How much hope—and what kind of hope—ought Christians to invest in politics? And what lessons ought they learn from the inevitable failure of politics to fully realize those hopes? The recent electoral defeat of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, seen by many as a repudiation of his illiberal politics, offers a caution not only to those who had confidently predicted the failure of liberalism but also to those who celebrate its staying power.

We recently commemorated the seventh anniversary of the death of the Jesuit priest James V. Schall. His life’s scholarly work can be summarized as an attempt to place politics within the horizon of eternity. This is no easy task, but for Christians who wish to serve their country and the world in a way ordered to God rather than to idols, it is essential.

Father Schall’s wisdom was sorely needed on April 12, when Mr. Orban conceded a general election and thus his longtime control of Hungary as prime minister. Mr. Orban has been a deeply polarizing figure throughout the West. In a time when much of political life is understood as part of an existential battle between liberalism and illiberalism, Mr. Orban attracted considerable interest beyond Hungary, less for the particular strengths or failures of his regime than for his profile as a leader of the illiberal resistance to Western political modernity. He earned this reputation not only by pursuing policies that he himself called “illiberal,” including on immigration, but also by doing so in ways that conspicuously opposed the European Union and cultivated right-wing support in other countries, especially in the United States.

It is not clear that the Hungarians saw their choice this way. Instead, the opposition campaigned by offering concrete solutions to the specific ills that Hungary had suffered under Mr. Orban. As Ross Douthat noted in The New York Times, Mr. Orban’s defeat suggests that “the best political response to populism is usually to deal with its concrete policy demands, rather than insisting that a democratic emergency requires people to back the [liberal] establishment no matter what.”

As a student of classical political philosophy, Father Schall would not have been surprised by the outcome in Hungary. He was keenly aware that governments are not to be judged only by their ideology but also on the more fundamental and concrete question of their justice: whether they serve the common good. If a specific government is not just, then it should not govern, regardless of what kind of regime it claims to be. 

If the pre-eminent question in politics is not whether a regime advocates the correct ideology but whether it is just, then we should not be satisfied with arguments that we must defend liberal democracy for its own sake, as if doing so will inevitably achieve justice. Politics is difficult and practical, and we should be skeptical of claims that any form of government is a universal solvent that dissolves all knotty problems. Promising too much in the name of democracy, Father Schall and many others argue, is part of the reason we live in an age of discontent with democracy. 

But the subordination of ideology to justice also places limits on alternatives to liberal democracy. Each and every regime should be judged against justice, and philosophical defenses of ideologies are no substitute for evaluating the justice of any particular polity. Because ultimately, we do not live in abstract regime forms but in concrete countries. Many of those celebrating the defeat of Mr. Orban, for example, might not think the policies of his successor, Peter Magyar, are much better.

Father Schall’s insistence that the Gospel is bigger than our ideologies is a truth always recovered only partially, and with mixed intentions. Some Christians, variously called “integralists” or “post-liberals,” have criticized others for failing to see the profound tensions between liberal democracy and the Gospel. There is some truth to this concern, and one need not be “illiberal” to recognize how dangerous it is to ignore the very real failures and pathologies of liberal democracy today. But offering a mirror image of this state of affairs only creates a new problem.

For Christians who have focused their political project on articulating and defending a future beyond liberalism and who intend for that political project to catalyze cultural and religious revival, it can be easy to place one’s hopes in a putative savior like Mr. Orban. It can become easy to conflate one’s hopes in Christ with one’s hopes in a temporal regime. In pursuing such goals, political disagreements with other Christians who do not share or even oppose that temporal pursuit can be magnified into a seemingly existential struggle.

But it is not only liberalism that can fail: It is all human governments. 

Here an important qualification is in order because leaders in the church must avoid confusing political forms with the Gospel and imposing them upon Christians as if only one kind of government can secure justice. The call of the laity to sanctify the world certainly includes entering into the fray about good forms of government for our time, and on this, as on many other things, they may reasonably disagree. But when such disagreement becomes constitutive of their relations with one another, the challenge is not simply a sociological one of polarization or division. It is idolatry: It becomes not only wrong but sinful. Christians who conflate their politics with the Gospel are not only locked in face-to-face battle with each other but are thus excluding the true God and focusing on false ones.

The remedy, of course, is not for Christians to abandon political activity and have the church act solely as a moral teacher standing on the sidelines of political questions. Rather, Christians must submit all forms of government, and their own participation in them, to questions of justice as seen in the light of the Gospel.

Living in Rome, I am reminded every day that empires do not last. This is the irony of Rome: For all the gifts bequeathed to us by that civilization, perhaps its greatest gift was its very ghost, a reminder of its mortality. It is more than fitting that the empire was replaced ultimately not by another political competitor but by a church, one that promises and points to a kingdom of a different kind.

Even the best earthly cities will disappoint. But hope does not disappoint.

Bill McCormick, S.J., is a writer at La Civiltà Cattolica in Rome and a research fellow in the Department of Political Science at Saint Louis University in Missouri.