ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the historical roots of being Spiritual but Not Religious by exploring the liberal Protestant ambition to create a psychological science of religion and how that ambition has been fulfilled in the current fascination with Buddhist-derived but secularly marketed mindfulness. In the 19th century, liberal Protestants in Europe and the United States became greatly excited by the realization that modern science, and especially the emerging science of psychology, seemed to prove the human truth of the teachings of Jesus. The great psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology (1917) stands as perhaps the high-water mark of this intellectual and spiritual enterprise. This chapter argues that Buddhist-derived mindfulness in the 21st century does not merely resemble these earlier intellectual projects but, rather, is a direct genetic descendent.
