Lamby the Liberal goes to church and helps out poor people and the sick -- like Jesus did. Sammy the Secular used to be a liberal, but now he's not. Sammy happens to be a conservative who doesn't believe in God, but who does believe in slashing Medicaid health care funding for seniors who have trouble paying the heating bill. Sammy also believes in giving huge tax cuts to wealthy corporations and spying on fellow citizens, like liberal Quakers, without a warrant. See? Lamby and Sammy are not so much alike after all. (Note: Although Sammy does not speak for all conservatives, or all secularists, he does make a nice nut while holding down a nest in the West Wing.)

In modernist categories, things are either religious or secular. Our constitution, for example, deliberately established a secular government that took no part in religion, whether positive or negative. But "liberal" refers to that which pertains to all free citizens. If you believe, for example, that all free citizens should have the right to vote, that's  a liberal idea. The opposite of that would be some political ideology that runs toward monarchy, totalitarianism, or oligarchy or plutocracy or something, any system that limited the vote to an exclusive in-group, whether that group is defined by gender, ethnicity, social class, religious test, literacy, ancestry, or whatever. What conservatism is about, from a political point of view, is conserving the power of the in-group. What liberalism is about is spreading power out to more people.

Ortiz writes: "For my audience, when saying someone is a 'liberal' that typically refers to a secularist, left-leaning, unbeliever."

Being liberal or conservative is a different matter from being religious or secular. You can mix and match: there are liberal Christians and conservative Christians; there are secular liberals, and there are secular conservatives. But since liberals tend to give voice to more people, that means that they give voice to secularists and atheists and Hindus and whoever comes along. The ACLU is, of course, the poster-organization for this. But it is inaccurate to claim that all folks who hold or merely tolerate the expression of secular or even atheistic ideologies are necessarily liberal. You can be a conservative and an atheist, just as you can be a liberal Christian.

To claim that one cannot be both a liberal and a Christian is to defy logic. And Lamby loves his logic as much as he loves his neighbors: that's how he got to be a liberal.