Fences To Separate Church And State?

I attended a Zoom meeting last night of AU, an organization that is a proponent for the complete separation of the church from government. The speaker was a guy with a lot of theological credentials, including a PHD. The entire premise of his talk was to show the history of how the country was never built around church and state separation. Even some of our state constitutions include reference to Almighty God in some of their articles. 

It was an interesting presentation based on the premise that instead of building a wall to separate the two institutions, we should build a fence. During the meeting I wasn't yet aware of the nonsense this represented. He was using these concepts as if they were interchangeable. They are two separate things.

First, we should have a distinct separation of the church and our government. Whether one uses the image of a wall or a fence or row of trees to represent a line, the idea is still the same. We don't need the government dictating our choices regarding religious affiliation and we don't need the church telling the government how to enact laws. I suppose it's cutesy to act like a fence is somehow going to make things run more smoothly or that would be a way to get this accomplished more quickly.

The other premise he used was that we need to have a dialogue. Certainly that is much more civil than what we seem to have now in our discourse. However, we can still have discussion over the fence, as it were, and still have strict separation of these entities. 

Another thought that presented itself to me was the idea that we have government declaring national and state holidays that sometimes are tied to religion. How do we do away with this if we are to achieve complete separation? It seems that we have never been able to separate our religion from our government. How often are cities or counties using local clergy to say a prayer before a meeting? We even have chaplains in the House and Senate. Our various military branches also have clergy in their ranks. 

I think I concluded that the bottom line for the speaker, and for many of the participants was not a strict adherence to separation wholly. He seemed to be pushing a more religious angle for discussion over the fence, and didn't seem to consider that perhaps the best approach might be to nix religion altogether and have someone with no religion do the talking. Too many times I think judgment gets clouded when one approaches issues from an already set point of view. Those who practice religion think, too often, that it offers all the answers.