Retreat is not faithfulness
Pastors are told that disengagement is non-political, when in reality, withdrawal always empowers someone else’s moral values.
By David Lane
American Renewal Project
From the late 1800s through the mid-1900s, large segments of American Protestantism, especially within evangelical and fundamentalist sections, retreated from public life.
Then they ‘baptized’ that withdrawal as faithfulness, congratulating themselves on staying ‘pure’.
The outcome was inevitable.
Others organized.
Others wrote the script.
Others governed.
Silence did not preserve the Church’s witness.
It forfeited it.
We have been unable to identify with absolute certainty a single author of the line “don’t polish brass on a sinking ship,” but it clearly emerged as a dispensationalist slogan in mid-20th-century American evangelicalism, popularizing a disengagement mindset that treated cultural and political involvement as pointless because the world was presumed irredeemably doomed.
The phrase circulated most widely in premillennial dispensational circles, particularly those shaped by Hal Lindsey-era end-times teaching, where it functioned as shorthand for abandoning culture, law, and institutions in favor of personal evangelism alone.
American evangelical theologian, philosopher, and Presbyterian pastor Francis Schaeffer [1912-1984] prophetically warned that this slogan was not Biblical realism but eschatological escapism, a pietistic retreat masquerading as spirituality that quietly surrendered the public square, eroded religious liberty, and handed political and moral dominance to those serving very different gods.
This retreat, dressed up as piety, is utterly foreign to the theology of America’s Founders, for whom Christianity was not a private sentiment but a public, civilizing force, so deeply assumed that nearly all of the first 123 American colleges and universities were founded with explicitly Christian purposes:
…to establish both the moral character and the governing class of the nation.
Contemporary American Christendom’s core problem is not a lack of sincerity or faith. It is a category error, a confusion about ministerial vocation, authority, and time.
Many pastors have been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that faithfulness equals withdrawal;
…that the Church’s task is limited to saving souls;
…and that culture, law, and power belong to someone else.
The result is a truncated Gospel in which salvation is privatized and the Biblical arc of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration is reduced to an ‘evacuation’ theological heresy.
Pastors are told that disengagement is non-political, when in reality, withdrawal always empowers someone else’s moral values.
There is no neutral public square; only competing gods with competing laws.
Somebody’s values will reign supreme in America’s public life.
And when 65-80 million Evangelicals remain disengaged (many unregistered, many not voting) those in open rebellion against God organize, draft legislation, and codify their values into law.
As Rev. Dr. Joseph Boot rightly observes, culture is the public manifestation of religion; there is no such thing as a nonreligious culture or society.
The first unmistakable sign of spiritual atrophy in America came when Christendom willingly surrendered its children to the disciplined, circumspect disciples of secularism.
In reality, far too many prophetic leaders have traded Biblical truth-telling, including confronting sin, injustice, and false gods, for a safe, therapeutic chaplaincy that props up prevailing power structures, blesses cultural norms, and avoids moral confrontation, thereby serving the status quo rather than calling the nation to repentance and reform.
Biblically, the Church is not merely a gathering place for worship but a governing assembly known as ekklesia, a body that shapes morals, restrains evil, and seeks the good of the city [Jer. 29:7; Matt. 16:18].
Yet many pastors have been trained in a sanctuary-only ecclesiology foreign to both Scripture and history.
The result is tragic but predictable: pastors preach personal morality while ceding institutional power, then wonder why laws, schools, and courts inculcate the children of God into secular theology, pagan metaphysics, and functional worship of the State.
When pastors recover a Biblical theology of time, authority, and obedience, they do not become partisan hacks, they become what the Church has always been at her best: a moral force in the public square, shaping the soul of a nation “founded for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.” [Mayflower Compact].
History does not ask the Church for permission.
It moves on, with or without her.
If the Church refuses to speak, others will.
If she refuses to govern herself, she will be governed.
If she abandons the public square, it will not remain empty; it will be filled by those whose values are hostile to God.
Most importantly, none of this requires pastors to become politicians.
What it does require is that pastors remember their identity.
Shepherds who refuse to warn the city are not being spiritual; they are being derelict.
Silence is not neutrality. Withdrawal is not purity. Retreat is not faithfulness.
The question before American Christendom is no longer theoretical. It is historical.
Will the Church continue to explain her absence while others write the laws, educate our children, and shape the nation’s soul?
Or will she once again stand, clear-eyed, Biblically grounded, and unafraid, as a governing moral force in the life of a people?
The future will not be decided by those who stayed home congratulating themselves on staying ‘above the fray’,
…but by those who show up, speak plainly, organize deliberately, and act faithfully, thereby radiating the unending and immeasurable love of God.
God has never honored retreat dressed up as obedience.
He honors courage.
He honors faithfulness.
He honors men and women who understand the times, and act.
Thankfully, Gideons and Rahabs have begun to stand.