The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), having just rejected that America is a Christian nation, has earned unsought praise from the ultra liberal and secularist Americans United for the Separation for Church and State (AU).

“The NAE represents a broad swath of evangelical denominations, so these results give us some cause to celebrate,” recently enthused the AU’s longtime analyst Rob Boston, who liked that a poll of NAE’s board rejected what he termed the “’Christian nation’ myth.”

AU advocates an ultra strict “wall of separation” between church and state, which it often defines as banning public prayers and Christmas trees on public property. “Don’t expect the government to impose theology on anyone,” Boston prototypically warned. Almost all evangelicals, and Americans, would agree, except that AU rejects any direct faith based witness in the public sphere. For it, defending traditional marriage or opposing abortion is by definition theocratic and un-American.

Citing the Constitution’s lack of religious references, Boston insisted America is not “officially” Christian. But who claims it is? References to America as Christian usually refer to the affiliation of most Americans or to faith’s role on our culture and traditions. But ultra secularists like to imagine “Christian America” must resemble New England in 1650 or Spain in 1550.

Christianity has been the primary spiritual force in America since our beginnings. It’s a form of faith emphasizing liberty and freedom of conscience for all. Coerced faith is no faith at all. But hyper church/state separationists try to believe that liberty and human dignity can survive in a spiritual void. History tragically indicates otherwise.

If America is not Christian, what is it? Only about 4 or 5 percent specifically identify with other religions. And most of the 15 or 20 percent professing no religious affiliation still mostly celebrate Christian holidays, attend church weddings and funerals, and rely on the inherited habits of faith, however unacknowledged. In times of national crisis or celebration, clergy are summoned, and civil events often convene in churches.

Some evangelicals have shied from “Christian America” because they think only individuals can be Christian even broadly defined, or they have an unworldly expectation of what Christian means, or they have surrendered to an exaggerated multiculturalism, or they think “post-Christian” sounds sophisticated while also liberating them from any public responsibility towards the nation.

The premature waving of a cultural white flag by some evangelicals understandably excites and encourages the relatively small number of professional arch secularists like AU. But how does it advance faith, culture or morals, either for church or nation?

Everybody inwardly laughed when presidential candidate George H. W. Bush in 1988 awkwardly claimed he was pondering separation of church and state while floating in the Pacific after his plane was shot down during World War II. Legal separation of church and state is rightly important in America, but it is not our nation’s ultimate spiritual raison d’être. And few individuals outside AU regard it as their ultimate faith.

America’s deep, flawed, often contradictory but persistent Christianity protects freedom for all and is ennobling in ways that abstract secularism never can be.

AU’s Boston is right that America is not legally, “officially” Christian. But America is more than what law specifically details. And America’s faith emerges from its history and is sustained by its people, without coercion, and transcending the scoffing of its critics.

Mark Tooley, a former CIA Analyst and graduate of Georgetown, is President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD).  He is a native of Virginia and a life-long Methodist.  This article first appear at the IRD blog ‘Juicy Ecumenism’ and is used with permission.