Lincoln at Gettysburg said the civil war was a test of whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal can long endure.

Now we're engaged in another great civil war testing whether any nation can endure without a state religion. The answer appears to be "no." Apparently we need a common belief system in order to function as a society, and without an established church the government has to dictate that belief system in some other way.