What does a 'secular' government really do to the faith?

The United States is constructed on principles drawn deeply from our Christian heritage. We can argue about which founding fathers (and mothers) were Dieists, Jefferson's desire to strip the bible of all miraculous pieces, who really belonged to their church and who just showed up because that was state law (as in Virginia). But I am a minister in the Presbyterian tradition and I can see the ecclesiological structure of my denomination at the base of the representative government of this republic, to name but a single example of our Constitution's Christian roots.

I think they made the government secular because of the European experience. The USA is two hundred years after the Reformation, at the conclusion of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants that tore the continent apart. William Penn, the Pilgrims, the Hugonots, and so many others came over here originally because this 'new' land (new to the whites) offered a place to get out of the religious turmoil of Europe.

What a lesson for democracy building in the Middle East! We of the West are accused of either being Christianizing or Secularizing, whichever is most convenient to accuse of undermining Islam. Secular state-building, as in Turkey, when it follows 'the Western model', is not about accepting Western values.

Secular state-building is more about preserving the religions from which they emerge. Two hundred and thirty years of secular government in this nation has allowed the various churches of the Christian faith to live in peace and pursue the Great Commission to great effect all around the world.

I think where we have begun to fall down, where there is truth in the Muslim world in their accusations of us being a money-loving, promiscuous society seeking to conquer the world, is that we once had a relatively clear idea of the separation of the salvific portion of our faith from the ethical portion of our faith. Jesus taught us how to treat one another as part of the inbreaking Kingdom of God to a sinful world. Those lessons are the foundation of our society. that is the ethical portion of our faith. The salvific portion, preaching and spreading the faith, that was set aside in the secularization of the governmental system. That was done because the other model, the church and state combined in power and purpose, was a deadly system that weakened the state and left the church a sinful shell of what Jesus calls it to be.

We are secular in government so we will not be warlike in religion. It is a tradeoff that has worked so far. Iraq may be the Islamic answer to bringing such an ideal into the Muslim world. Iraq has been called Civil War, Muslim killing Muslim, Sunni killing Shi'ite, Shi'ite killing Sunni. This land is the buffer between Shi'ite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. Can we present the ideal of a secular government over and against a Sharia-defined government in a way that is convincing to our brothers and sisters in the Middle East?

Can we convince the fundamentalists in both religions, Christianity and Islam, that secularism is not the death of our religions, rather it is a compromise with sin itself that takes the most inclusive aspects of our religious systems and places them on a level beyond the exclusive aspects of our religious systems? With political power, our faith operates violently. Separated from political power, it has to depend on the power of God, not the power of guns, to get its message across.