In the Varieties, James limits his attention to the experience of the individual person communing directly with the divine. So he doesn't attend to the ways in which those experiences are mediated by the experiences of other people, as reflected in personal conversation, books, institutions such as schools, monasteries, and churches, etc. In other words, he doesn't have an account of religious *culture*. In Lecture II he talks about this, and argues that "personal religion will prove itself more fundamental than [...] ecclesiasticism" because "churches, when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine." I think he's just wrong about that, and that, to use an academic buzzphrase, no matter how far back you go in search of a founding prophet, there was "always already" a religious culture shaping their vision. Even Abraham was shaped, if only via opposition, by the polytheistic religious culture of his tribe. And if it's true that religious culture is *always* an ingredient in "personal religion," and not a later grafting, then James distorts his account of personal religion by leaving that out.