Are we all religious now?

The website, The Immanent Frame, posted an interview with Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, who is Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Law and Religion Program at SUNY-Buffalo, looking at the failure of the courts to deal adequately with the realities of lived religion in America.

Let me get you thinking by including two quotes. One from the interview and one from a previous post written by Professor Sullivan.

From the interview, which can be found at: http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/08/11/religion-takes-the-stand/,

One of your posts on The Immanent Frame you title with the claim, “We are all religious now.” Can you explain what that can mean, for instance, to the fifteen percent of Americans who claim to have no religious affiliation, or to the New Atheists?
Yes, I mean it to refer to the phenomenon I will be describing in my new book, a new openness to seeing Americans as naturally “faith-based,” enabled, I believe, by a convergence between a broad range of humanistic critiques of scientistic understandings of the person, social scientific and biological; social and political movements that originated in the mid-twentieth century; and a contemporaneous shift in religious authority and anthropology from the church to the individual. The exclusivity of materialist/medicalized understandings of the entire range of human capabilities and experience, as well as ecclesiastical capacity to insist on orthodoxy and particularity, are both fast eroding in the face of these changes. It’s a next step in the radical disestablishment of religion in this country. This shift toward locating authority in the individual means that it’s much easier for people to move among religious communities, religious ideas, and religious practices in a much more ambiguous way, a way that is less determined by someone outside oneself. If people want to call themselves atheists, that’s fine with me, and I’m not telling them they’re not atheists. What I’m saying is that I think it is becoming socially, politically, and legally the case that people are understanding themselves in terms of a new revival of a holistic image of the human being as, in some sense, basically spiritual. I think that many people who would not call themselves religious would also at least assent to that notion.

And, then, from the referenced post, We are All Religious Now, which can be found at: http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2007/11/27/we-are-all-religious-now/, and references a number of specific cases, is a comment on an opinion written by Justice Souter.

Souter’s dissent in Hein hearkens back to the Flast era, insisting that religion is special, that individual conscience must be protected by a high wall of separation, and that James Madison ought to still rule: “favoritism for religion,” says Souter, “‘sends the . . . message to . . . nonadherents’ that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community.”

Souter’s is increasingly a minority voice. We are all religious now. As a leading architect of integrating spirituality into medicine says, “our belief [is] that there is a spiritual dimension in every person’s life, even in those who deny that there is.”

So, do you think that, with a redefintion of religion to emphasize the individual dimension and not the institutional one, that all Americans, even those who would deny such identification, are religious?