Confusion about Separation

This blog post, "Of Babies and Beans," by Adam Gopnik, at The New Yorker, is mainly about abortion (and about what Paul Ryan said during the vice-presidential debate on the subject) but it also included some sharp -- but I think misguided -- criticism of what Ryan said about the role of religious faith in citizens' "public" lives.  Gopnik characterizes as "disturbing and scary" what struck me as Ryan's (to me)unremarkable observation that “I don’t see how a person can separate their public life  from their private life or from their faith. Our faith informs us in everything  we do.”  Here's Gopnik:

That’s a shocking answer—a mullah’s answer, what those scary Iranian “Ayatollahs” he kept referring to when talking about Iran would say as well.  Ryan was rejecting secularism itself, casually insisting, as the Roman Catholic  Andrew Sullivan put it, that “the usual necessary distinction between politics  and religion, between state and church, cannot and should not exist.”  . . .

. . .  Our faith should not inform us in everything we do, or there would be no end to  the religious warfare that our tolerant founders feared.

Now, I believe strongly -- in part for "religious" reasons -- in the separation of church and state, properly understood.  But Ryan did not say that the "distinction between politics and religion" or the distinction between "church and state" (which is a different distinction) "should not exist"; and there is nothing mullah-ish about the statement that faith "informs" people's lives -- public and private -- comprehensively.  He didn't say that the positive law should enforce religious teachings or require religious practices, and there's nothing contrary to "secularism" (properly understood) in his statement.

Which reminds me . . . I participated this past weekend, along with a number of Prawfs-bloggers and friends, in a really stimulating and fun roundtable conference at the University of San Diego's new Institute for Law and Religion, on "The Freedom of the Church in the Modern Era."  Our own Paul Horwitz's work on the subject was, of course, at center-stage!  More on this later (I hope!).