Secular religion within "Red"

I found the relationship between the old judge and Valentine an interesting one. I also found something religious in it. In the beginning of the film Valentine is seen as a romantic, constantly waiting for her boyfriend's phone call and tells him how much she misses him. Even though viewers only hear the boyfriend's voice, we get a sense that he is controlling, paranoid, and withdrawn from her in that he does not love Valentine as she much as she loves him and that he may be cheating on her. But she is oblivious to all of this because she is stuck in her idealized view of the world.
When she meets the judge she is surpised at his blunt personality and automatically judges him as a numb old man who is dead to the world without a care for humanity. In reality, he does have a care for humanity, etc. but the thing that differs he from Valentine is his acuteness to reality. When he spies on people, he is actually allowing himself to face the tragedies and hardships of life rather than attempting to cover them up in a soft, cotton blanket which Valentine does...she shields herself from the real unfairness and tragedies of life. When she returns Rita, the old judge asks what her motives were for doing such a thing: did she return it because she actually wanted to (seeing reality) or because she was afraid of the guilt (a shield from reality). This, I think is secular religion: living a raw life, without a barrier from anything. Lots of times religion provides people with a metaphysical, transcendent feeling but secular religion allows people to be humanitarians, to find identities while living life on earth and seeing it for what it is.
This relates to what Golding said in his article on Jackson Pollock in "Paths to the Absolute," Abstract Impressionists saw themselves as "belonging to the here and in a more self-concious way" (116).