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Steve Deace is a national broadcast host on Blaze TV, a longtime syndicated radio host, and the broadcast expert in the upcoming documentary Secret Meaning of Life, which is built on 1 Timothy 6:6: godliness with contentment is great gain. He is in the fight every single day, and the world looks like it's going crazy.
How Bold Christian Broadcasting Has Changed
Being a Christian in radio, television, and podcasting has gotten harder over the last 10 and 20 years. Deace says two things have changed the most.
First, the facts. When he started as a local radio host, the corporate media had a biased slant, but their facts were mostly accurate. He could take an article from The New York Times and build an entire segment around it, giving a different slant on their facts than their bias did.
In 2015, the Times sent reporter Jackie Calmes to Iowa for a week to write a Sunday magazine cover feature on his supposed influence in the Iowa caucuses. She had dinner with the family several nights and spent time with his kids and his mom. The terminology was slanted toward their views. He was "anti-abortion," not "pro-life." But the piece was good. Overall it was objective and fair, and he has it framed on a wall in his man cave.
That was 2015. Eleven years later, the Times wouldn't call him at all unless he was critical of Trump or some other cause on the right, so they could use him as a cudgel to advance their own agenda. Now he's doing more legwork to prove things are true than he's doing commenting on them.
Second, the worldview. When he first started out, program directors told him he was a major market talent, maybe even a national talent, but his biblical worldview was going to be a limiting principle. Now it's the best selling point he has. There's more interest in it than ever before.
Deace has always viewed himself as broadcasting from a narrow road, and he says that road has widened. Today he makes direct biblical appeals and citations for why he thinks and believes the way he does. He wouldn't have done that when he started out on his own 15 years ago. Back then he'd have found other ways to say the same things. There are always trade-offs, always.
The Price of a High-Profile Faith
The traditional difficulties come with the territory, and we sign up for them. If he drops a piece of litter, he picks it up, because he knows he's always on display. When he gets terrible service, he used to never take it. Now he takes it constantly.
That's part of being a believer. In exchange for our life for his, we get higher expectations, and Deace will take that trade: higher expectations this side of eternity beat hell. He's getting the better end of the deal.
The Hardest Part: Doing the Pastor's Job
The biggest challenge is doing the pastor's job. Deace says he'd be an extremely wealthy man if he had even a nickel for every time he's heard, "Why don't I hear more of this at church?"
When he started, he thought he'd be the downstream activist who mobilized God's people after they left church. A few years in, he realized he'd have to do church. He'd have to teach and preach. By God's grace, he gets as much access to American Evangelicalism as any other person with a platform, and his is one of the biggest in the country hosted by an evangelical. The amount of biblical worldview teaching that has to be done before they even get to application is truly staggering.
The Pew and Barna surveys, with that 9% of believers holding a biblical worldview and all those crazy numbers, aren't abstract to him. "I live it. That's learned experience for me."
"Men, This Is a Football"
Deace uses this analogy all the time. He admits he doesn't know why he quotes the guy, since he's a Lions fan and hates the Packers. When Vince Lombardi took over the Green Bay Packers, they'd once been a proud franchise but had been terrible for more than a generation. On that roster were guys nobody knew would become stars: Bart Starr, Forrest Gregg, Willie Brown. People knew Paul Hornung because he'd won the Heisman. They were about to become one of the greatest teams in history.
On the first day of practice, Lombardi took the reel-to-reel film of all their games from the previous year, threw it in a wheelbarrow, and lit it on fire. He wasn't watching any of it, and they weren't breaking any of it down. They would start all over and build back up from the beginning. "Here's your first lesson." He held up a football and said, "Men, this is a football."
Deace says he has to do that a lot. This is a Bible. These are Bible verses. This is what it says. This is church history. This is what has been shown and revealed to be good, true, and beautiful. That has been way more of his job than he'd have guessed when he started.
Why Our Pulpits Went Soft
Biblical illiteracy makes the whole thing feel insurmountable. When you hear someone who's bought into something that isn't right, you have to say, "Let's back up and correct that way of thinking." We've gotten less educated over the years. We don't know church history, and we don't understand terminology.
A few weeks ago, Deace was in Detroit addressing hundreds of pastors, and he yelled at them for 20 minutes. His point was that an open Islamist, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, is about to be a U.S. Senator in their state because they allowed Dearborn to be completely overrun by that worldview. He says ISIS flags fly in downtown Dearborn in the middle of the day in the United States of America, and their people don't know the difference between Islam and Christianity.
Thirty years ago, he says, no political party would have put up a Muslim candidate like that. Democrats didn't even want to do it this year, and Gretchen Whitmer actually tried to stop him in the primary. "This is what happens when you abdicate your position."
How did we get here? Deace says many pastors graduated from the papacy of Tim Keller, Bill Hybels, and Rick Warren, and he names four causes.
The gospel was treated as if it didn't have to confront the world. The idea was that the gospel could be a stand-alone, hermetically sealed philosophical treatise that does personal life change. If it had any intersection with the broader world, it was by accident, as opposed to on purpose.
Too many pastors wanted to build a brand and not a kingdom.
We inverted the two greatest commandments. Jesus gave us two summations of the two tablets of the law. The vertical one is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. The horizontal one is to love your neighbor as you love yourself. We made love your neighbor the greatest commandment and God second, "which means God might as well be last." Then we did decades of preaching for people who may never come to church, may never want to be at church, and may never stay at a church.
Evangelism became the church. It became the church as opposed to a ministry of the church. The true task of the church is equipping the saints for the work of the ministry. Evangelism is a key ministry, but it's a ministry, not the whole ministry. Along the way, we made offending God fine.
The Pharisees Think God Needs an Editor
If you want to know where the Pharisees are, Deace says, they're in the seeker-sensitive churches. We tend to picture the Pharisees as the guys with the furrowed brows. No. The Pharisees are the guys who think that God needs an editor.
That describes a lot of megachurches. The progressives took God to charm school for the last generation, and the seeker-sensitive crowd did the same thing. Different packaging, but "the reality is both of them are guilty of the same sin. They both thought God needed an editor."
You can see it in popular culture too. Chris and Emilee point to the series The Chosen, where Jesus is supposedly walking around making notes for what he's going to say to people and checking with his disciples first to see what they think. They think he should probably tone it down a little bit. Chris's reaction: "I'm out. This is bad. Over." Yet it's become such an embraced thing. What is it in the human mind that blocks this and says, "What I've been taught before doesn't really matter," and willingly embraces it?
"I Die Daily"
Deace says this is where discipleship comes in. There's a reason Paul says, "I die daily." He doesn't say weekly. He doesn't say monthly, or once a year when he made a grimace somewhere. He had to die daily, because we're at constant war with the world, the devil, and our own flesh.
And notice who the first editor was. Eve. Look at how she answers the enemy. She edits God's word: "Well, God said not to touch the fruit." That is not what God said. He said not to eat the fruit. He said nothing about touching it, playing catch with it, hacky sack, looking at it, or smelling it. Deace paraphrases God's attitude: "I gave you one rule, man. You had one job. Don't eat the fruit. Do whatever you want. Just don't eat it."
That's been one of the original temptations of sin from the beginning, to think God needs my take and my spin. I'm just too invaluable for him to get this accomplished without me. It plays right into the vanity of this era of mass media, where everybody's got a brand and a TikTok page with more than 10 people.
"What Does This Mean to You?"
Chris and Emilee hear it from pastors of these kinds of churches: "We have our way of doing things." Jesus is the way. He doesn't care about your way of doing things.
What's the most common question at a small group? "What does this mean to you?" Deace's answer: "No one cares. You're a loser." Your truth doesn't have to be my truth, but you were born with an insatiable desire to have an aisle seat in the eternal smoking section, and no one cares what your opinion is. What matters is what it means, not what it means to you.
All eras of culture have their unique temptations, based on the customs of that culture. Appealing to vanity may be ours.
The Fork in the Road: Platform and Pride
Chris and Emilee spent years doing big market morning shows, and churches invited them in. Lots of people wanted to come on their shows, and you could tell which ones wanted to share the gospel and which ones wanted to build a brand. As people's platforms grew, a fork in the road appeared. Either they understood their insignificance in this elevated platform, or they doubled down on their significance and wanted to keep it going as if that were God's will.
Chris gave a recent example. Pastor Josh Howerton said, "Sometimes you got to starve the sheep and feed the goats to grow your church." Chris found it totally offensive: "That's not growing a church." We all have brands, and we all have common sense when we put content online to honor Jesus. The question is the intent of the heart.
Deace's Own Fork
Deace faced this himself. His first big national mainstream interview was a political debate with Ed Rendell, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee, on NPR. As men do, he started thinking, "I need to say things differently and do things differently than I was doing before, because this is a different level."
His assistant at the time, Jen, took him aside before the interview. She had no idea what he was wrestling with, but the Holy Spirit did. She said, "Hey, they booked Steve Deace. If they didn't want Steve Deace or didn't know what they were getting, that's on them. So go be Steve Deace." So he did.
There's still a constant temptation to make it about you, and he faces it constantly. When Jen moved on, he knew exactly what he needed in a replacement: somebody even more obnoxious and insufferable than himself. That's why he hired Todd, to stop him from becoming that which he often criticizes.
The Overcorrection
The third-way folks of the last era figured out that by standing down on culture issues, they gained academic and mainstream acceptance they otherwise wouldn't have gotten. So they ended up preaching messages that weren't really meant for the people in the pews on Sunday.
Now Deace sees a new group. He hates theological labels, but if you made him pick one, he'd say he's a continuing Reformed Baptist. As a Reformed guy, he sees a crop of young Reformed pastors who've decided the answer to not repeating the third-way mistake is to be the guys who hate the jerk store (Seinfeld fans will recall that "the jerk store called, and they're all out of you"). The second commandment, love your neighbor as you love yourself, doesn't matter at all to them.
These guys preach in very small churches, and he knows them. They say things that get them online audiences way beyond what they could generate inside their small churches. So now "that's my zeitgeist." Ironically, it's the same mistake as the third-wayers they mock, made in the opposite direction. Now I'm over-the-top provocative. Now I'm over-the-top offensive, because that generates the rage-bait clicks online that give me more feedback and a bigger dopamine hit than the 40 people I'm preaching to in my small country church.
Those dopamine hits, Emilee says, are a real plague on society today.
Satan at the Town Hall: Ottumwa and the Rhineland
We like to think the Midwest is a little bit immune to what's going on on the coasts, but look at Iowa over the last few years:
- A satanic statue at the state capitol during Christmas
- A congressional candidate bragging that they'd performed a satanic wedding
- A city council meeting in Ottumwa that opened with a prayer to Satan
"This is growing. This is everywhere." It reflects what's going on behind the pulpit at large. It isn't disguised anymore. It's Satan, openly, with none of the cover of another religion or a cult-style Christianity. So how do we address it?
A Shot Across the Bow
Deace answers with history. Early in his leadership, Hitler took the one fully outfitted regiment he had and marched it into the Rhineland to test the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty demanded that the Rhineland remain a demilitarized neutral zone under French control, the way, if you know your Star Trek, the Neutral Zone sits between the Romulans and the Federation. Hitler marched the unit in to test the mettle of the French and fire a shot across their bow.
The French did what they typically do best: they ran.
That gave Hitler his first political victory, and he could tell his people back home they were on the right path. History was with them, and Europe was weak. "Who knows how different things would have been if they would have stood right there and put that unit down?"
What does that have to do with Ottumwa? "Everything." These are shots across our bow. For a generation we've been conditioned to believe that if our guy wins the cable news debate, or the people I vote for win, I did my part and I can go back to my normal life. In reality, laws are what you are willing to enforce. Everything else is a blog.
There's a saying about Marxists: don't quote laws to men with guns. Someone coming at you with an appeal to Satan isn't interested in the nuances of a constitution. They're interested in destroying it. In Deace's view, that person should be arrested rather than argued with, and that's exactly what every previous generation would have done.
Fire Insurance and Solid Milk
Why don't believers see this? Deace says a lot of those third-way churches did preach the gospel. They did say your sins must be forgiven in Christ or you're going to hell. But there was no wider application. It was "congrats on your fire insurance, and hope you hang out and keep tithing, but on to the next group of applicants."
So no one moved off of milk, and no one understood what it really took to build Christendom. Deace gives two examples:
- Everybody thinks the Crusades were terrible. He says they were actually defensive. "They may have ended terrible, but without the Crusades you'd all be speaking Arabic right now."
- We use "puritanical" as a put-down, "when the Puritans are literally the people that made America." The Thanksgiving holiday we'll celebrate next month is theirs. They built the country.
Hosea says, "My people perish for a lack of knowledge." That knowledge and discernment haven't been taught, and the history hasn't been passed on.
You see it when Christians run for office for the first time. "I have the right beliefs, so people are just going to line up to write me checks and knock on doors for me." No, they won't. They'll be less inclined, because you've got to be even better at this, since you know that stuff. A lot of believers think it just happens, eureka, as opposed to "I have to actually do it. I have to be the hands and feet of the gospel." We're sorely lacking in the application arena because we're sorely lacking it from the pulpit.
Will We Enforce What We Believe?
Chris asked whether Deace sees a parallel between the people who couldn't stand up at a town hall during a satanic invocation and the jury that wanted to browbeat everybody except one juror in the Clancy case. Deace's answer: "10,000%."
It comes down to the same thing. "We're not a nation of laws, we never have been. We're a nation of political will, and we always will be." You can have all the laws on the books you want. If you won't enforce them, they're glorified blogs.
That's what's being tested right now after all the great wins in Iowa. The armies of darkness are now asking, "You going to really enforce this stuff? Are you really willing to pay a price for this stuff?" Toppling Saddam Hussein wasn't hard. Governing what came next was way harder. As hard as it was to gain the political power to do all the good in Iowa, it will be even harder to maintain and enforce it.
What's the slogan of the state? "Our liberties we prize, our rights we will maintain." So how do you maintain them? You can't take a young Satanist aside and say, "We really can't have a prayer to the enemy of the God our rights come from," and expect him to say, "Snap, G, I had no idea. Thank you, bro." That's not what's going to happen at all. You have to demonstrate that you're willing to enforce what you believe, or he's going to challenge it and keep doing it.
Rebuke Them
Deace has heard that some pastors are very upset and irate, but that's all he's heard. Will they pound their hands on the table, get red-faced, and then go about their business? He thinks at least a couple of pastors need to walk into the next city council meeting and rebuke them: "The Lord rebuke you. You need to repent for what you have done here."
When he talks about a biblical worldview, he doesn't think every sentence should begin with "Thus saith the Lord God of hosts." But he thinks some sentences should. Chris added that if you use the name Yahweh, that will help, and that council needs to hear it.
He points to the pastor in Dearborn, Michigan, who walked in and said, "Absolutely not," in front of all those Muslims while far outnumbered. If he can do it, the people of Ottumwa should be able to handle it. That's why Deace used the historical analogy: "If we can't defend Ottumwa, Iowa, where in Iowa can we defend?" We're being weighed and measured as we speak.
Remembering Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk has been gone a little over a year, and his influence is still there. Deace knew him when he was a kid, a young go-getter and gofer on the Cruz campaign. Not many young men are like that, but you meet a lot of them working full-time in politics. As Kirk began to rise, Deace stayed in touch for several years, then got closer in the last few years of Charlie's life, particularly his last year.
That's why Deace is sympathetic to pastors who didn't come on board with TPUSA at first. He wondered too whether this guy was just using the gospel to gain more political access.
Then he got to spend a lot of private time with Charlie. He saw him in his own element. He went to behind-the-scenes dinners where Charlie was almost like the Godfather presiding over disputes and keeping the families in line. He saw how seriously Charlie took the Scriptures, how much he studied them, and how open he was to accountability. They all knew which local church Charlie attended, because he invited you to come with him, as he did Deace. Charlie held himself accountable to serious ministers and serious people of the gospel, like Frank Turek.
The Subtle Tribute: Sex and Money
This could be its own podcast, Deace says, but here is the most subtle tribute he can give his friend, something beyond the obvious.
Sex. Charlie was a good-looking young man, single most of the time he was building the organization, and TPUSA has no shortage of young attractive women volunteering and working there. Yet while he was single, and after he was married, no woman ever came forward to say he slid into her DMs, sent a text he shouldn't have, or showed up in her Snapchat with an inappropriate picture. "Stop and think about that." He was the emperor of that organization with all that influence, and there's no evidence at all.
That's why critics have to come up with the craziest conspiracy theories, like exploding microphones. The typical stuff used against men like him, everybody knows wasn't true.
Money. For four years under Biden, "if you even thought in your mind I might write a check to Donald Trump, the DOJ sent you a subpoena." They were indicting anything that moved. And Charlie was running the wealthiest nonprofit on the American right. You don't think they went through his 990s and every tax return? They went through them probably 666 times, "if you hear me knocking." They found nothing. Nothing at all.
Deace's takeaway is that the two things that most often destroy men in positions of leadership are sex and money, and no one can cast any aspersion, throw any stone, or make any claim against Charlie on either. That has too often gone unsaid, and it's the best tribute he can make to the legacy of his friend.
His warning is this: everybody sees the out-front stuff, and that stuff matters incredibly. But he has seen it happen in the lives of others, and it almost happened in his own life. If the foundation behind you isn't secure, that public face can only prop you up for so long, no matter how good you are at it.
Chris's response: the way you respect all mankind and the way you're faithful to your wife says everything we need to know about you.
Final Thoughts: Contentment Is a Lost Art
Deace preaches to the 40 people he has at his church right now, then puts his sermons online. The audience is growing, and he thinks it's because they have nothing to sell. They're just authentic. It's like Bible Sidekick, the book he promoted on the show: it helps people. They want to see it go out, of course, but if God doesn't do anything with it, they don't care. Everything else is nothing but sand castles on the seashore compared to Jesus's kingdom.
"It doesn't matter how many downloads I have. It doesn't matter how many people are at your church. What matters is, are you being a faithful steward of the gospel with the platform that he has given you?"
If you're not, you won't be content with it. You'll do very reckless things with it, or you'll tell yourself your ambitions are no longer in conflict with God's will but a manifestation of it. Those are the rationales our broken brains accept before we become cautionary tales.
Then comes the funny thing. The older he gets and the more successful he becomes, the more he understands why contentment is a fruit of the Spirit, and why it's one of the lost arts, particularly for those of us who are alphas and very driven. You can easily mistake drive for contentment, or settling for a lack of drive. We think, "I could be even bigger at this. I could be even better at this. I can make even more money than this." Why?
That's the theme of Secret Meaning of Life: contentment with godliness is great gain. It applies to the people working on the project too, who have had the knees cut out from under them with family issues and health issues. God is testing us on whether we'll be content in the middle of all this while we make this movie. If we can't, our testimony won't last long enough to get it completed and distributed.
The encouragement is that we're not alone. Think about people like Charlie Kirk and Steve Deace, who are in the battle every day and keep fighting the good fight. Remember the work they're doing, and stay faithful with the platform God has given you.
You can find Steve Deace at the Steve Deace Show on Facebook and X, where his many outlets get aggregated.