This is an excerpt from an ongoing discussion between me and a co-worker.

I still disagree with you on the church/state argument. I believe religion and politics should be kept separate, as I said before. Who is to say what version of Christianity is to be recognized by the Government? Would it be mine, yours, or Benedict XVI's? Who is the arbiter of that? Men from Washington to Madison recognized that our nation was a mixture of more than one faith, and that to survive there needed to be mutual respect of all faiths. While they realized that it was our faith that shapes our morality; that faith needed to be instilled on a personal level and not by the government.

The message of Christ wasn't about the governments recognizing Him. His message hits us on a more personal level. We are the heralds of the Kingdom of God, not Uncle Sam. We are the ones responsible for taking care of the hungry, the thirsty, the unclothed, the strangers and aliens, the prisoners (Matt 25:30-46). This is the message of the Gospel, the Good News. It's not about politics.

Here is an interesting quote from the 1930's:

"The national government ... will maintain and defend the foundations on which the power of our nation rests. It will offer strong protection to Christianity as the very basis of our collective morality.
Today Christians ... stand at the head of [our country]. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit... We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre, and in the press — in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past ... few years."

Sound familiar? This is a quote from a speech by Adolf Hitler (Hat tip to One P.O.'d Veteran for the quote).

This is the danger of mixing Church and State in any form. We see it from the Crusades to the current problems with radical Islam. Whenever we try to mix religion and politics both suffer.
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I still fail to see how a nation founded on the principles of freedom and individual liberty can then attempt to take away that most important and sacred of those liberties, that of belief and worship. Why is it that the Radical Right feels they need to legislate morality? I just cannot grasp it.