“Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation” (Psalm 146:3). The Psalmist is not telling you to abandon the public square. He is telling you where salvation does not live, so that you will stop demanding it from an address that cannot supply it. “It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in princes” (Psalm 118:9).

There is a question you are not allowed to ask in certain rooms, and I have learned over the years that the penalty for asking it has very little to do with politics. I wrote recently about a girl who shamed me for making the honor roll and taught me to hide the best of myself to keep my place in the group. The grown version of that lesson is everywhere now, and it runs deeper than party. We have made a religion of our politics, and you do not question a religion without being treated as a heretic. The loyalty has hardened into a kind of faith, and the party a person votes for has quietly become the thing he expects to save him.

So let me ask the heretical question and let the wreckage answer. What happens to a people who hand a prince the trust that belongs to God alone?

The Reformers understood something about the human heart that our age has worked hard to forget. John Calvin described it as a perpetual factory of idols, a forge that never cools, always at work turning good things into gods. The prophet put it more bluntly. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). An idol is rarely an ugly thing. It is usually a good thing asked to do what only God can do, and few idols are more seductive than a political savior, because he arrives dressed in the language of justice and rescue and belonging.

This is the part you will want to dodge, so I will close the exit before you reach it. The idol is not a partisan possession. The progressive who believes the right party will at last deliver justice and the conservative who believes the right man will at last restore the nation are kneeling at the same altar in different clothes. Both have taken a hope that belongs in heaven and nailed it to a candidate. If you have already decided this essay is about the other side, you are the one it was written for.

Look at what the idol leaves behind where it has been served the longest, because the bill comes due in proportion to the trust. Take two cities where a single party has held nearly total power for generations, Chicago since 1931 and Baltimore since 1967, both majority-minority, both governed by the party that promised to be the people’s deliverer. The promise was believed, election after election, with a devotion most churches would envy. Here is what the devotion purchased.

In Baltimore, where roughly seven in ten students are black, state testing showed only about one in ten students proficient in math, and a few years back, Project Baltimore found nearly two dozen city schools where not a single student tested proficient in math at all. That came with a budget of over $1.5 billion and more than $21,000 per student. In Chicago, spending climbed 97% since 2012 while reading proficiency fell 63%, and an inspector general found the district spending millions on staff travel to destinations as far away as Egypt and Finland, in years when a South Side pastor was measuring reading in his own neighborhood at 6%. Two Baltimore mayors left office in disgrace, one of them for misusing gift cards meant for needy families. In Chicago, a single alderman held power for fifty-four years before a jury convicted him, and he was roughly the fortieth alderman convicted since the early 1970s. The people kept the faith. The prince kept the proceeds.

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