Remember when coffee was just coffee? When there wasn't even a choice between caffeinated and decaf?

No longer. Now, you can have your coffee dripped, steamed and served stripped of its caffeine by high-tech baristas sporting nose rings. You can buy a decaf French Vanilla coffee at Dunkin' Donuts and you can get a White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino Light Blended Coffee at your local Starbucks. You can mix your caf with your decaf and you can virtually have your dessert in your brew (that would be the somewhat redundant Starbucks Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino Blended Crème).

As coffee has gone, so has religion.

Remember the days when there were Catholics, Protestants and Jews and your weird uncle, the black sheep of the family, who declared himself an atheist after dating a French girl who was an exchange student at your high school? In those days, everyone stayed in their church or synagogue and observed their religions with doctrinal purity and clarity -- or at least professed to stay within the lines of their religious doctrine, even if in private they didn't.

Now, say the researchers at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Americans' religious beliefs have become, well, more like that White Chocolate Blended Creamy whatever that you can get at Starbucks. The Pew Forum surveyed 36,000 American adults as part of a long-term study of religion in this country. And they found that while more than 90 percent of Americans say they believe in God or a universal power, those beliefs are all over the map or, to use the Pew folks' fancier language, "most Americans have a non-dogmatic approach to faith."

In what would have been a shocking statement just 50 years ago, for example, "a majority of those who are affiliated with a religion, for instance, do not believe their religion is the only way to salvation. And almost the same number believes that there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their religion."

In the first of the study's reports, which was issued in February, researchers found that Americans moved easily between denominations and faiths, choosing the ones in which they felt most at home, not necessarily the one into which they were born.

Evidently, not even atheists are atheists any more. Or at least a significant portion of them aren't: one in five atheists told researchers that they believed in God or a higher power, which either means they don't know the meaning of the word atheist or they don't feel a need to be true to its definition.

Sort of like the people who come to dinner and say, "I'm a vegetarian, but I eat chicken and fish."

We're not sure what all this means. On the one hand, it means job security for those in the clergy, who still have a significant flock to tend to. On the other hand, a religious leader's work is either getting harder or easier. Harder, because it's difficult to shepherd on a flock that wants to go in different directions; easier because encouraging diversity within your ranks means you don't have to enforce as many rules.

And yet.

While we're not fans of orthodoxy of any sort -- religious, political or ideological -- we do wonder if the increasingly narcissistic aspect of our society isn't the explanation for the increasingly informal quality of religious belief. In a world where the individual's experience and interpretation reigns supreme -- so many bloggers! so much opinion! -- we're not surprised that religious expression is now less a matter of following doctrine and more a matter of how you feel about one aspect or another of religious dogma.

But what happens when people's religious beliefs become more individualistic and less institutional, when you can choose whether to believe in divine grace but not divine retribution, for example?

It just all seems a little too easy to us that way. In one of our favorite parts of the study, Pew researchers found that more people believed in heaven than in hell.

Well, that's convenient now, isn't it