I would like to address this point if I may. In some circles, most of which can be found in the conservative movement, the belief is that most if not all of our problems are at their most basic, spiritual problems. The reasoning is: gluttony is a sin, therefore it follows that if people were more inclined to be righteous, gluttony would decrease. Premarital sex is a sin, therefore if people were inclined to be righteous, premarital sex would decrease as well as unplanned pregnancies out of holy wedlock. and so on and so on.
This belief is why these groups focus so much on the spiritual needs of the people/country. They see it(fixing the spiritual needs) as a way to fix the physical needs.

To a small degree, the idea has merit. If someone is depressed and suicidal, restraining them so they cannot hurt themselves keeps them alive, but does not fix the underlying problem. I personally feel that a persons attitude and how they interpret life's many challenges deeply affects how they will grow and advance as a person, or fail to do so. Fix the underlying problem and the overt problems will disappear. Spirituality is not necessarily THE way to do this IMO but it is A way.

I think chaosman raises a very good point. The underlying issue is often one of a person's individual values and behaviours, or as the religiously-inclined will define it, the propensity to sin. The problem is that preventing "sin" is a very poor basis for making public policy. It's obvious that if nobody was greedy, there would be (virtually) no theft, but telling people not to be greedy is not going to prevent crime. And of course the government can't get into people's souls and rewire them to be selfless.

But the problem for secular humanists is this: if we disregard "sin" as a basis for policy, and instead focus on solving society's practical problems, then what constitutes a problem worthy of being solved? It sounds like a stupid question. Of course we want people to be healthier and happier and better educated and more productive and less poor. But why?

If you take away "In order to please God" as an answer, then what are we trying to achieve? I'm not saying it can't be answered, it can. It's just more difficult to articulate than "Because God says so", and requires careful thinking about the goals, values and limitations of public policy. For example: Is the divorce rate a social problem worthy of government intervention? The fact that more boys than girls go into sciences and engineering? Obesity? Depression?

If we don't think carefully about what we're trying to accomplish, then we fall into lazy assumptions. The government should do something about divorce because we as a society, automatically assume that divorce is a bad thing. Is it? The government should do something about obesity because fat people are more likely to be unhealthy, and unhealthy people are less economically productive. Well, do people exist just to grow the GDP, or would people happily exchange a few years of life for more bacon cheeseburgers? Is our goal to maximize happiness? Well then why not just put Prozac in the drinking water?

It's not that much of a problem, when you realize that a government is not a computer AI or something, it's composed entirely of people. It's in the government's (group of people's) best interest to ensure that its components are as healthy as they can be, have reached their developmental potential (not stunted by malnutrition), live as long as possible to keep their contributions going. It's also important to make sure that no one is stopped from doing anything by stupid reasons---a brilliant physicist shouldn't be blocked at age nine because girls can't do math.

I'm not sure how divorce would matter to a government, marriage is important because it's one way to track the addition of new citizens to protect and nurture, divorce doesn't really stop that as marriage isn't the only way to get new citizens.

You do have the same attitudes in part of the left. Like political correctness*, where the banning of evil words should change the attitude of people.

Some on the left also have the ideological purity over practicality mindset, and the "if it can be interpreted as doing sinners a favour, it has to be the wrong thing" attitude. Like some feminists reaction to the slutwalks. How can they be good, if some machos can enjoy watchign them? And it's not demonstrating for the whole femminist package but for a single issue. So are they good because that is a gateway issue for the full package, or bad because it's competition for full package femminsts?

Now i tend to view thoose progressives, who hold that sort of attitudes, as just like social conservatives only in a different colour. A bit like thoose, who out of annoyance about the dogmatism of their church, feel the need to dogmatically contradict their former church in each and every issue. But the question remains, are thoose attitudes typical or required for social conservativism, and the nutty fringe of progressives has them as well, or is that an effect of perception bias.

*or part of it. There is a grey area between political correctness, opposition to useing more offensive language, that adds no extra information, and demands for using acepted terms correctly. The border tends to be drawn according to rhetoric convenience more often then not.