The New Republic article is an insightful piece of political analysis. Foer recognizes that the Democratic Party and political liberals bought into secularism and lost their hold on mainstream Christianity. Now, caught in the grip of competing special interest groups, the Democrats are trending secular in a big way.

Dean's personal life is a graphic testimony to this reality. Raised an Episcopalian, Dean stopped attending church at age thirteen when his father, a committed church warden, no longer required him to attend. Later, Dean married a Jewish physician, Judith Steinberg, and the two decided at first to join the Unitarian Church. This would make perfect sense, since the Unitarian Church--virtually devoid of any theological conviction--is the perfect meeting place for a secularized Episcopalian and his secularized Jewish wife. Nevertheless, the Deans decided that they would retain their personal religious identification and later allowed their children to decide whether to be Episcopalian or Jewish. Both chose to claim a Jewish identity.

In Dean's highly secularized world, this pattern of decisions makes perfect sense. Since he has given no indication of personal conviction or theological concern, Dean obviously saw his church membership as a matter of social and cultural significance. This became abundantly clear when Dean later resigned his membership in a local Episcopal church and joined the Congregationalists. This significant shift did not come as a result of theological controversy or spiritual concern. To the contrary, Dean broke with the Episcopal Church because the congregation resisted a bike trail across its property. Obviously, Dean is more comfortable in the High Church of Environmentalism than in any church of deep Christian conviction.

Dean is running to the left of the other major candidates and he often claims to be running for "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." Dean's new denomination, the United Church of Christ, is the vangard for the theological left--supporting homosexual marriage, homosexual ministers, abortion, and just about every other liberal cause. As a matter of fact, when Gov. Dean went looking for a church to join [after the Great Bike Path crisis], he found himself comfortable in the church that prides itself on being what we might call "the liberal wing of liberal Protestantism."

Governor Dean attempted to try out his new use of religious language when speaking to an African-American church in Columbia, South Carolina. The Boston Globe reports that Dean changed his tone of voice as well as his message as he told the congregation. Dean told his congregation that "in this house of the Lord, we know that the power rests in God's hands and in Jesus' hands for helping us. But the power also is on this, God's earth--Remember Jesus said, 'render unto God those things that are God's but unto Caesar those things that are Caesar's.'" If that sounds a bit confusing in terms of religious conviction, Dean's other statements will just add to the problem. He told the Boston reporter that "Christ was someone who sought out people who were disenfranchised, people who were left behind." He went on to say, "He fought against self-righteousness of people who had everything...He was a person who set an extraordinary example that has lasted 2000 years, which is pretty inspiring when you think about it." Pretty inspiring when you think about it? That statement is more remarkable for what it doesn't say--when you think about it.