i heard that kleen kanteen were sponsor of some part of the olympics games in canada. might also explain the reason why i see them everywhere when i’m up there in the “great white north”

You can definitely have separation between church and state, with religious or non-religious people — a secular government just means that laws shouldn’t enforce things that are based exclusively on religious faith. E.g., the Catholic church is free to teach that contraception is wrong, but any argument for actually outlawing birth control has to be based on something more than subjective moral judgment — medical / safety reasons, compelling social / economic reasons, etc. — something that remains true regardless of one’s religious beliefs. More generally, government shouldn’t take actions that privilege people with specific beliefs — the government should (at least in theory) be able to equally represent all its citizens. A Catholic judge may not be personally impartial about certain things, but they should be able to recognize the difference between having personal convictions, and abusing the power given to them by the whole population by enforcing those convictions in ways the law/constitution doesn’t support. (I’m saying _should_ though, since some of them actually pull it off better than others )

Separation of church and state is to protect both of them, though. If the state becomes the arbiter of religious beliefs, on the one hand, you no longer have a free government for anyone of a faith other than what the government chose — by definition their rights are being limited for reasons that from their perspective offer no advantage to themselves or to society (if there was advantage from other religious perspectives then the law would be secular in the first place, even if it happened to agree with the teachings of some religions). That ultimately harms the government (or at least, the country) by making a permanent underclass out of anyone of a non-official religion. On the other hand, from the church’s perspective, if the government starts making or enforcing laws that have no foundation outside religious belief, that effectively means that the government, not the church, is the one deciding what religious beliefs should be taught. (Which might sound good to some politicians, actually, but it doesn’t tend to do nice things for either the church or society when it actually happens…) And even if it works out well for one religion in the short term, once that precedent is set things can turn the other direction as soon as someone else takes office…