[Frumanchu]

IMO we got into the position we're in, because some Christians have been raised to believe that "You don't polish the brass on a sinking ship!", quoting evangelist Dwight L. Moody in the 19th century. These Christians believe that the culture will not (and cannot) be redeemed by anything - not even by a wholesale repentance and conversion of the population. In their view, nothing short of the physical return of Christ will have any lasting impact on it, and thus the most a redeemed man can hope for is that the cultural rot might be delayed, making a future generation deal with it instead.

IMHO, I do believe the progressive rise of certain schools of eschatology (or, at least, their gain in popularity through vehicles of both fiction and new media) has also had an effect here. I've seen first hand multiple times over a willingness to let the culture degrade in the belief that it is merely hastening the Second Advent, giving rise to a "love the citizens, hate the society" sort of mindset.

[xzins]

IMHO, I do believe the progressive rise of certain schools of eschatology

Yet the rise of the Moral Majority and of Falwell and of evangelicalism, which made huge political inroads, was largely made up of premillennialists.

My sense is that knowledgeable premillennialists, even dispensationalists, realize that much of their own forecast has not yet come to pass and could be centuries away. In the meantime, "salt and light".