A decade into the Trump era, there are a few rules that should, by now, be obvious to anyone trying to keep both their theology and their sanity intact. One is not to confuse political intensity with spiritual clarity. Another is not to mistake national crisis for divine uniqueness, as if our moment were the first in which believers have felt the temptation to hand messianic power to a ruler in a suit. And another—perhaps the most important—is to pay close attention not only to what political leaders promise, but to what frightened Christians are willing to believe about those promises.
Because that is where the deeper problem usually thrives. Not first in Washington, though Washington has its own disorders. Not first in a party platform, Democrat or Republican. The deeper problem lives in the religious imagination. It lives in the part of the church that has begun, often without admitting it, to look to the government for what only God can give.
This issue isn’t new. It is merely enjoying a fresh cycle of popularity.
The lie is not simply that government matters. Government does matter. Scripture is too sober to deny that. The lie is not that laws are important. Laws are important. The lie is not even that Christians should care about public life. They should. The lie—the dangerous one, the soul-distorting one—is that salvation can be found there. That if only the right people gain power, sign the right executive orders, appoint the right judges, defend the right symbols, punish the right enemies, and restore the right social order, then the deepest wounds of a people can be healed.
At that point, politics stops being stewardship and becomes soteriology.
The church has always been vulnerable to this because human beings are vulnerable to visible power. We are drawn to immediacy. We like flesh-and-blood deliverers. We prefer systems we can manipulate to kingdoms we must receive. We say we want justice, and often we do. But mixed into that desire is another one: the desire for control. The government can require and regulate compliance with the law. It can reward loyalty and punish resistance. That makes it extraordinarily seductive to religious people who are tired of cultural decline, frightened by moral confusion, and impatient for vindication.
But Scripture is relentless in warning God’s people not to confuse political order with redemption. “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help,” Psalm 146 says. “His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish” (Psalm 146:3–4, KJV). The psalmist is not arguing for apathy. He is arguing for proportion. Princes are real, but they are temporary. Governments matter, but they are mortal. Their power is derivative, not ultimate. The moment a Christian looks to the government for what belongs to God alone—moral renewal, spiritual transformation, lasting peace, and final justice—something in their discipleship has already begun to weaken.
This is one reason the current moment is so spiritually perilous. Americans’ trust in the federal government remains low overall, but it rises and falls significantly depending on which party controls the White House, a pattern that suggests many citizens—including religious citizens—are tempted to treat government less as an institution under judgment than as a vessel of partisan hope. In 2024, Pew found that only 22% of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what is right always or most of the time, and that trust has consistently been higher among the party that holds executive power. This is not yet idolatry by itself. But it is the emotional esteem in which idolatry grows.
And in the church, the distortion can become more explicit. PRRI’s national surveys have found that roughly one-third of Americans qualify as either Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers, and that these views are positively correlated with authoritarian attitudes. Not every patriot is a Christian nationalist. Not every politically conservative Christian has confused nation with kingdom. But enough believers now speak as though America were not merely a country under God, but the primary instrument through which God means to save the world or at least save “our way of life.” That language is not just politically overheated. It is theologically disordered.
The Bible has seen this fever before.
In 1 Samuel 8, Israel demands a king. The request is not irrational. The surrounding nations have kings. Israel wants stability, continuity, and visible strength. The people tell Samuel, “Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations” (1 Samuel 8:5, KJV). On one level, this is a constitutional request. On another, it is a spiritual revolt. God tells Samuel, “They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them” (1 Samuel 8:7, KJV).
That line deserves more attention in the modern church than it receives. Israel did not stop believing in God when it asked for a king. That would have been too obvious. It simply decided that God’s reign, by itself, felt insufficiently concrete. It wanted divine legitimacy attached to human power. It wanted heaven’s blessing with an earthly throne. It wanted a ruler who could be seen, measured, admired, and feared.
Israel wanted politics to do what only covenant faith was supposed to do. Samuel warns the people that the king will take their sons, their daughters, their fields, their harvests, their labor, and their freedom. And when power is elevated to something sacred, it rarely remains limited. But the people of Israel insisted. “Nay; but we will have a king over us” (1 Samuel 8:19, KJV). It is one of the most revealing political lines in Scripture, because it exposes how easily we mistake human authority for security and power for salvation.
We will have a king. We will have order. We will have someone who can make the world submit.
The church, when it falls in love with government power, is often repeating Israel’s mistake with more patriotic branding.
This is not a call to withdraw from public life. Romans 13 still exists. Paul writes, “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God” (Romans 13:1, KJV). Government, in the Christian vision, is not a cosmic accident. It is a delegated authority with real responsibilities. Peter says something similar when he tells believers to submit “to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake,” including kings and governors who are sent “for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well” (1 Peter 2:13–14, KJV).
And Scripture makes this pattern unmistakably clear that God is not absent from political power. He is often working through it—sometimes to preserve, sometimes to judge.
In the story of Joseph in Egypt, God raises up a government to preserve life. What began as betrayal—Joseph sold into slavery by his own brothers—becomes the means through which God positions him inside Pharaoh’s administration. When famine strikes, Egypt becomes a place of provision, not only for its own people but for the surrounding nations. Joseph later says, “God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance” (Genesis 45:7, KJV). The state, in this case, becomes an instrument of preservation. God uses political structure and authority to save a people from destruction.
A similar pattern appears in the story of Cyrus, king of Persia. Though he is not an Israelite, God calls him “my shepherd” and even “mine anointed” (Isaiah 44:28; 45:1, KJV). Cyrus issues a decree allowing the exiled Israelites to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. Here again, a foreign government is not outside God’s purposes. It becomes the means by which restoration takes place. God uses a ruler who does not fully know Him to accomplish His redemptive plan.
But Scripture is just as clear that governments can also be instruments of judgment.
In the Old Testament, God repeatedly raises up empires to discipline His people when they turn away from Him. The most striking example is Babylon. In 2 Kings 24–25 and throughout the prophetic books, Babylon conquers Judah, destroys Jerusalem, and carries the people into exile. This is not presented as random political collapse. The prophets interpret it theologically. In Habakkuk 1:6, God says, “For, lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation.” Babylon becomes a rod of judgment—an instrument God uses to confront Israel’s rebellion.
And yet even here, power remains accountable. The same Babylon that God uses is later judged for its own pride and cruelty. In Isaiah 14 and Jeremiah 50–51, God turns His judgment against the very empire He raised up. Power may be used by God, but it is never beyond His authority.
In the New Testament, this tension continues under the Roman Empire. Paul writes, “The powers that be are ordained of God” (Romans 13:1, KJV), acknowledging that government authority exists under God’s sovereignty. And yet that same Roman system is the one that crucifies Christ. In Acts 4:27–28, the early church prays, recognizing that Herod, Pontius Pilate, and the rulers of the people were gathered together “for to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done.” Even in the greatest injustice in human history, God is at work through political structures—not to endorse them, but to accomplish redemption through them.
Scripture does not present government as neutral. It presents it as instrumental. But in every case, the same truth holds. Government is never the savior. It may be used by God, but it is never God.
These passages are so often mishandled. Romans 13 does not teach that government is divine. It teaches that government is accountable to the God who established authority itself. Paul calls the ruler “the minister of God to thee for good” (Romans 13:4, KJV). That is a limit, not a blank check. The government is not the savior. It is not even the church. It is a servant with a narrow and serious task to uphold justice and preserve civil order. Once Christians ask the government to become an engine of spiritual rebirth, or once the government asks for loyalty in ways that belong only to God, both politics and religion become corrupt.
This is why Jesus’ own words remain so politically clarifying. When Pilate asks Him about His kingship, Jesus answers, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36, KJV). That sentence means Christ’s reign does not originate in the mechanisms of worldly coercion. His kingdom is not built by decree, secured by propaganda, or defended by the sword in the manner of earthly regimes. It is real but not reduced to human effort. It has public implications, certainly. It judges nations. It commands repentance. But it is not identical to any nation, party, constitution, or administration. To forget this is a costly mistake for the church.
One of the most revealing biblical warnings comes not from a kingly narrative but from a military one. In Isaiah 31, Judah is condemned for going down to Egypt for help. “Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help; and stay on horses, and trust in chariots, because they are many” (Isaiah 31:1, KJV). Egypt, in the passage, represents the old temptation to seek deliverance in visible force rather than in covenant faithfulness. Judah wants protection. It wants strategic advantage. It wants a rescue that can be counted and deployed. But the prophet says that trust is misplaced. Egypt is not God. Its horses are flesh, not spirit (Isaiah 31:3).
That image still speaks with unsettling clarity. Replace chariots with campaign machinery, horses with legislative majorities, and armies with bureaucratic power, and the principle does not change. The moment the church begins to believe its future rests on the government’s ability to enforce its moral vision, it has already begun to look to Egypt for help.
The difficulty is that much of what the church seeks from government is not wrong in itself. Christians rightly care about life, justice, liberty, parental responsibility, sexual integrity, religious freedom, the protection of children, and the restraint of violence and corruption. These are real concerns, and the government has legitimate responsibilities in many of these areas. The danger emerges more subtly. It begins when these good and necessary concerns are elevated beyond their proper place—when what is legitimate becomes ultimate, and what was meant to be pursued wisely becomes something quietly trusted for salvation.
The government can outlaw some evils. It cannot transform a heart.
It can restrain wickedness. It cannot produce holiness.
It can defend the church’s freedom. It cannot make the church faithful.
It can protect a people from certain forms of chaos. It cannot save a nation from sin.
The issue is not that the church believes politics matters too much in principle, but that it often lives as though it matters most.
You can see this in the emotional posture people carry, especially in how they respond online. Elections are spoken of with more urgency than repentance, court rulings with more intensity than the resurrection, national decline with deeper grief than personal sin, and political opponents with greater certainty than the condition of one’s own soul. The Apostles’ Creed may still be confessed on Sunday, but the lived confession—revealed in fear, anger, and urgency—suggests that Caesar’s throne has begun to carry more weight than Christ’s reign.
This is part of why the church sounds so panicked so often. A Christian whose hope is anchored in the kingdom of God can grieve, contend, vote, organize, and resist injustice without collapsing into hysteria every time the wrong candidate wins. But once salvation has been relocated to the government, every election becomes apocalyptic. Every loss becomes existential. Every compromise becomes betrayal. Every opponent becomes not merely mistaken, but civilly demonic. Politics begins to absorb religious emotion because it has taken over religious expectation.
And that expectation always produces moral casualties.
One of the first losses is truth. When Christians begin to equate the right political outcome with the will of God, they grow more willing to overlook or excuse falsehoods if they seem to serve that end. The reasoning is not new, if the cause is righteous, then perhaps the distortions can be justified. But God has never required deception to uphold His reign.
Witness is lost first. The church says Christ is King but lives like everything depends on elections.
Then neighbor-love fades. During election seasons, people stop seeing neighbors and start seeing enemies.
Prayer goes next. If politics is what really matters, prayer becomes routine, something said, not something trusted.
Scripture calls for a different order. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness” (Matthew 6:33). First, not politics, not power, not party. Christians belong to God’s kingdom before any nation. When that order is reversed, politics takes on a weight it was never meant to carry.
That is why Revelation does not picture power as a shepherd, but as a beast. Governments can do good, Romans 13 makes that clear, but when it demands loyalty, imitates God, and goes unchecked, it becomes something else. Not because all governments are evil, but because any power treated as ultimate eventually becomes dangerous.
Which brings us back to the church.
The most dangerous lie in the church is not merely that the government can help. It can help. It is not that Christians should vote. They should. It is not that public policy matters. It does. The most dangerous lie is that salvation can be found there and that the nation can be redeemed by decree. It also suggests that the kingdom can be ushered in by legislation and that the moral collapse of a people can be reversed primarily through force while ignoring what America needs most which is repentance, holiness, truth, obedience and prayer, not the proper administration.
Those lies flatter fear because they offer immediacy. It flatters pride because it promises control. It flatters tribalism because it lets believers imagine that the line between the righteous and the wicked runs neatly between political camps rather than through every human heart.
But it is still a lie.
Salvation is found in Christ. Not in Congress. Not in the White House. Not in the Court. Not in the bureaucracy. Not in the charismatic ruler who promises to make the nation strong again, moral again, feared again, or prosperous again. The state may be used by God. It may even serve justice in meaningful ways. Christians should be grateful when it does. But the government remains what it has always been in Scripture, a temporary servant, dangerous when idolized, necessary but limited, capable of both order and oppression, never worthy of worship, never fit to bear the church’s ultimate hope.
The church does not need less seriousness about politics. It needs more theological seriousness about what politics cannot do.
It cannot forgive sins.
It cannot raise the dead.
It cannot reconcile human beings to God.
It cannot transform envy into love or lust into holiness or resentment into mercy.
It cannot save.
Once that becomes clear again, Christians may finally be able to return politics to its proper place: important, consequential, morally charged, but not ultimate. They may be able to vote without worshiping, contend without panicking, criticize without despairing, and seek justice without imagining that the state is the source of it.
And perhaps that is where the church’s recovery must begin—not in another campaign, but in confession. In admitting that many believers have expected from princes what should have been expected from God. In hearing again the old warning of the psalmist. In remembering that Israel’s great political sin was not wanting order but wanting a king in place of trust. In listening again to Jesus say that His kingdom is not of this world and then realizing how often we have behaved as though it were.
The government can govern. It cannot redeem.
The church can witness. It must not kneel to politics.
And salvation, despite all the promises of modern politics, is still found where it has always been found, in the crucified and risen Christ, whose kingdom has never depended on the consent of Caesar and whose reign does not rise or fall with the fortunes of America.
