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this doesn't mean it doesn't have a moral imperative, and all morals and ethics have some base to draw from. In the case of the United States, its rather easy to see for societal values, they are based on many enlightenment values, and other values that developed over the years. Indeed, much of the world draws from many of these same sources.
List the values that are a basis for our society, either specific or not, and then study where they come from. In the case of the United States, read what they wrote, and who they said inspired them.
Our basis for human rights, universal education, democracy, sexual equality, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of speech and press, etc. derive not from theology, but from philosophers who drew from many different sources, and their own experience to advocate for these values. And, even in the United States, they won over society through the centuries.
The one thing, however, is that while quite a few of these philosophers were Christian, none of them really based these arguments for any of this on their religion. Many of them were aware that they couldn't and even wrote about it.
To give a simple example, while many of the leaders of abolition were religious, and gave their arguments against slavery a religious veneer, they never really quoted the Bible(which supports slavery) and instead talked about economic problems of slaver, its sustainability, and yes, even appealed to equality and fraternity.
Other, later, civil rights activists, particularly women suffragettes, were openly critical of Christianity because of the pervasive sexism in the Bible. The same is true of many abolitionists, such as Fredrick Douglass. Indeed, most of the 19th century thinkers who advanced human rights the most had radically different ideas about Christianity than many believers today, they would be closer to the UUA, or Quakers, and many called themselves agnostic or were atheistic in their beliefs.
But any beliefs these people had about the supernatural are irrelevant, the fact of the matter is that they based their morality and ethics, firmly, in the ideas of equality, and a sense of fairness.
This is key, these are secular ethics, in that no religion can claim them as its own, and the strength and superiority of ethics not based on any religion is that they can transcend religious boundaries.
I have seen many Christians, on this board, say that Gandhi was inspired by Jesus Christ in his civil disobedience, which is rather disingenuous, he wasn't Gandhi's primary inspiration, but a rather different source was.
He wrote this about "On civil disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau:
Thoreau was a great writer, philosopher, poet, and withal a most practical man, that is, he taught nothing he was not prepared to practice in himself. He was one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced. At the time of the abolition of slavery movement, he wrote his famous essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience". He went to gaol for the sake of his principles and suffering humanity. His essay has, therefore, been sanctified by suffering. Moreover, it is written for all time. Its incisive logic is unanswerable.
—"For Passive Resisters" Indian Opinion October 26, 1907
An Indian was able to take inspiration from an American, crossing any cultural and religious barriers because the values exhibited were universal, and could be adapted to apply to various situations.
Again, another example, what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:
During my student days I read Henry David Thoreau's essay On Civil Disobedience for the first time. Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times.
I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.
—"The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr."
Of course, this wasn't the only inspiration, and, to appeal to the religious, in both cultures, both men appealed to their religions. But the values they advocated are not, in themselves religious.
This is something that I think is perhaps one of the worse things perpetuated by religious Christians is the co-opting of secular values to claim as their own, in totally unjustified ways, and even worse, they twist their own theology, and the very nature of the god they claim to worship to make it fit with the morals and ethics of the day, and at the same time they sell themselves short in ways even they don't realize.
The fact is that we, as a society, and most of us individually, are much more moral and have a much better ethical outlook than any god or prophet. This is a simple fact, and the need to have such beings as paragons of virtue is a time that should be left in the past, as a historical blip.
And I know the United States is the most religious of the western nations, its the outlier, the statistical anomaly. However, outside of the fringe right, most Americans, regardless of their religion, certainly don't have a moral or ethical outlook that is based in the religion they follow. Society would be so much worse if they did.
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