Ep. 356 Andrew DeCort - Neighbor Love and the Abolition of Othering

Andrew DeCort joins me to explore what it means to love our neighbor — not as a vague ideal, but as a radical way of living that can heal our divisions and reshape our world. Drawing from his own story in Ethiopia and his new book Reviving the Golden Rule, Andrew shares how the practice of neighbor love dismantles fear, ends cycles of othering, and calls us into a deeper belonging rooted in the very heart of God. We talk about how love becomes courage in the face of violence, how Jesus’ teaching to love even our enemies abolishes exclusion, and how the Neighbor-Love Movement is helping people embody this ancient command in practical, everyday ways. This is a powerful conversation about faith, reconciliation, and what it means to live as people who see every human being as a reflection of God’s image.

Andrew DeCort founded the Institute for Faith and Flourishing and cofounded the Neighbor-Love Movement in Ethiopia, which have reached over twenty million people with the invitation to nonviolent spirituality. He holds a PhD in religious ethics from the University of Chicago and has taught ethics, public theology, peace and conflict studies, and Ethiopian studies at Wheaton College, the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology, and the University of Bonn. He is the author of Reviving the Golden Rule, Blessed Are the Others, Flourishing on the Edge of Faith, and Bonhoeffer’s New Beginning. His words have appeared in Foreign Policy, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Economist, Christianity Today, and numerous other platforms.

Andrew's Book:

Reviving the Golden Rule

Andrew's Recommendation:

Grief is Love

Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.com

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Transcript

Andrew DeCort: 0:29

Jesus says between the lines again and again, that we only exclude ourselves from full belonging with God when we exclude others from full belonging with God, and that the desire of our heart is for full belonging with God, that we have nothing to fear, that we are fully embraced by this God who is kind and generous to the ungrateful and even the wicked. You Paul,

Joshua Johnson: 1:02

hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, in this episode, Andrew de court invites us back to the heart of Jesus, to a love that refuses to draw lines, abolishes othering, and welcomes every person as a neighbor. It's not sentimental or abstract. It's a love that confronts violence, hierarchy and exclusion with a courageous, embodied compassion. In this conversation, Andrew shares his story of being rejected by his own church community in Ethiopia, and how that experience and others of pain and awakening led to the birth of the neighbor love movement. This global effort is built around a simple but radical conviction that the command to love your neighbor, even your enemy, is the foundation for healing a broken world. We talk about how easily othering takes root in us, the ways love becomes an act of strength rather than weakness, and what it means to live a faith that looks like Jesus, kind, generous, open to all. Andrew's vision is both ancient and urgent, that our eyes, ears and words can become instruments of love in a world desperate for belonging. So join us for a conversation about courage, reconciliation and the practical hope that love still has the power to make us whole. Here is my conversation with Andrew de court, Andrew, welcome to shifting culture. Thank you so much for joining me.

Andrew DeCort: 2:40

Joshua, it's a pleasure to be here with you. Thanks for your hospitality on your show.

Joshua Johnson: 2:43

I'd love to get into this conversation, this conversation about neighbor, love and how important that ethic is to the world today, and othering, and how this just what we do as humans, is we other people. So how to figure that out? You talk in your in your book, about your your time in Ethiopia and your time today, but when you're we're really coming alive to the concept of othering, what was happening in your life. Take me into those moments where othering really came alive for you.

Andrew DeCort: 3:19

This is such an important topic for our time. Joshua, we can easily think we know what love your neighbor means, and we can miss it's really profound, profound significance for what we're going through right now. So when I was really discovering othering, I was working at a rapidly growing Pentecostal church in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. I had recently graduated from my master's program at the University of Chicago, and this church had a very messianic identity for what we were going to achieve in Ethiopia. Our mission statement was redeeming nations in righteousness, and we believed that by redeeming Ethiopia, we'd redeem the continent of Africa and then the world. It was this kind of rippling vision of change through the power of this church. And at that time, it also happened to meet an amazing person at a coffee shop named Lily, who's now my wife. And we recently celebrated 18 years of marriage, 15 years of marriage, 18 years of relationship, and the leadership at my church told me eventually that I could no longer be part of the church if I was in relationship with Lily, because she was part of another church and probably largely identical beliefs, you know, gathered around the Bible, gathered around the person of Jesus, gathered around this invitation to love the neighbor. And yet, because Lily was part of another church, I couldn't be part of my home church, because she was assumed that she might bring in some kind of foreign spirit that would kind of corrupt God's favor on this leadership team and the wider congregation, and so I ended up being kicked out of this church and started being part of a community across town and across town on the other side of town, there I was having lunch one day at a roadside Cafe, and a young boy came up to the table where I was eating with some friends and asked for help. And his name was IO by I later found out, but we told him, No, we weren't we weren't gonna interrupt our lunch and help him, sadly, and he walked away. And when he was walking away, this hood that he was wearing, he was wearing a hoodie, just fell off his head, and I saw that he had this horrifying wound on. The back of his head, Joshua. And it was one of these. I call him Matthew 25 moment, a moment where I was confronted with Jesus teaching that whatever you do to release of these, these people that you see as small or insignificant, you've done that to me. And that began me getting up from my table and going and meeting this boy, learning his name, and then starting a relationship with Him, and spending many, many, many days in a local hospital where we were trying to help him heal from this terrible wound. So I was going through this personal experience of being rejected by a church that I thought I would serve my whole life, and then seeing how I was so quickly going to reject this street boy who desperately needed help, and then being confronted by this word of Jesus that this person who is so easily seen as unrelated or less or discardable, had this sacred, even divine, value, and that's exactly what I experienced in him.

Joshua Johnson: 6:24

That's such an important story, both of those because, number one, I mean you thinking about Lily, who's your wife. Now that you know this is a fellow believer, another Jesus follower, somebody that has very similar beliefs is is right there and still when, when you're looking at Hey, us versus them, it's still an othering process, even when there's somebody so similar in values to who you are. And then you know somebody where, you know you have Yab, who is has this wound on the back of his head that you're we really always don't see people on the margins, right? And you know, sees people on the street. You see people that are homeless in the United States, or whatever it is, we really just look away. And so othering starts really simply, and you talk about the neighbor. Love ethic actually starts not just with Jesus, because Jesus radically comes and tells us to love our enemies and really shows us the way, but it actually starts early on in the Hebrew Bible. Where does this neighbor love movement start? Who is God and What's he trying to say to us, even from the beginning of the story,

Andrew DeCort: 7:42

the way I trace the origin of the neighbor love movement Joshua is in Genesis, chapter one, from the very beginning of God's original intention for humanity. This was a really revolutionary text that was put at the very beginning of the Bible to provide a lens for how we read everything that comes afterwards in the rest of the Bible. And it was common in the ancient world, or at least, not unknown, to see humans as the image of God or as reflections of divinity, or as these resemblances of divine dignity. But in each of those cases, it was always a priest or a king, an elite figure, who was seen as being the image of God. And thus the image of God reinforced that sense of hierarchy, that there was someone higher than you, someone more important than you, someone superior in value and authority that you should basically submit yourself to and be subject to. And this was used as a justification for slavery in the ancient world, that the gods had ordained rulers and then had ordained others to be under them. Genesis, one comes along and introduces this revolutionary vision, that each and every person is made in the image of God, that every person has an exalted dignity that reflects the preciousness of a creator that speaks life and gives the gift of existence that we are meant to share. So this was an incredible breakthrough. I mean, imagine, to this day, Joshua, if I could look into your face and say, I'm looking at a glimpse of God, and so I'm going to approach you with reverence, with curiosity, with a sense of affection and value. This is the invitation there and then, when we get to Leviticus 19, a couple books later in the Hebrew Scriptures, we hear for the first time, love your neighbor as yourself. And something that I think is really significant about that text is that it's nested within Moses, larger moral teaching about how the community should relate to to itself. So you have teachings about fairly paying the day laborer. This is someone whose labor you could exploit and then discard. Moses says, make sure that person is paid day of and treated with respect. Moses talks about the way that we treat people who are so called disabled, whether because of a visual impairment or a hearing impairment. Again, these are people that you could trick or that you could physically abuse or humiliate, and they wouldn't be able to see you doing it or hear you doing it. Moses says, pay attention to these people and treat them with care. On the other side of the teaching of love your your neighbor, later in Leviticus 19, there's the teaching to love the foreigner. So this is the person that you may not recognize as being part of your group. Maybe they don't speak the same language as you or look like you. Right at the center of this chapter is this command, do not bear a grudge or seek revenge against your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. So it seems like this neighbor love command is meant, in many ways, to summarize the ethical vision and behavior of the community that Moses is trying to form as the people are coming out of hundreds of years of slavery in Egypt. And it revolves around seeing the precious value of the other person of the neighbor, whether they may be a worker or they may be physically disabled or they may be from another ethnic group or nationality, the relationship is meant to be one of love and equality.

Joshua Johnson: 11:21

Take us into Ruth's story. So I mean, you use the story of Ruth as good example of what this looks like across ethnicity and religion, and what neighbor love looks like. So

Andrew DeCort: 11:32

something that I wrestle with in this book Joshua is Moses says, Love your neighbor as yourself, but it seems like there's still categories of other people who can be disregarded or even destroyed without any sense of loss or regret or or a sense of having broken God's law. And we see that in Moses teaching, this includes this happens when you get labeled as an enemy, when you get labeled as an enemy of Israel, you're kind of removed from the moral circle or the moral radar of who gets seen as bearing this divine significance and being worthy of love. And when Israel was journeying into the land of Canaan, there was this ethnic group named the Moabites, who did not welcome them and did not treat them well. And Moses responds in kind. He says, Never show hospitality or welcome a Moabite, don't let them come into your community for 10 generations, which seems to be a way of saying, Never, ever accept them. I know in Ethiopia, some people can name their ancestors 10 generations back. I most certainly can't. I don't think most listeners to this conversation could name their ancestors 10 generations back. He's saying, For as long as you can remember, and as long as you can look into the future, don't accept these people. So in the book of Ruth, we have a story of Naomi, this Israelite woman who's in a famine in the land, and she's desperate, and so she moves to Moab looking for food. And when she moves to this, you know, this other land, this pagan enemy territory, disaster strikes her even further. Her husband dies and her sons die. And it's very likely that a Hebrew reader of this text would have said, Yeah, of course, that's what happened. You left the promised land where God's favor is more uniquely present, and you went over to those people who weren't even ever supposed to be accepted into our community, and now look, you're losing all of your blessings because you stepped outside of the umbrella of God's favor. Ruth then moves back to the land of Israel. But the trick in this really small and powerful story is that her Moabite, daughter in law, Ruth, insists on coming with her. But of course, in doing so, Ruth is violating this law of Moses that a Moabite should never, ever be accepted into the community and treated as an equal, as a neighbor, as someone who fully belongs. And in this story, there's a man named Boaz who ends up not only offering Ruth work and offering her special protection and care in the community, he asks her to become his wife and to become part of His family. So what you see here is Boaz not only defies the teaching of Moses to keep Moabites out, he marries her and becomes family with her and starts starts a new beginning with her and Boaz, in this book of Ruth is described as a man of hesed, a man of covenant love, of divine character that has this loving kindness that is unlimited. And so the powerful thing about this story, for me, Joshua, is that Boaz is both a lawbreaker when it comes to chapter and verse, and he's the exemplar of divine character, because he loves the other that we've been told never accept them. He loves Ruth, this woman of noble character. So this is, I think this is really, really fresh, because this story is in Scripture, but it's also showing how love can transcend and expand scripture at the same time.

Joshua Johnson: 15:24

I mean, so if you look at scripture, if you look in the in the Old Testament, it seems pretty clear you have the. Ma, you have, you know, in Deuteronomy, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, you have lived at kiss 19, love your neighbor as yourself. But it seems to go go wrong. It doesn't seem to be like the core ethic that they decide to live by. If Moses is saying, hey, never invite these people in. They're your enemies, right? We're talking about enemy language. What stories are these people telling that othering starts to take place above and beyond neighbor?

Andrew DeCort: 17:04

Love? Yeah, yeah. What stories are these people telling that othering goes beyond neighbor love? That's such an important question. I think there's, there's a couple different stories. One is about them, one is about us. For example, in the case of Moab, there's a story told about how those people came from dirty ancestors, that there's some kind of original evil back in their history. And if you go back far enough, you'll see that they're, they're these kind of corrupted people. And we hear this language today Joshua, that these people were born to be criminals, that these people were born to be murderers or thugs. So there's something kind of fated against them because of their ancestry. Another is because of more recent traumas. So again, I mentioned that in the case of Israel entering into Canaan, they were not received and treated with hospitality in the way that they expected. And so there was a grievance, a grudge, there was a sense of having been wronged, and there needing to be some kind of retribution or payback. Of course, we're very familiar with that story too. They wronged Us. They hurt us. Now they're going to get hurt. But there's also the story that we tell about ourselves, and that's often the story that we have some kind of superior connection to God, and that God has willed for us to be on another level compared to other people. And we can see some of this in in Deuteronomy. I talk about this in the book. And these are, these are really complex texts, but for example, towards the end of Deuteronomy, we hear the god character through Moses saying that if you obey my law, you will be the head and never the tail. You will be at the top and never at the bottom. You will have the wealth and others will come to you in a posture of service, being subservient to you. You can tell that here. You know, if you're going to be close to God, you get to be the top. You get to be the head. You're not that dirty, nasty tail dragging at the bottom. So that story is, when we're close to God, we get to use people for our own benefit, at least certain categories of people, and we don't have to feel like we're somehow violating the image of God in others. So these stories, I think, get circulated very much today, whether it's there's something wrong with them that goes back to the deep past, whether there's trauma, a conflict that has built resentment between us, or the story that we're telling that we have some unique connection with God that makes us closer to God and justifies us using and abusing other people, other people, because God just made it this way, and a lot of ways that would connect with something like Christian nationalism today, where, for example, last night, I was watching a video where the the so called Secretary of War posted on his his X account, a video of the Lord's Prayer with American missiles being launched and exploding in so called Enemy Territory, using the words of Jesus to apparently provide fair prayerful sanctification of America, American military aggression. There you see that God is on our side when we're shooting at our enemies, our Jesus, original prayer is being fulfilled. So these are, these are powerful stories.

Joshua Johnson: 20:26

That's a really powerful story. That's it's kind of mind blowing that that still happens today, and we're using these stories to really other others, and we are then lifting ourselves up so that we could be at the top and we could get all the blessings because we're closest to God. It's kind of scary that that can happen. Jesus Himself comes in. He's calling us an ethic of love in a greater way than ever before. He moves into a place of even saying, you know, love your enemies that wasn't said before. Jesus is the one who's like, really takes it to the extreme. It is like love for everyone. What Is Jesus really getting at? What changes if we take Jesus seriously, of what this really looks like and what this really means,

Andrew DeCort: 21:19

this is what's at the heart of Jesus, teaching of neighbor love. The neighbor is everyone, and the command to love is universalized, and so there's no longer any other. That you can target for indifference, for aggression, for annihilation. We just seen that the enemy is often the label that gets put on people to be pushed away, to be treated as objects of hatred or to be attacked. For example, in the Book of Leviticus Moses, has God say this statement, I will be an enemy to your enemies. And he talks about how just if a few of us start chasing our enemies, that 1000 of them will run away again. It's this idea that God is on our side with Jesus. He explicitly says, Love your enemies so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. Here, Jesus is returning us to this vision of Genesis, one where God is the first lover of enemies. Jesus gives one of his very rare definitions of God in Luke chapter six, verse 35 where Jesus is unpacking his teaching of loving the enemy, he says that God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked, that God's posture towards people isn't predicated on their behavior. It's predicated on God's character. And if God is fundamentally kindness and generosity, then this is what pours out of God, even in a situation of conflict. So Jesus is going to the ultimate other, the one that you feel religiously and politically entitled to oppose an attack. And he says, even that one you are called to love. And you're not just called to love that one because of some kind of abstract moral duty, but because this love for the other is the very essence of God. And so what Jesus is doing here, Joshua, I think, is something very, very I call it revolutionary Not, not to use that word in a kind of cheap, you know, firework sort of way, but, but in the sense that Jesus is shifting our paradigm and calling us into a fundamental new energy for being human. Because he's saying there is no other that you can exclude, disregard or attack, as if they don't matter. Every person, including the one you label as another, is connected to you and has precious value. So I call this the abolition of othering, if, if we get a very, very powerful command to love the neighbor in Hebrew scripture, but we see that there are loop loopholes still about. Well, if you're an enemy, you can still be excluded or attacked. Jesus universalizes neighbor love and abolishes othering. And what I try to suggest Joshua is that when Jesus sends His disciples out into all nations, notice it's this movement outward towards others. Jesus says, Teach them to obey everything that I've commanded you. And we know that love of the neighbor, including Love of the enemy, is the core teaching of Jesus. So when Jesus is saying, go out and teach all people to obey what I've commanded you, he's saying, universalize this practice of neighbor love. And so this is what I talk about, the universalization of the neighbor love movement, which is exactly what we see in the early Jesus movement, where people are going out across cultural and political and religious boundaries, and they're spreading this vision that the other is a neighbor and worthy of

Joshua Johnson: 25:06

love. I so wish the world would be like that, and we can see that, I think the argument against those and people, even that call themselves followers of Jesus, would argue, saying that this really is weakness, and the world doesn't work this way. And if we don't use force, where everything is going to basically go to hell, right? It's going to be hell on earth. So we need to use force, or we need to other people. We need to dominate so that love can prevail. It's a strange like loop they do in their head to get to domination and force is neighbor. Love weak first of all, and why does force or domination not bring about love that we're seeking?

Andrew DeCort: 26:01

Yes, neighbor, love is not weak. Neighbor love is courageous. Neighbor love is powerful. Neighbor Love is the embodiment of a more courageous, creative agency that can bring healing between us. Othering is easy. If you have insulted me, it's easy for me to try to ratchet that up and insult you back. If you have threatened me, it's easy for me to try to again, escalate and threaten back if you. To use physical aggression. It comes very, very instinctively for the fight, fight or flight mode to go in and I either run away from you or I try to dominate you. Neighbor love is calling for a more grounded agency that faces conflict without mirroring conflict. It is responsive rather than reactive. And I would say that rather than a weakness, this shows incredible composure, it shows incredible awareness. It shows that rather than me being subject to your whether it's aggressive language, aggressive behavior, aggressive policy, that I am my own agent, or my community has its own agency and freedom to act rather than to react, to initiate rather than to follow the script that we've been given. So I'm a reader of Friedrich Nietzsche, and Nietzsche famously talked about how at the core of human life is the will to power. And Nietzsche had a really, as you can imagine, he didn't, he didn't think that neighbor love was a good thing, or he didn't take it seriously. He said it was exactly that. It was weakness. It was being a doormat. It was getting walked over. But what I say in response to Nietzsche is that it's it comes very easy for us to try to seek our own power to try to maximize our interest, to put ourselves at the center of the universe. But when you are exercising agency out of the awareness that the other person also bears value, that there's also a reflection of divinity in them, that there may be something to learn from them, this requires a larger awareness. Requires a larger self control. It requires an expanded range of motion that I think many of us call weak because we find it so intimidating, we find it so challenging, we find it so threatening, because it does require vulnerability and to your second question, Joshua, I would say that, you know the teaching of Jesus is, is Love your neighbor as yourself, including the one that you're most likely to view as an enemy. And I would say I've never been in a situation where I want to be loved by being dominated. And I've never been in a situation where domination has motivated me to become better, more truthful, more generous, more cooperative. And having worked in East Africa for many years in the Ethiopian context, I've never seen where American foreign policy of aggression, invasion, occupation has built respect. Instead, it's developed further resentment. I think that this comes common sense to all of us, if any of us Americans, were treated the way that Israel is currently treating Gaza, for example, after we've invaded Yemen or Syria, or numerous other countries across the world not to go back to Iraq, we would say that this is completely intolerable. We would not view this aggression as motivating towards some kind of mutual relationship of cooperation. I think this is, this is common sense when we put ourselves at the center of the story. But if we look at, say, Iraqis or Afghanis or Somalis or Palestinians as our neighbors, as people who bear equally precious value, it would become more commonsensical for us to say, of course, occupying, bombing, destroying is not going to generate the kinds of relationships that will create mutual security, mutual prosperity, mutual flourishing. And more and more research Joshua is demonstrating this, and I talk in the book briefly about how there's a researcher at Harvard University named Erica Chenoweth who has done a massive study from 1900 to, I think, 2019 and she looks at, I think, 627 cases, and she finds that non violent social change in the face of conflict is twice as effective at bringing sustainable change, sustainable justice, sustainable democracy, as violent methods of trying to overthrow situations of tyranny or conflict. So more and more we see the empirical social scientific research catching up with the teachings of Jesus around loving the enemy and practicing non violence, that neighbor love is not weak, but rather it lays the foundation for us to have a meaningful human life together, which is exactly what Jesus said, Blessed are the peacemakers, because they will inherit the earth. The world becomes a home when we practice peace together.

Joshua Johnson: 32:09

I think another thing that people will say, you hear it all the time, is love the person Hate the sin they're. This language in the Bible, where there's calls for righteousness, sin is not tolerated. But we're all messy. We all have, you know, tensions within ourselves, and each one of us has those things. How do we reconcile that? What does it look like where love and righteousness, holiness, and, you know, love of neighbor coincide.

Andrew DeCort: 32:40

I mentioned a minute ago Jesus teaching in Luke, chapter six, Love your enemy. Why? Because God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Immediately after that, in the next in Jesus next breath, he says, Do not judge, lest you be judged. And then he gives another teaching where he says that if you give in the same measure, you will be given, and there will be a good measure running, running over that will be poured into your lap. It's this image of fullness, of abundance of surplus. First judgment. In this context, it's clear Jesus is talking about othering. If you think that you have some kind of moral superiority to someone else, you're not operating out of an awareness of your own fragility, your own capacity to commit mistakes, your fallibility, errors of judgment, of behavior. Jesus is saying, if you're making any kind of moral judgment out of a position of moral superiority, and assuming we're the good ones who are who are closer to God, that's a mistake. On the flip side, he says that when we are exercising moral generosity to pour out forgiveness and grace towards others, we are opening ourselves to receive the same abundant measure from God. And so I would I would say, Joshua, yeah, of course, there's a crucial role for confronting injustice. If we're lying to one another, we won't be able to trust one another. We need to be able to seek the truth together. If we are exploiting one another and treating one another cheaply, of course, we're going to feel devalued and dehumanized, and resentment is going to build between us, and we're going to have escalating conflict. We need to be able to treat one another with respect, and so those those injustices and dehumanizations need to be named and called out. But they do not get named and called out from a posture of moral superiority, as if I'm the good one, and if you could just be like me, then we would be better. But rather, it gets called out from the posture of this is the community that we're seeking, in which all are equally valued, in which we are all equally accountable, and so it's not come over to our side and become like us, because you're less, you're unrelated, you're dirty, you're defective, you're a monster. It's together we seek the common good of all in this posture of both humility towards ourselves and generosity in the face of human failing. So I think that this is crucial, because the desire for justice can so easily become the basis of reinscribing othering. We are the good guys. We have. You know, today we call it civilization. We could call it Christianity. We could call it the West, this assumption that somehow this world that we've built up in large part through practices of colonization, enslavement, the exploitation of the human person, that somehow we have a moral superiority, and so calling for justice is constantly a self affirmation that we are right and that God is on our side. Jesus is so perceptive into this psychology of self elevation. He says, if that's if that's the energy out of which you think that you are protecting justice, then you've just fallen into the trap of othering again. And watch out, because with the measure you judge, you will be judged. And this is, this is I call this in the book of Joshua, the paradox of neighbor love that Jesus, Jesus says between the lines again and again, that we only exclude ourselves from full belonging with God when we exclude others from full belonging with God, and that the desire of our heart is for full belonging with God, that we have nothing to fear, that we are fully embraced by this God who is kind and generous to the ungrateful and even the wicked.

Joshua Johnson: 36:49

I mean, we are the beloved children of God, and, you know, as we are the beloved, so are other people. Is that we walk in that way, it could really make the world a better place. You write about specific examples of everyday people like doing this in real life, and I think it's part of neighbor love that's really difficult. Is as we were just talking, I. About about justice and trust and and with other people. When that is not reciprocated, it's really hard to love. Give me an example of somebody that actually did that. What was the effect? What difference did it make? We need to

Andrew DeCort: 37:32

constantly be re embedding neighbor love into our embodied lives and practice, and if it's not, if it's not practical and lived, then again, we're just playing a mind game where we're probably elevating ourselves over someone else, and assuming that we are, that we are superior. One of the examples that I write about in my book is Martin Luther King, Jr, Chapter Chapter Six of the book looks at what I call modern exemplars of neighbor love. These are not people who are perfect and without mistake, but these are people who give us shining examples of what the practice of neighbor love looks like in situations of extreme othering and injustice, and many people may not be aware of the depth of Martin Luther King Jr's faith. He was a Christian minister. He had a PhD in theology. And the civil rights movement, in many ways, was a neighbor love movement. What Martin Luther King Jr insisted again and again is that we will not respond to the othering of American society, which is through the lens of race, the color of skin in the same kind by seeking control or by seeking domination or by seeking to separate or eliminate anyone. Instead, we will seek to reform our society by insisting again and again on the precious value of every human being in the society, regardless of the color of their skin, regardless of how much money they have or their political convictions. And what we saw through Martin Luther King, Jr, refusing to mirror the exclusion, the devaluation, the hatred in his society is that he contributed towards massive, massive transfer transformations in humans in American society, like the passing of the Civil Rights Act, desegregation across the board in the United States, and the ongoing journey that we're part of, of a society in which Every human person is valued equally. Of course, this project is profoundly incomplete, and we're continuing that struggle today. We see it. We see it rising and spiking again today. But I think Martin Luther King, Jr is a particularly powerful example of the practical implications of neighbor love, because he didn't start a movement to try to, for example, elevate oppressed African American people over white Americans. His energy wasn't born out of resentment, but implicitly mirroring back the very thing that he sought to oppose. Instead, there was genuine creativity and transformation in his movement that was grounded in the dignity of all people. It was grounded in non violent struggle. So instead of again, using subjugation and weapons to try to bring change, it was through dialog. It was through relationship. It was through non coercive means, and that was creating the possibility for what king called the beloved community in which people don't feel like winners and losers but equally responsible participants in the society. And I just tried to imagine Joshua, what if Martin Luther King, Jr wasn't operating with an ethic of neighbor love, and he didn't see white people, for example, as neighbors, people who are equally precious and connected to him. Imagine the ways that he could have used his gifts for speaking and organizing and acting to sow an even deeper resentment and conflict in our society that could have gone in very, very different directions. So I see King as a very powerful example in our society that we need still today, because we're seeing this rhetoric of those people, the enemy, the monster, those who must be eliminated in order for our society to be safe, for it to be prosperous, for it to be blessed by God. Martin Luther King, Jr stands out as an exemplar that says that that road doesn't take us to where we go, you know. And towards the end of his life, he became increasingly clear that we either choose non violence or we choose non existence, because if we choose the path of violence, we will end up eliminating each other. And what I just like to highlight again is that King said non violence or non existence, not because he was a liberal, not because he had against some kind of abstract morality, but he believed that anyone that we seek to create to commit violence against is our neighbor and bears the precious image of God. And so we are. We are degrading God if we act in violence against any. Human life. So again, the neighbor love ethic was the breath, it was the bone, it was the energy of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr, and of course, the countless, countless people who made that movement possible.

Joshua Johnson: 43:06

You're not just actually thinking about this, studying it and talking about it, you're actually trying to live it on the ground in Ethiopia as well as you're trying to implement this neighbor love movement in practical ways of what it looks like to see this move across Ethiopia. So just tell me about that movement. Why are you setting that up in Ethiopia? And what are some of these practices that you're you're utilizing to help this neighbor love movement spread?

Andrew DeCort: 43:38

So in 2018 Joshua, there were events happening in Ethiopia that were indicating that conflict was really getting ready to escalate. There were public executions, some really just horrific deaths like we've we're seeing some of that in our society now, and displacements of people and an increasing discourse of the other as an enemy, as a cancer, as a hyena, as a kind of dangerous wild Animal. This was often a long religious, ethnic and political lines, and so we were seeing hardenings of identity towards others that were creating really, really heartbreaking violence. And my wife, Lily and I and our partner, takalane nega said we really think that othering is at the heart of what's unfolding in Ethiopia. Yeah, it's complex. There are historical grievances, there's poverty, there's conversations around, how is the map drawn? What is the nature of the political structure of society? But at the heart of the violence that we're seeing is this willingness to view other people as unrelated or less than ourselves. And so we wanted to, we wanted to start a movement that would mainstream in ancient in Ethiopian society, the vision of the other as a neighbor, that whoever you see, whoever you interact with, they are your neighbor, and they bear precious value in the eyes of God. And regardless of whether you follow Christianity, whether you follow Islam or another faith or no faith, this is our shared moral vision that can unite us in a society of the common good. And so we started traveling the country, speaking at universities, speaking at libraries, speaking at business incubators, meeting with religious leaders politicians to ask people to sign a covenant that says, Just today, I covenant to love my neighbor as myself, every woman, man and child, is my neighbor across every boundary and identity. That's the crucial part I choose to see and treat my neighbor with value, compassion and practical respect. Today I say yes, I'm an ambassador of neighbor love. So we asked folks to make a personal commitment to live a covenantal life oriented around this love of the other as a neighbor, and then we unpack that covenant in seven practices rooted in the body. And I really love the practicality of this Joshua, because you don't need a special amount of money or a special technology or some kind of outsized influence to practice neighbor love. It's in our body. So it starts with seeing the other person as my neighbor. And that's that's just, again, very blunt and practical. When I look at you, I'm seeing someone who is connected to you, even if I'm just meeting you for the first time, even if I have reason to be suspicious of you, or even if there's a history there where there's a deep resentment, I choose to see you as someone who is bearing precious value, rather than to look away from you or to label you as something less than a precious neighbor. With my ears, I choose to listen to you with patience in seeking understanding. This could be truly a revolutionary practice, if we would all devote ourselves to say, I want to listen to you and understand what you're saying even in the midst of disagreement, rather than just, you know, turning you off and assuming that I already know another is the mouth commit to speaking to the other with respect and truthfulness, even in the midst of disagreement. And this has to do with removing any kind of insulting or dehumanizing language from our vocabulary, so that even when we get heated or when our emotions are escalated, we refuse to start moving into the language that says, But you are labeling you, insulting you, degrading you. So there's seven of these practices that are rooted in the body, but they start with how we see other people, how we listen with other people, and how we speak with other people. And. And the invitation for the last several years in Ethiopia has been for young people to reclaim the heart of their faith found in loving their neighbor as themselves, and to embody this with their own flesh in their relationships with other people in community. And this, this has been extremely challenging Joshua, because Ethiopia has passed through a devastating civil war from 2020 to 2022 conflict remains very unpredictable and intense in Ethiopia. And the thing is, when your community organizes itself around naming another group of people as the enemy, you easily become a person in between. If you are committed to loving others as your neighbors, your own group may not recognize you as being part of them because you're wanting to make peace with the enemy and see their dignity and seek non violent solutions to the conflict, the people on the other side of the conflict may not recognize you as one of them because they still may label you as part of their enemy group, and so you increasingly become a kind of third space, maybe homeless, wilderness dwelling person, and we've learned through the process of Ethiopia, Civil War, just How threatening and challenging it can be to invite people to make love of the neighbor, the very core of their identity and faith and practice, because a lot of people will not understand it. And I think the same is true here in the US today, that when we break out of our tribal notions of identity and belonging, that a lot of people may be very confused and feel like, Oh, you've become a traitor to us. You're not a truly, you don't truly belong with us because you're not aligned against anyone. But are seeking to see others as precious in value, regardless of who

Joshua Johnson: 49:44

they are. So speak to America right now, if we're we're looking at a place of greater polarization, greater identity, hardening aspects of our lives, seeing people as the other and seeing people as enemy, and we have escalating violence. Yeah, in our country, speak to speak to the Americans. What do we need? How can we start this movement in America, what can we do so that neighbor love can actually help our situation?

Andrew DeCort: 50:18

Yes, again, I really see Jesus as as such a genius of neighbor love and the kind of epicenter of this movement that has spread across the earth across the last 2000 years, and in Jesus time, Jewish relationships with Samaritans was one of the most inflamed, deeply resentful relationships of othering. Samaritans were to be avoided. They were to be cast out. They were to be spoken about with degradation. And what we see is that Jesus went to Samaria. He actively traveled inside of that dirty land, that enemy territory. Jesus built relationships with Samaritans. He touched Samaritans. Jesus told arguably his most famous story about a Samaritan. But rather than talking about how the Samaritan was a thug or was a heretic, Jesus described the Samaritan as the embodiment of divine love that opens heaven this very shocking story, and I would say that in America today, we need to follow the example of Jesus and build relationships with the people that are seen as the as the most hateable others in my Christian community, that might be trans people, that might be Muslim people, that might be Palestinian people. And what I want to do is I want to build relationships where I am listening actively, where I'm coming in with a curious mind and seeking to understand how has othering limited my understanding of who you are and what your story is and what your experience is like. Will you teach me and help me enlarge my love? So I think Americans today need to build active relationships with the people that they believe are the enemy. And of course, that's going to be complex, that's going to be messy, but when we do that, I find that so many of my assumptions about who those people are, they get, they just, they get blown away, because there's a depth in many cases, there's a beauty, there's a goodness that I wasn't expecting to encounter that becomes very healing to my humanity, I feel changed and enriched. So what would happen today if Americans made a list of. Okay, who are the the three groups of people that I'm most tempted to see as totally wrong, as hopeless and part of the downfall of my society, and what if I would actively seek to build a relationship with at least one member of that group and say, Would you tell me your story? Would you tell me about your life? Can we begin walking together? Ooh, that would require a lot of patience, but I think it would be transformative for all of us. And instead of relating to one another as these two dimensional caricatures of one another, we would relate to one another as neighbors, as these full bodied complex, deeply precious people with whom we share life.

Joshua Johnson: 53:36

Andrew, this has been rich and wonderful and good and something that we desperately need. I have a couple of quick questions as we end here. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?

Andrew DeCort: 53:50

I would say to my 21 year old self, it's gonna hurt really bad. Learn how to grieve deeply, value friendship and always keep love at the center of who you are. God will sustain

Joshua Johnson: 54:03

you. Sounds good. Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend.

Andrew DeCort: 54:08

I've been reading some old stuff and I've been reading some new stuff. Well, I've spoken that the theme of grief. I've been reading a book called grief is love. My dad passed away a little over a year ago, and I've been going through the grieving process of really missing him and how grief comes unexpectedly and washes over us. Grief is love has been quite a powerful book about how do we work through our grief and recognize that our grief is, in fact, love. The reason why we feel grief in the face of loss or in the face of injustice or suffering is because we were created to love and to be together, and so when that's broken, the grief that rises up in us is an indication that love is actually present, and I've been working on allowing who those complex emotions to live together. Joshua, grief and love, longing and missing, deep admiration and the deep ache and emptiness that comes from absence. So that's that's one book that I've been reading and really appreciating.

Joshua Johnson: 55:14

Wow, that's beautiful. I mean, that's a that's a deep one, right there. Yeah, Andrew, your book, reviving the golden rule, I think is really important for today, in our day and age. It's probably, it's important for all of humanity from the beginning all the way until the consummation like this is that this is a huge thing, that, you know, it's the core of who Jesus is. It's the core of what he has brought. And, you know, it's the core of God as somebody wants to be love, give love to all people and receive love. And so this is, this is huge. This is key. I love this book, so I want people to go out and get it, and you can go get that. Anywhere books are sold. Is there anywhere you'd like to point people specifically to get the book? Or how could they join the neighbor love movement? What does that look like to connect with you?

Andrew DeCort: 56:10

Yeah, you can get the book at bookshop, at Amazon, at IVP. You can buy the book wherever, wherever you buy books, it's going to be available paperback, ebook and audiobook on October 2. So it's should be out really, really soon. If people want to sign the neighbor love covenant, covenant and download our seven practices. Go to NLM global.org, I encourage people to print out the covenant, put it in a place where you can see it, and every day, renew your commitment to being someone who is expanding this ancient movement of love across barriers of enmity, suspicion, grievance, and let your body become the first place where you are practicing love with your eyes, with Your ears, with your hands, with your feet and who you're walking with. So books available anywhere you buy books, please visit NLM global.org and check out signing the covenant and becoming a practitioner in your community?

Joshua Johnson: 57:12

Yes, wonderful. So well, yeah, we'll link to that in the show notes. So go to the show notes, just click the link. You'll go straight to download the covenant neighbor love covenant, sign that and actually live it. And if we do that, if there's enough of us that could actually live this covenant of neighbor love and actually practice it and do it, our world would look more like Jesus, and that's what I want to see happen. It would just be in an incredible place. So Andrew, thank you for this conversation. Thank you for diving deep in what does it look like to actually love our neighbor, love our enemies? Practically. What does it look like? Practically? What. Does it look like to actually see people listen well, speak respectfully to others, and how othering has actually really hurt and hindered this love all over the world for a long time, and so I just pray that we can live this out. It is fantastic conversation, and really enjoyed it. So thank you, Andrew,

Andrew DeCort: 58:10

thank you so much. Joshua, it's been a joy to be with you. Jesus said, Do this and you will flourish, and that's my hope. You.