We All Worship Something

Everybody worships something. You don’t opt out of worship just because you skip church. Worship is whatever gets your deepest loyalty, your strongest reaction, your unquestioned allegiance. For many people, that is their bank account or career. However, for lot of Christians today, it has become a political ideology.

You can usually spot what someone worships by what makes them lose their composure. Try questioning a person’s political tribe — not their policy — and watch the room’s temperature spike. That reaction is diagnostic. It’s not unlike the reaction you might get from insulting their god. In a sense, that’s what just happened.

Let’s Talk About Divided Loyalty

Scripture doesn’t leave much room for doubt here. God’s first commandment wasn’t “be nice” or “vote responsibly.” It was this: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3).

The Israelites’ great recurring sin wasn’t atheism. They never stopped believing in Yahweh. Their sin was syncretism — bolting other gods onto the one who demanded exclusive loyalty. A golden calf here — a political alliance with Egypt there. God didn’t want a share of their devotion. He wanted all of it — which is exactly why He kept commanding them to tear the other altars down.

Political tribalism is becoming our modern golden calf. It may not be gold-plated, but it comes with a gold-plated media operation — and it works the same way. It promises security. It gives you a “them” to blame and an “us” to belong to. And it quietly asks for something we have claimed belongs to Christ alone: our ultimate loyalty.

Is It Really That Bad?

You already feel how divided the country is. You feel it at Thanksgiving. But the trend line is worse than most people realize.

Pew Research has tracked how each party views the other for years. In 2016, well under half of highly engaged partisans called the other side immoral. By 2022, that number topped 70% among Republicans and climbed into the 60s among Democrats. Current Pew data shows both parties still underwater with the public — and roughly a quarter of Americans now dislike both parties at once, a share that’s grown steadily.

The Listen First Project’s polling is starker still. A majority of Republicans, and a large share of Democrats, now call the other party “enemies” rather than fellow citizens with different opinions. About one in five Americans say people on the other side lack the basic traits to be considered fully human. Read that again. That’s not policy disagreement. That’s dehumanization — happening in a country where most people still check “Christian” on a census form.

What Political Idolatry Actually Costs

Idolatry always costs you something, and rarely the thing you expect.

When your party wins, idolatry gives you a hollow high. It fades fast, because it was never about righteousness — it was about winning. When your party loses, idolatry hands you despair that’s disproportionate to an election, because you’ve attached your hope for the future to the wrong source.

That’s the tell. When a political outcome can shake your confidence in God’s sovereignty, you’ve already made the swap. When you assume God is punishing America because your party lost, you’ve stopped treating the election as one event inside God’s providence. You’ve started treating it as a referendum on whether God is still on your side — and that betrays just how far we’ve wandered from worshiping God, and God alone.

Jesus warned his disciples about this directly: “No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24). Divided loyalty doesn’t average out to 50% devotion each. As Jesus continues, “he will hate the one and love the other.” One master wins, and it consumes the other. If your political tribe shapes who you trust, who you’re willing to demonize, and what you’ll excuse in “your” candidate — Christ already told you how that ends. Not with balance. With replacement.

A More Constructive Approach

I’m not telling you to disengage from politics or stop voting. Policy is important — it affects real people. “Just pray about it” is solid advice, but it was never a substitute for showing up.

I am telling you to run a gut check before you run to the polls. The world will not stop spinning if your candidate does not win. If you believe that God is sovereign, then you must also believe that what happens as a result of the election is in accordance with His plan.

The bottom line really comes down to trust. Can you trust that God might just have a purpose in every little detail of how this election will shake out? The alternative is to live in abject fear that the “wrong” people may get elected. Fear is what the enemy of our souls uses to motivate us to do and say things that are destructive — things we would never consider doing if we were not afraid.

A Better List of What Can’t Separate Us

The early church faced circumstances harder than ours. Rome demanded political loyalty as religious devotion — Caesar was worshiped as a god, and refusing could get you killed.

Still, Paul could write to believers inside that empire that neither death nor life, neither the present nor the future, nothing in all creation, could separate them from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:38-39). Notice what’s missing from that list. Political defeat isn’t there. Bad legislation isn’t there. A congressional majority you don’t like isn’t there. Paul didn’t leave that out by accident.

Christ didn’t die to make you a better partisan. He died to make you His. Everything else — your vote, your opinions, your hope for the country — belongs under that. It falls right in there with “taking every thought captive to Christ.” Thoughts that dehumanize people in the other ideological camp are not thoughts we’ve taken captive to Christ. Jesus didn’t just die for “good church people” — he died for “all.” You know what the definition of “all” is? It means — ALL!

So as you prepare to vote this fall, and as we all endure the escalating hurricane of political mudslinging hurled at us from every form of media, let’s try not to let the mud stick. The love of Jesus in those who know him has the potential to shine as a beacon of peace, sanity and hope amidst this storm of fear we all sense approaching.