Use secular to indicate movement away from religious affairs and toward worldly ones. This has been extended to apply relative to all religious or spritual beliefs, whether or not they include a similar doctrine.

Examples of secular used in religious contexts include: Secular goverments, which follow civil laws as opposed to religious instructions like the Islamic shariah, Catholic canon law, or Jewish Halakha, and which do not favor any particular religion.

and also you feel that it's necessary to be a regular Christian church go'er to be a proper President? Are you saying that as a "born again Christian" President, that Bush was mandated to use his Christian faith when making national and international decisions?

A Matter of Faith
By DAVID BROOKS



When Bill Clinton was 8, he started taking himself to church. When he was
10, he publicly committed himself to Jesus. As a boy, he begged his Sunday
school teacher to take him to see Billy Graham. And as anybody watching his
book rollout knows, he still exudes religiosity. He gave Dan Rather a tour
of his Little Rock church, and talked about praying in good times and bad.

More than any other leading Democrat, Bill Clinton understands the role
religion actually plays in modern politics. He knows Americans want to be
able to see their leaders' faith. A recent Pew survey showed that for every
American who thinks politicians should talk less about religion, there are
two Americans who believe politicians should talk more.

And Clinton seems to understand, as many Democrats do not, that a
politician's faith isn't just about litmus test issues like abortion or gay
marriage. Many people just want to know that their leader, like them, is in
the fellowship of believers. Their president doesn't have to be a saint, but
he does have to be a pilgrim. He does have to be engaged, as they are, in a
personal voyage toward God.

Clinton made this sort of faith-based connection, at least until he sullied
himself with the Lewinsky affair. He won the evangelical vote in 1992, and
won it again in 1996. He understood that if Democrats are not seen as
religious, they will be seen as secular Ivy League liberals, and they will
lose.

John Kerry doesn't seem to get this. Many of the people running the
Democratic Party don't get it either.

A recent Time magazine survey revealed that only 7 percent of Americans feel
that Kerry is a man of strong religious faith. That's a catastrophic
number. That number should be the first thing Kerry strategists think about
when they wake up in the morning and it should be the last thing on their
lips when they go to sleep at night. They should be doing everything they
can to change that perception, because unless more people get a sense of
Kerry's faith, they will feel no bond with him and they will be loath to
trust him with their vote.

Yet his campaign does nothing. Kerry talks about jobs one week and the
minimum wage the next, going about his wonky way, each day as secular as the
last.

It's mind-boggling. Can't the Democratic strategists read the data?
Religious involvement is a much, much more powerful predictor of how someone
will vote than income, education, gender or any other social and demographic
category save race.

Can't the Democratic strategists feel it in their bones how important this
is? After all, when you go out among the Democratic rank and file, you find
millions of Democrats who are just as religious as Republicans. It's mostly
in the land of Democratic elites that you are likely to find yourself among
religious illiterates.

But of course this is the problem. Forests have been felled so people could
publish articles and books on the religious right's influence on the
Republican Party. But as the Baruch College political scientists Louis Bolce
and Gerald De Maio have suggested, the real political story of the past
decade has been the growing size and cohesion of the secular left, and its
growing influence on the Democratic Party.

According to the American Religious Identification Survey, the number of
Americans with no religious affiliation has more than doubled since 1990.
There is now a surging but unself-conscious power bloc within the Democratic
Party.

Like the religious right in the Republican Party, the members of the secular
left are interested primarily in social issues. What unites them more than
anything else is a strong antipathy to pro-lifers and fundamentalists. While
75 percent of Americans feel little or no hostility to fundamentalists,
people in this group are far more hostile to them than to other traditional
Democratic bête noires, the rich or big business. They don't like to see
their politicians meddling with religion in any way.

Just as Republicans have to appeal to religious conservatives but move
beyond them, Democrats have to appeal to the secular left but also build a
bridge to religious moderates. Bill Clinton did this. John Kerry hasn't. If
you want to know why Kerry is still roughly even with Bush in the polls,
even though Bush has had the worst year of any president since Nixon in 1973
or L.B.J. in 1968, this is one big reason.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

I don't know if he's really involved in this, since the article is from the media? but if he is, he just trashed our constitutional rights.

Bush said to have secretly lifted some spying limits after 9/11

By James Risen and Eric Lichtblau
New York Times News Service
Published December 16, 2005
...
The officials said the administration had briefed congressional leaders about the program and notified the judge in charge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret Washington court that deals with national security issues.

Several officials said the eavesdropping program had helped uncover a plot by Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker and naturalized citizen who pleaded guilty in 2003 to supporting Al Qaeda by planning to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches. But the officials said most people targeted for NSA monitoring have never been charged with a crime.

What the National Security Agency calls a "special collection program" began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism. The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Al Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002.

In that same year, the agency began conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through a chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their international communications, the officials said. The agency, for example, can target phone calls from someone in New York to Afghanistan.

Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that calls from that New Yorker to California could not be monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court....

days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, John Yoo, a former official in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, wrote an internal memo arguing that the government might use "electronic surveillance techniques and equipment that are more powerful and sophisticated than those available to law enforcement agencies in order to intercept telephonic communications and observe the movement of persons but without obtaining warrants for such uses."

Yoo noted that while such actions could raise constitutional issues, in the face of devastating terrorist attacks "the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties."

You ever get the feeling that the New York Times is run by the dems? Don't you get it Bill? If Clinton had done the same thing concerning the NSA, he would be touted for his remarkable insight and care for our security. But since it was President Bush.... Aren't you tired of this? I certainly am.