Laws do not make people moral. Criminals will do what they’ll do regardless of whether it is illegal or not. They don’t care.
What laws do is give the government, a necessary evil in a sense, the teeth to legitimately deal with the immoral and illegal behavior when it occurs, for the protection of its citizens and the establishment of an orderly society, which makes for a free society. It gives them the authority to act and delineates which actions are to be taken.
If the the government does not deal with crime and immoral behavior, people will on their own and anarchy will result. It will be survival of the fittest, or cruelest, and to hell with everyone else.
A representative form of government that we have is, theoretically, restricted to what it can do by the laws that govern it so that it can protect society and yet does not step over the bounds into tyranny and oppression.
But government MUST exist and it must have laws so that people can be free under it. Not free to rape and murder and steal, or anything else they feel like doing, but free to live their lives in peace. Members of society have an obligation to each other. Nobody lives in a vacuum and everyone simply cannot do whatever he pleases.
Besides, governments based on the Judeo-Christian value system are the freest and most prosperous on earth. Having a religious basis for our laws does not immediately equate to oppressive theocracy.
If you want to see what living under a government which is not based on Judeo-Christian morals, the 20th century provides plenty of examples of societies based on atheism.
Tell me which one of these, Prokopton, you would prefer to live under.... Cuba? USSR? NK? Communist China? Pol Pot? Which atheistic paradise would you prefer over a society based on the Judeo-Christian value system.
Those countries you name are communist dictatorships, they cannot be compared to a democratic republic, Christian or not. I'm Catholic but I also don't want to live in a Socialist country like Brazil, even though the population is mostly Catholic.
Your post equates crime with immoral behavior, but they are not, and should not, be the same. Your arguments could be just as easily made to allow the government to control what you eat, how much you exercise, whether you smoke or drink, and a myriad of other things that some people feel are wrong or immoral and that, for the good of society, you should be prevented from doing by the use of coercive force, if necessary.
Christianity is based on individual freedom where we do right or wrong based on our own decisions, not because we fear the coercive force of religious leaders.
Our Democratic Republic was also founded on individual freedom where citizens are free to do and say things that only a jerk would do or say.
Freedom to only do what someone else thinks is right or moral is no freedom at all.