoke (or dampen) and dwell instead on the historical questions at the heart of Restless Souls: How did the spiritual come to be privileged over the religious by so many Americans, and what were the cultural implications of sanctifying that division? Those are puzzles enough.

      A proclamation from Whitman's Democratic Vistas (1871), on display among the epigraphs to this book, is one canonical moment in the imagining of “spirituality” as the most elevated, precious, and desired portion of religion. Not in churches, creeds, sermons, or organizations, but in the “solitariness of individuality” would “the spirituality of religion” be realized: “Only here, and on such terms,” the poet announced, “the meditation, the devout ecstasy, the

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