The election is all but over. Trump won in a landslide, Republicans took the Senate, and probably the House (that’s still up for grabs for some reason as I write this), and with those results, all talk about packing the Supreme Court and abolishing the Electoral College and Senate filibuster has ended.

Polls tell us that there are a lot of reasons for the results. Inflation and the economy generally top the list, but illegal immigration, lawfare, attacks on free speech, and the Democrats’ hard left turn on cultural issues also make the list. Most rank-and-file Democrats seem ready to move on, but the pundits, professors, and other members of the Democratic elite are convinced the results prove Americans are bigots, racists, and misogynists.

The Good

I know many Christians are breathing a sigh of relief at the results of the election. The good news is that Trump is likely to derail many of the more destructive elements of the far-left agenda that Harris has supported, including things like eliminating all restrictions on abortion and religious exemptions to abortion mandates for healthcare professionals, promoting transgender ideology, silencing non-government approved voices in the media, and the like. So that’s good.

The Cautions

But we need to remember that politics is downstream from culture. While court decisions can shape culture—look at the radical change in attitudes toward so called same-sex marriage in the wake of the Obergefell decision—more often than not the culture shapes laws and court decisions.

And the culture is trending left. Freedom of religion and free speech are not as popular as they once were, and, as Aaron Renn has argued, neither is Christianity. Abortion is widely accepted, though ballot measures in a few states this election for the first time went against the trend of liberalizing abortion laws—though barely. And the culture produced by the Sexual Revolution is very much a part of American society even in many of our churches.

Further, Trump and the Republican platform committee threw social conservatives under the bus by repudiating the party’s longstanding plank opposing abortion and supporting traditional marriage.

Given all that, apart from divine intervention, the best we can hope for in most of these areas is a slowing of the downward slide, not its reversal.

An Old Testament Parallel?

I find myself thinking of the Kingdom of Judah before the Exile to Babylon. It had sunk into idolatry, but there were some good kings who tried to return to the Lord. Most of them, however, did not remove the pagan sanctuaries in the high places. That in turn meant that when the king died, paganism returned in force, and Judah slid past the point of no return. When the high places were finally removed, it was too late: Judah had filled the land with innocent blood, the judgment they had earned came, and so the kingdom was destroyed and went into exile.

We have to face the fact that Trump isn’t removing the high places in our culture, and with around 70 million aborted babies we have more than filled our land with innocent blood. I’m not saying we are the same before God as the kingdom of Judah was, but the parallels are ominous.

How Then Should We Live?

So what should we be doing as Christians?

The same thing we should do under any administration: support it when it is doing right, oppose it when it is doing wrong, and use all the means at our disposal to move it toward righteousness. That means working for pro-life legislation and support for traditional marriage, among other things.

But we must not fall for what French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul called the Political Illusion, the idea that our problems are at root political and thus their solutions are political as well. While politics is important, our problems are at root spiritual, then moral and cultural, before they are political. And so we need to be at work at these deeper levels and not just on the superficial level of politics.

Above all, that means a strong commitment to prayer. If we aren’t praying seriously and intensely, we’re saying to God, “I don’t need you for this. I can handle it.” The fact is, we can’t.

With prayer, we also need to add fasting and repentance from personal and corporate sins. These include placing our hope in anything other than God, such as politics and political figures, and attitudes, words, and actions that demean the image of God. This includes pornography as well as treating our political opponents with contempt or as enemies. Jesus calls us to pure hearts and minds and to love our enemies and to pray for those who abuse us, not returning evil for evil. We are to demonstrate a better way regardless of how we are treated or our circumstances.

It also means taking a clear stand on the moral issues we face in the culture. We are to speak the truth in love. Affirming things that are not true is ultimately unloving, but we need to affirm truth in a way that demonstrates our concern for our neighbor’s ultimate good, which is the biblical definition of love. Of course, their ultimate good is that they come to know Christ, but even apart from that, not living a lie is better for them in the long run than following Satan, the father of lies.

The command to love our neighbor is why we as Christians need to be involved in culture and, yes, the political process. Advocating for truth is our moral duty before God, but fortunately it is also our right in our constitutional republic. Done in reliance on God and undergirded with prayer, fasting, and repentance on our part, who knows? God may be gracious and send a revival that will change the trajectory of the nation.