Thank you for this clear explanation. Unfortunately, too many social conservatives advise Christians that they can simply disengage from public institutions that are going to the devil. But those institutions set norms for society that we simply cannot avoid, if only because we must live in the same world with those whose lives are shaped by them.
In addition, I think the State is becoming much more agressive in its attempts to legally crush the Church.
One thing that many Protestants don’t realize (and this is not meant as a criticism of Protestants, but simply as an observation) is that when they complain about what they perceive as the formerly great political power of the Church, they are complaining about the only thing that could successfully face down the State and preserve the private sphere.
Much of the history of the Church is the history of conflicts between Church and State (whether the State was a king or a Marxist commissar) and Protestants don’t understand that the function of the Church was to preserve the space for Christian faith and moral life, regardless of the government of the time.
Theocracies (like Islam and Calvin’s Geneva) attempted to make civil and religious law one and the same, but the Church has always known that God and Caesar have their separate spheres...and that God’s sphere must be defended by the successors to St Peter, imperfect though they may be.