Washington Post‘s Dan Balz says incoming DNC chair Howard Dean “offers a secular vision of the world at a time when Democrats worry that they have ceded the values of faith and spirituality to Republicans.” Huh? What? Since when did the “values of faith and spirituality” get reduced to anti-homosexuality, anti-abortion, preemptive war, and laissez-faire economics? Even religious folk who share those values should be distressed by this consolidation of a master narrative that confines “faith and spirituality” within a set of issues. That’s cheap grace, and dumb journalism. And it’s a shallow understanding of secularism, which is rooted in Christian theology. And yet even so secularism can be broad enough to allow fundamentalists and atheists alike participation in public life. Not so the Washington Post‘s apparent definitions of secularism or faith.