You said: "My sense of people’s negative reaction to religion is that it has more to do with the way religious people sometimes act or with the way religious groups organize themselves (or fail to organize themselves) than with the language those religions seek to apply to experience of the divine"

I can't speak for anyone else, of course, but in my case - it's more the second than the first.  I was a Christian from childhood into my 30's, and while I have no shortage of very bad experiences with Christians and Christianity, that wasn't what made me jump ship.  I simply came to the realization over a period of several years that I don't believe the Christian narrative, and that centering my spiritual journey around Jesus just doesn't make any sense to me. The Christian vocabulary just doesn't accurately describe my experience of myself, the world, or how I experience the Divine, and really - it never did, even though I tried like hell for years to make it work.

Different people mean different things by the SBNR label, but in my case, it simply means I'm not an atheist or agnostic and I am not an adherent of a specific religion.  I don't understand why that would make anyone feel like they need to apologize for being a Christian.  And while there are some people in the SBNR camp that are very negative about Christians, my experience has been that there are a lot more who are just really into yoga or meditating or whatever, and Christianity isn't something they really think about much.  (I live in Los Angeles, where Christianity isn't as culturally dominant as in other parts of the country, which probably makes a difference.) 

I'm fully capable of putting language to my spiritual experience.  Do I derive some of that language from various religious traditions? Is my experience and the language I use to describe it influenced by my experience of being an American in the 21st century?  Of course - I am not inventing my spirituality ex nihilo. I agree that there's no such thing as a purely private spirituality - for me, there's just no logical connection between that point and the need to belong to a particular religion.