“The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.” — Proverbs 18:17
Part One: How We Find Truth
The Four-Tier Evidentiary Framework
In evaluating any public claim, we sort evidence by reliability before drawing conclusions.
Primary-source documentation: peer-reviewed studies, court records, on-camera transcripts, archaeological evidence. Independently confirmable by anyone.
Real evidence that reasonable people read differently depending on their prior commitments, professional lens, or theological framework.
Claims traceable to a single source, reliant on anonymous reports, or lacking independent corroboration. Not necessarily false — but below the standard required to treat them as established fact.
Claims that contradict available evidence, commit clear logical fallacies, or present contested matters as settled.
The Organizational Lens Principle
The mission of an organization shapes how it interprets and presents evidence. This is not an accusation of dishonesty. It is a recognition that advocacy organizations, media outlets, governments, and individuals all have lenses that determine what they see, emphasize, minimize, and how they frame ambiguity. We ask of every source: What is this organization’s mission? How does that mission create incentives to interpret evidence in a particular direction? Has this claim been corroborated by sources with different institutional incentives? This principle applies equally regardless of political or theological orientation.
A Word Before We Begin: The Invisible Lens
There is a meta-point worth naming before we analyze a single claim, because it applies to this document as much as it applies to the prayer we’re examining.
Most people would readily agree with the statement: “People should be able to hear truth even when it contradicts what they want the story to be.” Ask anyone. Virtually everyone says yes. Of course. That’s just being reasonable.
And then they go right back to doing exactly what DeCort did.
That’s the real problem. It’s not that people are lying. It’s that the lens is mostly invisible to the person wearing it. DeCort isn’t sitting there consciously choosing to suppress evidence. He genuinely believes he’s speaking prophetic truth. The lens does its work quietly — determining what counts as evidence worth including, what frame feels “balanced,” which suffering registers as real and which recedes into background noise. By the time the prayer is written, the narrative has already been constructed at the pre-conscious level.
A declared lens, submitted to a disciplined process, can surface truth. A hidden lens — especially one wrapped in the language of prophecy or justice — constructs narrative while its bearer is convinced they’re bearing witness.
Proverbs 18:17 applies to us too. Hold this document to the same standard it applies to DeCort.
Part Two: Who Is Speaking
Andrew DeCort: Background and Framework
Dr. Andrew DeCort holds a PhD in Religious and Political Ethics from the University of Chicago. He is a Wheaton College graduate (2005, theology and philosophy), whose home church was Calvary Church in Naperville, Illinois — a large nondenominational evangelical megachurch. He taught at Wheaton and the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology before founding the Institute for Faith and Flourishing (2016) and co-founding the Neighbor-Love Movement in Ethiopia (2019). He is referred to as “Rev. Dr.” in academic contexts, indicating ordination, though no specific denominational affiliation is publicly documented. He publishes with IVP Academic (evangelical), writes for Sojourners (progressive Christian), and has appeared in Christianity Today, Foreign Policy, the BBC, and The Atlantic.
His first book, Bonhoeffer’s New Beginning: Ethics After Devastation (Fortress Academic, 2018), examines Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ethics. Subsequent works focus on nonviolent spirituality and peacemaking. DeCort does not appear accountable to any denominational body, elder board, or church authority structure. His organizations are independently operated nonprofits. This matters because the accountability structures that shape theological speech in a local church — elders who push back, congregants who ask hard questions, denominational standards — are largely absent from the independent public theologian model.
The Hidden Premise: Principled Nonviolence
DeCort’s organizations promote “nonviolent spirituality.” His books frame Jesus’s teachings as fundamentally about peacemaking and nonresistance. This identifies DeCort as operating within the tradition of Christian pacifism — the belief that violence is never justified. This is the single most important interpretive key to the entire prayer, because it explains every otherwise puzzling choice. If violence is never justified, then October 7th and Israel’s response are not two sides of a moral equation — they are two expressions of the same evil, with the more powerful actor bearing greater responsibility. From this framework, Hamas’s attack need not be named because it cannot justify Israel’s military campaign. Nothing justifies violence.
This is internally consistent. But DeCort never identifies this premise openly. He presents his conclusions as though they are simply what faithful Christianity looks like, rather than as one contested tradition within a much larger theological conversation. The hidden premise does all the work while never being exposed to examination.
Part Three: The Theological Landscape on Violence
Three Christian Traditions
Pacifism holds that Jesus’s teachings prohibit all violence. The early church was largely pacifist for its first three centuries. The Anabaptist tradition (Mennonites, Amish, Brethren) holds this position. DeCort operates here.
Just War Theory, the dominant tradition since Augustine (4th century) and Aquinas (13th century), holds that war is a tragic reality in a fallen world but can be morally justified under specific conditions: just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, last resort, proportionality, and protection of noncombatants. This is the position of Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, and most Protestant traditions. It does not celebrate war. It recognizes that the refusal to use force can itself be moral failure — the abandonment of the innocent.
Holy War / Crusade holds that God actively commands or blesses specific military actions. This is what DeCort accuses Hegseth of holding. It is the most dangerous position because it removes moral restraints.
What the Text Actually Says
The “turn the other cheek” passage (Matthew 5:39) is often cited as proof of absolute nonviolence. But in first-century Jewish culture, a strike on the right cheek — delivered with the right hand — was a backhanded slap: an insult, a dominance move, not an attempt to kill. Jesus teaches: do not return insult for insult. But he never said “if someone is about to murder your child, stand there and let it happen.” There is a categorical difference between absorbing an insult with grace and watching the innocent be slaughtered. The first is Christlike humility. The second is moral cowardice in spiritual clothing.
Jesus braided a whip and drove money changers from the temple (John 2:15). He told disciples to buy swords (Luke 22:36). Nehemiah built Jerusalem’s walls with a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other (Nehemiah 4:17–18). Paul affirmed governing authority “does not bear the sword in vain” (Romans 13:4). Ecclesiastes declares “a time for war and a time for peace” (3:8).
The pacifist tradition has sophisticated responses to all of these passages — and those responses deserve a serious hearing. Pacifists rightly point out that just war theory has frequently been weaponized to bless wars that were anything but just. That critique lands. But acknowledging it doesn’t resolve the harder question: what would principled nonviolence have us do on October 7th? What does it prescribe when the alternative to force is the slaughter of the innocent? These are not rhetorical questions. They require an answer, and they are the reason most of the Christian tradition has landed in the just war camp rather than the pacifist one. This is a genuine debate within Christianity, not a settled conclusion.
The Historical Test
What ended the Holocaust? Allied armies. Six million Jews were dead by liberation. Bonhoeffer — whose ethics DeCort’s first book examines — joined the plot to assassinate Hitler because his pacifism had become complicity. What ended American slavery? The Union Army. Abolitionists tried moral persuasion for 35 years; it freed not one slave. What stopped the Rwandan genocide? Nothing. 800,000 Tutsis died in 100 days because nobody intervened. Pacifism as a personal ethic is admirable. Pacifism as a national policy is a death sentence for the vulnerable.