The image of withdrawal or retreat is all wrong. The problem is not that Christians, to be faithful, must withdraw. The problem is that Christians, particularly in liberal social orders like that of the United States, have so identified with those orders that they no longer are able to see what difference being Christian makes. I am not trying to force Christians to withdraw but to recognize that they are surrounded. There is no question of withdrawing, as all lines of retreat have been cut off. The interesting questions now are what skills do we as Christians need to learn to survive when surrounded by a culture we helped create but which now threatens to destroy us. Of course, the image of being surrounded may be far too coherent to describe the situation of Christians. When surrounded, you know who the enemy is and where the battle lines are drawn. Most Christians, especially in America, do not even know they are in a war. The “secular” I engage is not “out there” in a world that no longer identifies itself as religious, but it is in the souls of most people, including myself, who continue to identify themselves as Christian (pp. 18-19).5
Eric Austin Lee - Engagements between Hauerwas and the nation-state: A reply to Steve Bush (post 1 of 2) (Hauerwas Quote from Dispatches from the Front)
Hauerwas might say that “Us Christians very well could and perhaps should engage the nation state when necessary as distinctly Christian, but we should not delude ourselves into thinking that we are actually ‘ruling’ ourselves, let alone let the state direct our desires, for the state does not have its end in God, but only in itself.
As Yoder argues, since almost all rulers claim to be our benefactors in order to justify their rule, there is no reason that Christians cannot use that very language to call their rules to be more humane in their ways of governing. Moreover, if we are lucky enough to be in a situation where the ruler’s language of justification claims to have the consent of the governed, we can use the machinery of democracy for our own and our neighbor’s advantage. But we should not, thereby, be lulled into believing that “we the people” are thereby governing ourselves. Democracy is still government by the elite, though it may be less oppressive since it uses language in its justification that provides ways to mitigate oppressiveness. But that does not make democracy, from a Christian point of view, different in kind from states of another form ([The Priestly Kingdom] pp. 158-159).