Loving Your Neighbor and Dancing Through Landmines

We are all inspired by stories and examples of courage. And we all want to be courageous.

How many of us have read how Corrie Ten Boom and her family risked their own lives to help Jewish refugees escape the Nazis and thought, If I were there, I’d do the same thing? Do we not do the same when we read Martin Luther’s famous refusal to recant of his teaching—the teaching of justification by faith—at the Diet of Worms in 1521? “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise,” he said (maybe). Here I stand too, we think.

Surely we would have stood alongside William Wilberforce, Hannah More, and the rest of the abolitionists as they worked tirelessly to end the slave trade. We would have shared a seat with Rosa Parks. We would have worked and marched alongside John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. and the rest of the civil rights advocates in the 1950s and 1960s. No matter the historical event, we always see ourselves on the side of the angels. And we do it with all kinds of stories. We would have thrown the one ring into the fires of Mount Doom. We would have fought with the Rebels and not the Empire. And we even do it with the Bible, too.

We are always David but never Saul. Elijah but never Ahab. Paul the Apostle but never the Pharisee.

We all want to be heroes—to defend the cause of the righteous and to be on the side of justice. And it is easy to imagine ourselves as being heroes in the hypothetical. To have courage when we’re using our imaginations. But what about when courage is actually needed? The truth is, we don’t know until we’re in the moment.

Love that Requires Courage

We live in a moment where something essential to the Christian life requires enormous courage: loving your neighbor as yourself. This command is the heart of Christian ethics—the exact expression of our love for the Lord our God (Mark 12:30–31; Luke 10:27). Loving your neighbor holds this place of prominence—it is the second greatest commandment, inseparable from the first.

Yet, the cultural moment in which we live is more influenced by the ethics of the Marquis de Sade than of Christ, who believed the “doctrine of loving one’s neighbor is a fantasy that we owe to Christianity and not to nature.”¹ Because we live in “the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” as one federal official said, loving your neighbor, with all its compassion, charity and humility, is outdated and unrealistic at best, and dangerously naïve at worst.

Far too many professing Christians seem to agree for my comfort. So we are always looking for the limits—to find the line we don’t need to cross. To discover who is not our neighbor. We’ve been doing this since, roughly, five seconds after Moses said, “You shall love him as yourself” (Leviticus 19:34 NKJV).² An “expert in the Law” even tried to get Jesus to give him an out. (It didn’t work—see Luke 10:25–37).

Still, we keep trying. We are discipled, by pundits, politicians, and algorithms to look for a limit—to find a reason not to show compassion. We want an out. Yet, as with the expert in the law, Jesus doesn’t give us one.

Dancing Through Landmines

So why does this require courage? Because to love your neighbor as yourself, no matter who they are requires dancing through landmines. One of the most dangerous is the relationship between faith and partisan political affiliation runs for so many American Christians.

Americans are conditioned to think about social issues, and the world in which we live, in terms of left vs right, liberal vs conservative, Democrat vs Republican. And for American Christians—assuming we can even see beyond this conditioning—to fail to toe the line comes with varying degrees of risk. It involves going against the grain of public opinion within a good portion of your community—even if they would have unhesitatingly agreed with you less than a decade ago. You may be called a “liberal” (and worse) behind your back by friends. If you are a somewhat public person, you may have strangers malign and misrepresent you. A few might even declare that you’re abandoning the faith altogether. Some of us face professional retribution as well.³

That’s why so many Christians are uncomfortable—or even afraid—to speak against so much of what is happening today. To say that immigrants, regardless of status, have the right to due process and protection against unreasonable search and seizure is not spin; it is the truth. These are rights protected under the Constitution of the United States. No law can be established that supersedes these, nor can an executive order or a policy memorandum. To say that ICE agents have demonstrated a pattern of reckless endangerment should not be controversial, especially in light of all the evidence. And yet it is, especially among conservative Christians who have been told that the Republican Party is the moral choice for the last 50 years.

It’s easier to say nothing. Safer. And easier still—safer still—is to defend the narrative. Some declare that the left is running a “propaganda war” on ICE, as Josh Howerton did. Others, like Erick Erickson, Andrew Walker, and Albert Mohler, either directly or tacitly blame victims. If people would just comply, if they wouldn’t impede law enforcement, none of this would happen.

That we live in a time where it takes courage to say something that really isn’t all that courageous says something about the state of the world in which we live. And it isn’t good.

Your Heart is Working Properly

So we look at the events of January 24th, 2026: 37-year-old Alex Pretti, a US citizen who worked in Minneapolis’s VA hospital, was shot multiple times by five for more ICE agents. Trump Administration officials—and President Trump himself—immediately declared him a “domestic terrorist” intent on massacring agents, and that the agents shot him in self-defense. Their story that has been contradicted by eye witness video, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Pretti was allegedly carrying a handgun on his person.⁴ Video evidence from the shooting shows him holding only a cellphone, which he used to record the activities of ICE agents—an action protected under the First Amendment. It does not show that he attempted to harm any agents; instead, it shows that he came to the aid another individual an agent pushed to the ground before being pepper sprayed and restrained. Pretti appeared to in no way be a threat when agents opened fire.

But here’s the thing: You can disagree with people protesting, and where protesters are themselves instigating violence, local law enforcement should intervene. But Pretti’s death should not be not a partisan issue. It is not a matter of right and left. It is a matter of right and wrong. It’s about real life and a real person. To say that what happened to Alex Pretti was wrong does not mean you are a “leftist.”

It means your heart is working properly.

Love is Worth the Risk

It may not seem courageous to say, but it is. Showing compassion, putting another before yourself, in a world “governed by power” is dangerous. Seeking to hold the governing authorities to account is risky. Loving your neighbor as yourself, whatever you might disagree on, requires courage.

Love is a risk. But love is what we, and our neighbors, need. It is what turned the world upside down in the early days of the church. Love—the love of Christ at work in and through us—can do it again. Now is not the time for us to shrink back. We cannot let fear stifle us, for the Lord is with us wherever we go (Joshua 1:9).

It takes courage to love—but love is worth the risk.

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

1. Marquis de Sade, as quoted in Neil Schaeffer, The Marquis de Sade: A Life (Harvard University Press, 2000), 436.
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2. Contextually, “him” refers to the “stranger,” or “sojourner”—what we would call an immigrant today. Jesus’ application of this teaching extends it to, effectively, all people. ↩︎
3. This is a common concern for individuals working for denominationally-affiliated entities. ↩︎
4. As was his right in an open carry state and as protected by the Second Amendment ↩︎