On War with Iran and Desiring the Political Good

Praying for peace

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

As I’m writing this, President Trump has just wrapped up his meeting in the “Situation Room” to discuss what to do with Iran. This comes after a “Truth Social” post yesterday where the president alarmingly called for everyone to evacuate Tehran. Many people are concerned about the possibility of the United States not just approving of Israel’s war with Iran, but of joining their war efforts. Most of us have lived through too many wars in the Middle East to go back there for another one or to do more national building. And many of President Trump’s own supporters rallied to him because he promised not to be another “Neo-Con.” On the other hand, a nuclear Iran is a frightening prospect, and Iran has been funding terrorism, like the Oct. 7th Attacks in Israel, for a long time. Complicating things, there are many innocent Iranians, including Iranian Christians, who are undoubtedly suffering in the Israeli-Iranian War, as there are innocent Israelis. War is always ugly and messy. In all this, the question for American Christians is, how should we be praying and what should we desire? I fear that in our ultra-polarized political climate, we are so bent on scoring political points and seeing our political opponents fail, that we are willing to allow innocent people to suffer if that’s the cost. Our fervent prayer on the precipice of war should be that peace should prevail, that justice should be done, and that our leaders should be wise and righteous and honor God.

It doesn’t really matter if you agree with our leaders and support their agenda or not. If you’re a regular reader, you know my disagreements with some of them already. But when it comes down to it, we’re talking about a grave situation. And in such a situation, our desire must be driven solely by the greatest good, not by the lesser goods of scoring political points or feeling personal vindication when leaders fail. We must desire what is absolutely good, or people may die. That’s what we’re really talking about here. Hoping that President Trump blunders so that you can feel vindicated in not voting for him means that people will die in this situation. Now, you probably won’t consciously hope he blunders. But if you are honest with yourself, there may be a deep part of you that perversely desires him to fail. It’s that same sort of feeling you get when you are disappointed when a natural disaster doesn’t destroy anything meaningful. It’s perverse and you know it and you won’t tell anyone that you think that way, but you know in your heart that you do.

Practically, this means not anticipating and looking for and jumping on all evidence of blunders as soon as you can find them to vindicate your assumption that the president is not qualified to handle this situation. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. But what matters is this: what do you hope? Do you hope that he screws up and people die and you’re political perspective is vindicated and you can post about it online? Or do you hope that he does the right thing, maybe against the odds, and lives are saved and you have to find something else to post about online? I’ve been on Twitter long enough to know that there are plenty of people who fall into the first camp. And lots of them have large platforms. The algorithm encourages it.

Prayer is a form, a practice of hope. I get into this in To Live Well. But you’ll find that out next year sometime. In prayer we demonstrate our hope for God’s promises and future fulfillments by asking for our good desires. Not all our desires are good. Most of them are fleshly and need to be repented of, but in prayer we ought to be bring God our good, godly desires that align with his will. Which is one reason why we should be turning to prayer in moments like this instead of primarily turning to hot political takes. We will struggle to know what to do or say politically. I know I certainly don’t have the geopolitical answer to this situation. If you came to this article hoping for an in-depth analysis of the war in Iran, I’m sorry. I’m not your guy. But I can and will encourage you to pray. Because I do know that our desires in moments like these are not always or often pure or godly. We may be tempted by the algorithm or by pundits to desire the downfall of politicians (of either side) or to be seen grandstanding online or to troll or announce our political solution, and I think our first and primary duty is prayer. Most of us won’t find ourselves in a position to make a decision whether to enter a conflict or not. But we can pray. And as Christians we can and should pray.

And in that prayer we should contemplate what the Good is. In this situation, what should we desire? We should desire peace. Afterall, “blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9). We should desire justice, for peace without justice is a false peace. We should desire wisdom and righteousness for our rulers, and that they would honor God with their decisions rather than honoring themselves.

If you can pray this for your political “opponents” without a little squirming, you may not be praying it truthfully. Maybe you are and you’re just quite mature. But it’s no easy thing for someone embedded in the political polarization to honestly pray for the wisdom and righteousness of their political opponents. Yet that is what I believe we are called to do. And many of us who opposed the Trump presidency and have criticized it now are in the position to honor him as president (1 Peter 2:17) and desire his good because his good means people living rather than dying, people flourishing rather than suffering, people united rather than divided. That may come as a shock to some who oppose the president. How could desiring the good of President Trump unite people when he is so divisive? Well, because part of his ultimate good would be to not be divisive. Desiring the good of someone is not the same as desiring what they want. It’s doing your prayerful best to desire what God wants for them.

I said earlier that in this potential war-time situation our desire must be driven by the greatest good, not the lesser goods of scoring political points. That’s not quite true. It’s always a “potential war-time situation.” There is always a great deal at stake in our world, and we do wrong to turn politics into a game for personal pleasure or entertainment. The ghoulish rush to dunk on one political party or the other for the actions of the Minnesota shooter (which are far from clear, to me at least) is another example of this gamification of politics. It was especially painful to watch Christians participate in this rush, when we have something meaningful we can rush to do in moments of political crisis, or any crisis for that matter: pray. Prayer for the good of your elected officials. Pray for the peace of the world. Pray for justice and righteousness to prevail. And let that prayer turn into a desire in your heart, so that you never hope that your political opponents fail to do good, only that they fail to do evil.