Also, my discussion focused more on the other book I read alongside Schmidt — Mark Oppenheimer’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door.

Here’s what I had to say in my UU World review of Schmidt’s book:

Schmidt, a Princeton historian, shows how Americans came to distinguish spirituality from religion. Although the book doesn’t quite trace the story all the way from “Emerson to Oprah,” as the dust jacket promises, Unitarians are central to it. Schmidt extends the history of their influence beyond the nineteenth century, showing how Transcendentalists’ ideas influenced scholars and new religious movements into the first half of the twentieth century.

Our UU emphasis on the individual search for religious meaning is not unique. We share a religious outlook with many other Americans: “call it transcendental cosmopolitanism, Inner-Light liberalism, Whitman’s sublime religious democracy, or the Spiritual Left,” Schmidt suggests. Notably, he wants to find in the Spiritual Left a political counterweight to today’s militant Christian Right. True, many proponents of nondogmatic spirituality were politically progressive, but Schmidt doesn’t show that a commitment to personal religious experience yields anything like a sustained political or cultural movement. The Spiritual Left, as he depicts it, is extra-ecclesial; its institutions are retreat centers, college classrooms, and bookstores, never congregations or denominations or regional cultures. But the Christian Right is dominated by all three of these. Religious liberalism’s influence on the culture is diffuse and unfocused, and therefore politically impotent; the Christian Right is anything but.

I say, go right on ahead and discuss Schmidt right here!