GUEST: STEVE DEACE, from the Blaze, syndicated radio host and best-selling author
President Trump is relentlessly positive—about his abilities, his policies, and America. It’s widely reported that the President was heavily influenced by Norman Vincent Peale’s best-selling book from 1952, The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale was a minister at Marble Collegiate, a church in midtown Manhattan where Trump’s family became members (but rarely attended).
This likely explains why Trump chose Paula White-Cain to lead the White House Faith Office—she is cut from the same positivity cloth in the health, wealth, and prosperity movement where one “names and claims” God’s blessings.
So what does this have to do with the war in Iran? Trump’s self-confidence, in his leadership, the U.S. military, and in his ability to “make deals,” has impelled him to undertake what no president previously dared—to take military action against Iran to keep them from developing a nuclear weapon with the goal of achieving peace in the Middle East. With the region’s history of conflict going back to ancient times, this is an audacious objective.
One of Trump’s favorite adjectives is the word “great.” In late February, the war started “great” with the airstrike extermination of Iran’s supreme leader and dozens of other commanders. The war continued to go great as the U.S. and Israel “decimated” Iran’s military infrastructure and sank its navy. And now we’re told the negotiations with Iran to end the war and give up their nuclear weapons ambitions are going great.
But is that really true? One day the president says a deal is close. The next day we hear there’s no deal. The reality is no amount of positivism can make a crooked stick straight—or open the Strait (of Hormuz), for that matter.
Iran is crooked and intractable. Their Shia Muslim worldview is apocalyptic. They believe they will usher in the Twelfth Imam, the Islamic version of the messiah, through the conflagration of hostilities. This means they have no intention of peace with the U.S. and Israel, regardless of casualties and hardship. Their patience is long while the president must be mindful of the mid-term elections in November where he could lose power in the Congress.
So how to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable? Steve Deace, author and syndicated radio host for The Blaze, joins us this weekend on The Christian Worldview to discuss how the war with Iran can be concluded in a way that achieves the objective of keeping them from making nuclear weapons.
We will also address how the war has exposed the deep rift on the right over Israel and the major inroads Islam is making in Western nations, including the U.S. And finally, we’ll talk about Steve’s new children’s book, Why Independence Day? America is Great Because God is Good, and the call for Christians to use their spheres of influence to be salt and light in our changing country.
