No, government is designed to create a safe environment for people to live, work, and raise their families, by protecting them from bandits and invaders, plus providing a court system to peacefully settle disputes.
Once government (as opposed to institutions like churches) start promoting Virtue, the question then becomes "Whose Virtue?"
Shall it promote the Communist virtue of altruism, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"? Or shall it promote the Islamic virtues and execute any who dare mock Mohammed?
If you say "Well, only Judeo-Christian virtues", then who gets to decide what is included. The ultra-orthodox Jews will want a ban on all work on the Sabbath. If you restrict to just Christian, then which sect gets to be final authority?
Your post mixes specific religious practices with universal axioms of civilized behavior. Public virtue relates to the later, not the former.
In other words, to answer your question, the “final authority” in a free society is natural law. Just as gravity has the power to make you fall regardless of your religion, the public safety function of government consistently exposes certain basic, universal virtues as essential to civilized life, regardless of the religious makeup of a culture.
For example, I’m sure we agree that murder is destructive to civil society and falls under the public safety function of government. But murder would never occur if life was valued as it should be. That “should” is a moral premise, yet it is inextricably connected with our laws about murder.
Those laws reflect the duty of government to promote the virtue of respecting human life by punishing with vigor those who lack that virtue. This comports both with Paul’s teaching in Romans 13 and with the Founder’s view of the Creator as the source of those unalienable individual rights the government has a duty to defend.
Public virtue is not an option. We won’t stay civilized without it. If it sometimes presents us with hard questions, well, that’s just the price we pay for trying to be civilized.
You are WRONG—Government is designed to promote the Virtue of Justice. Just Law-—Rule of Law—is the type of government we have-—from which everything else has to flow. If we have NO Rule of Law—we have no America.
If laws are unjust-—we have no Rule of Law—we have Rule of Man (hitler type laws just made up on whims which deny natural laws and right reason).
The Founders stated that the purpose of education was to promote Virtue (as did the Ancient Greeks) and education of the populace was necessary to keep a Republic. Ignorance is deadly for a Republic-—but they ALL knew that Virtue was necessary for Freedom.
Government is designed to promote Virtue as understood by “Just Law”. Justice is a Virtue—a most important one to the Founders and Cicero and John Locke.
Just Law is defined by my tagline-—it is the ONLY reason for government-—Justice.
Just law-—promotes Moral Laws of Nature. Yes, Natural Law Theory has a “moral code” and was developed in Western Civ. for thousands of years and has a Universal—Objective Truth (the Judeo/Christian God in the US) as the basis of Jurisprudence in the US.
All Jurisprudence springs from Right Reason-—meaning ALL JUST LAWS have to be well reasoned—logical—and according to the Nature of man and woman.. You have to take into account—in laws that women bear children, etc. Otherwise, the laws are unjust.
Marxism throws out Natural Laws with its radical egalitarian which denies the differences (science, logic and reason) not only between the sexes and between adults and children, but they deny God—Objective Truth. That is the very PLACE our inalienable rights come from—they are eternal—ABSOLUTE—and so Marxist ideology is incompatible with the Constitution.
Objective Truth only exists if there is a God—and our government was designed by all Christians....and based on Common Law and the very Christian Magna Carta. Common Law could never have existed with any other type of belief system besides Christianity which gives dignity and worth to every human being. Individuality is from Christianity-—it was a radical turn in the history of man and radically changed the whole world. Jesus Christ was a radical as was Socrates.