5. Non-Institutional Spirituality and SBNR: The Thought of R.C. Fuller

1. The article analyzes the SBNR (Spiritual But Not Religious) phenomenon as an autonomous cultural position of contemporary Western man. The author points to the process of separating spirituality from institutional religious structures, leading to a shift in authority from external dogmas toward internal, subjective authenticity of experience. The text emphasizes the difference between traditional mysticism and the modern search for meaning, where the experience of the sacred is no longer interpreted through the prism of doctrine, but personal transformation. Invoking the thought of Robert C. Fuller and William James, the text reveals the mechanism of the secularization of transcendence and the transition toward a 'first-hand' lived religiosity, in which individual testimony becomes more important than institutional orthodoxy.