NY Times

More recently, Americans’ desire in the 1970s and ’80s to devise spiritual identities apart from traditional categories was labeled “Sheilaism” by the sociologist Robert Bellah, for a woman called Sheila who believed in God, did not go to church, but trusted her own internal voice to direct her on a spiritual path.

Many of today’s “nones” are yesterday’s “Sheilas,” and some of them may be spiritual descendants of those New Lights whose innovative ways of being (and not being) religious established trends in American belief nearly three centuries ago. The rising and falling preference for the open air of unaffiliation is not only not new, it is exactly how religion in America has been periodically enriched and expanded from the beginning.