The limit I requested is a light burden, hence the ample exception, "except insofar as the doctrine and practices etc. etc. obtain to the main idea," intended to keep our rhetorical attention on the central issue, so that doctrinal disputes serve, rather than distract from, our understanding of Christendom. Since in your opening statement you tightly knit the doctrine you mention to the argument you make, I don't think we really disagree.
If you're concerned with the etymology of the word 'culture', you might look at the extension of the root latin meaning of 'worship' to its modern roots: a husbanding, a cultivating of the land, eventually to be extended in the 16th century to the cultivation of language, and then to the cultivation of the intellect through education, and eventually to the end result of such education and customs as generalized across many persons. Out of the latin root, this genealogy of meaning drew that aspect of worship having to do with the knitting together of families and persons by a shared perception of a final good, the agreed-upon true virtue of the husbanded material. If the Christian church knows this final good best, still, a secular culture has a understanding of some good, even if it be a false one, and this knits it together and justifies the name 'culture'. Moreover, a secular culture, to the extent that it is not suicidal, has some grasp of the truth God makes available to man's natural reason. At its best, the hope of the secular culture, and thus the hope of politics (the etymology of which you would do well to consider) aspires to the possibilities of greatness, glory, and beauty in the souls of men. Hope belongs to politics; vastly less than the hope of Christian glory, but it still deserves to be called hope. St. Aquinas may have described all he wrote as seeming "like straw", but he had written the works all the same. St. Augustine writes of the city of man, in Book XV.4 of City of God, that "the things which this city desires cannot justly be said to be evil, for it is itself, in its own kind, better than all other human good." The danger, I know no-one here needs to be told, is in the injustice wrought by the overweening ambition of the powerful, because secular culture doesn't understand humility. And in the unavoidable mingling of the two kingdoms, since we are citizens of both, this is surely the first place the church may take up arms: to chastise the state for its injustices.
You call on the authority of Augustine, but I'll be the one taking him seriously. In the first letter in our possession (#100, A.D. 408) which is written to a Roman official during the Donatist controversy, he does just as I considered, petitioning the African Proconsul to exercise leniency towards convicted men. The city of Calama was rioting in reaction to recent measures signed by the Emperor Honorius against Pagans and Donatists, including fines, "a sharper goad of irritation," and confiscation of church property. Augustine, speaking as a pastor of souls, asks the Proconsul "to use milder methods of coercion, and to spare their lives."
But it was also around this time that he writes his first significant defence of state interference in church affairs, letter 93: "let the kings of the earth serve Christ by making laws for Him and for His cause," and also the ominous interpretation of Christ's words, "compel them to come in."
Earlier, in A.D. 397, he writes to a Donatist bishop who had voiced a complaint on behalf of his brethren about the original schism. Upon receiving the judgment of the Council of Arles in 314 that the confirmation of bishop Caecilian was valid, the Donatists had appealed to the emperor. When the emperor had supported the Catholic side, the Donatists refused to abide by his decision. The later Donatist bishop complained that an ecclesiastical dispute had been settled by a secular authority. Augustine responded, that "it was not meet that a bishop should be acquitted by trial before a proconsul: as if the bishop had himself procured this trial, and it had not been done by order of the Emperor, to whose care this matter, as one concerning which he was responsible to God, especially belonged."
Augustine's writings over the whole period (388-416) are characterized by concern for peaceful reintegration of the Donatist with the Roman church. He places great hope in pastoral dialogue, missionary work, and formal debate. But the Imperial rescripts increased in harshness, culminating in Council of Carthage in 411 (at which attendance was made compulsory by Imperial edict) at which the Donatists were proved to be in the wrong, and in an edict in 414 that attempted eliminate the schismatics, banning the writing of wills, punishing with total confiscation of property, lashes, and exile. When the Donatists were briefly tolerated between 409 and 411, they persecuted the Catholics; when the law turned against them, they turned increasingly to violent revolt. Many criminals and vagabonds seem to have joined it and wandered the countryside as outlaw thieves and vandals. After an Imperial crackdown of an unrelated rebellion by a Roman official in Africa, the Donatists seized the chance to falsely accuse an enemy of theirs, Marcellinus, a Christian and a friend of Augustine, saying that he had been involved in the conspiracy. Marcellinus was imprisoned by the special imperial judge, and then murdered while in jail.
By the end of this period, Augustine seems to have lost hope in the ability of moderation to persuade the Donatists to rejoin, and he begins to defend vigourously their prosecution by the state. But the manner he chooses is instructive. One might expect that Augustine would take the political line - that these men are ruining the social order. In fact, he takes the ecclesiastical line - that, for the good of their souls, these men must be converted. In letter 173 (A.D. 416) he writes to an imprisoned Donatist,
"How much more, then, is it fitting that you should be drawn forcibly away from a pernicious error, in which you are enemies to your own souls, and brought to acquaint yourselves with the truth, or to choose it when known, not only in order to your holding in a safe and advantageous way the honour belonging to your office, but also in order to preserve you from perishing miserably! "
In letter 185 (A.D. 416), a long letter to a Count Boniface, governor of the Diocese of Africa, explaining the whole history of the Donatist controversy, he writes,
"What sober minded person could say to Kings, 'Care not by whom the Church of your Lord is in your Kingdom restrained or oppressed; it is no business of yours who in your Kingdom is religious or sacrilegious'; since you cannot say to them, 'It is no business of yours who is chaste or who is unchaste in your Kingdom'? Why should adultery be punished and sacrilege permitted? Is it a lighter thing that a man should not keep faith with God than that a woman should be faithless to her husband?"
It would be unfair to Augustine to imply that he was a Torquemata supporting an Inquisition. On the contrary, his letters are characterized by moderation and pastoral concern for souls, including a strong sympathy for human weakness, and passion for evangelization. Nevertheless, these letters teach us that his chief purpose in dealing with the Donatist controversy was not to preserve the distinction between church and state, but rather to maintain the unity of the church; if the state had to be conscripted to achieve this unity as a last resort, he was willing to use it.
What was he doing then? Were the arguments of his letters an intellectual failure? Was he inconsistent with the thesis of the City of God? I am not familiar enough with that work, so I must ask someone else, perhaps you, Trent, to take up this burden. The letters must be explained away somehow, but I'm afraid I'm not up to the task.
On the subject of state churches: it wasn't just England that had one. Several others come to mind: the Lutheran princedoms, the Masssachusetts Bay Colony, effectively early-modern France. The Bride of Christ, rightly or wrongly, has not always longed for divorce. Sometimes it's frantically tied the knot with its own hands. During the pre-Reformation years, John Wyclif, William of Ockham, Pierre Dubois, and Marsilius of Padua, among others, all called for state authority over the ecclesiastical government, not to mention property. After the Western church had been stripped of its universal character, the threats posed to dissenters did not pass. Persecution merely specialized in a wider variety of heresies and perhaps, with the division of labour, became more efficient.
Augustine's letters: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102.htm
Imperial edicts: http://www.fourthcentury.com/index.php/imperial-laws-chart-395
Historiography of Augustine's letters, published first in 1919, and republished in 2009: http://books.google.com/books?id=ZaEuAAAAYAAJ&dq=the+letters+of+st+augustine+sparrow-simpson
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