This is Dawson’s historical overview:

” There is a general; feeling today that the Victorian compromise was wrong – that war is unchristian, that business is unchristian and that even the State is to a great extent unchristian also. We have lost both the optimism of the Victorian Liberals and the old Conservative acceptance of the State and the social order as a God-given order. We find it much easier to understand the attitude of the early Church with its uncompromising hostility to the world and to the power of Mammon… The whole Christian tradition, and the prophetic tradition which lies behind it, are a standing protest against the injustices and falsehood of that which is commonly called civilization… Wherever the city of man sets itself up as an end in itself and becomes the centre of a self-contained and self-regarding order, it becomes the natural enemy of the city of God”

[Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Modern State, 1935]