But if the earlier hope to "save Amerca" was overblown, so too is the current counsel to withdraw from politics — an overreaction against an original overreaction. In the elegant words of Richard Neuhaus, such pessimism "expresses a painful deflation of political expectations that can only be explained by a prior and thoroughly unwarranted inflation." Were Christians in fact to withdraw, we would simply ride a pendulum swing back to the isolationism of the fundamentalist era.