JD VANCE: There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) January 30, 2025
A lot of the far left has completely inverted that pic.twitter.com/XkoTiKgq3g
Just google “ordo amoris.” Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone? https://t.co/otvv5g1wFN
— JD Vance (@JDVance) January 30, 2025
Time for a bit of seminary.
Thanks to a bit of discourse JD Vance engaged in, we have our next big question.
What is ordo amoris?
The Vice President appeared on Fox News to discuss the administration’s immigration policies and picked up an emergent thread in conservative circles regarding the “sin” of empathy, arguing the political left carries empathy too far and attempted to shrink the bounds of empathy to a closer circle of people. From the quote, highlighted in the tweet above, “There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world.”
It’s a great quote and it’s a great sound bite.
The problem is that it is a stretch and a misstatement of the Christian concept.
As many in the subsequent days, including Vance himself, have pointed out, Vance seemed to be trying to highlight the theological concept of ordo amoris, or “ordered love”.
The concept comes from the work of St. Augustine in The City of God. Augustine believed that true virtue and moral goodness stem from properly aligning our affections and desires with what is truly valuable and worthy. Thus, God’s love must be centralized in reordering our affections. Our ultimate fulfillment then lies in the pursuit of virtue and moral goodness required the proper ordering of our desires, with God as the ultimate object of love and devotion.
“But if the Creator is truly loved — that is, if He Himself is loved, and not something else in place of Him — then He cannot be wrongly loved. We must, however, observe right order even in our love for the very love by which we love that which is worthy to be loved, so that there may be in us that virtue which enables us to live well. Hence, it seems to me that a brief and true definition of virtue is ‘rightly ordered love.’” (City of God, XV.22).We can see the genesis of Augustine’s theories in Jesus’s encapsulation of the commandments. “And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and Prophets.’” Matthew 22:37-40. In these two, Jesus is likewise tying the order of love together. To love others, we must love God first, and to love God is to love our neighbor.
C.S. Lewis described this relationship in his letters. “To love you as I should, I must worship God as Creator. When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.” Letters of C. S. Lewis. To do otherwise, is to create idols in one’s relationships. We’ve all seen these. The parents that have made idols of their children and lift of their children as the greatest importance in their lives. The spouses that lift up their mate as their idol, prioritizing their mate to the exclusion of all else. It’s not to say these relationships aren’t important or that making them a priority is bad. It’s when it comes out of order that a person’s life is unhealthy. But that is a sermon for another time.
Vance doesn’t include God in his list of loves, so it’s hard to determine if his list would follow the concept of ordo amoris or not.
His comments instead seem to go to a related concept discussed by Thomas Aquinas. Ordo caritatis, or the order of charity, a concept in which the application of our love, or of how our affection is expressed is directed to those more closely related to us. This principle is outlined by St. Paul in his letter to Timothy. “But if any man have not care of his own, and especially of those of his house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” 1 Timothy 5:8. Aquinas ordered love as follows:
- God
- Ourselves, as a man ought to love himself more than his neighbor
- Our neighbors
- Our bodies, as a man ought to love his neighbor more than his body
This is just common sense. Of course we love those closest to us in different ways. The bonds are stronger, we go to greater distances for them.
It is not, however, a good philosophy for foreign policy, nor is it exactly applicable to our current immigration issue. First, as foreign policy, we would have to assess at a broader scale the concept of our neighbor. Who is the United States neighbors? Is it just Canada and Mexico, literal proximate neighbors? And of late, it doesn’t seem like we are acting too charitably to them. Is it the countries we share kinship with, like the United Kingdom? Or friendship or our allies? What is the neighbor to a country? Vance would like this to be just another part of America First, but it ignores a much deeper concept.
Secondly, with regard to immigration, we are largely dealing with an issue that is here already. The issue is proximate. It’s at our door. So the question is more how we treat the stranger that is already among us than the foreigner that is very distant.
Here, I think John Calvin gives perhaps the greatest critique.
"Now, since Christ has shown in the parable of the Samaritan that the term 'neighbor' includes even the most remote person (Luke 10:36), we are not expected to limit the precept of love to those in close relationships.
I do not deny that the more closely a man is linked to us, the more intimate obligation we have to assist him. It is the common habit of mankind that the more closely men are abound together by the ties of kinship, of acquaintanceship, or of neighborhood, the more responsibilities for one another they share. This does not offend God; for his providence, as it were leads us to it.
BUT I say: we ought to embrace the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love; here there is no distinction between barbarian and Greek, worthy and unworthy, friend and enemy, since all should be contemplated in God, not in themselves.
When we turn aside from such contemplation, it is no wonder we become entangled in many errors. Therefore, if we rightly direct our love, we must first turn our eyes not to man, the sight of whom would more often engender hate than love, but to God, who bids us extend to all men the love we bear to him, that this may be an unchanging principle: whatever the character of the man, we must yet love him because we love God." John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, Book 2, Chapter 8, Section 55.
As Calvin outlines, this is the whole point of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Remember, the parable of the Good Samaritan comes in Luke immediately following Jesus outlining the two greatest commandments. A young student of the law asked Jesus what he must do to attain eternal life and Jesus asked him the commandments. The student repeated the two commandments Jesus stated above. Jesus then acknowledged his correct statement.
The young student of the law had to ask one more question. Luke adds, desiring to justify himself, the lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?”
The lawyer, the pharisees then and now wanted a neat box tied around who their responsibility to love covered. Fellow Israelites would be certain. Showing hospitality to foreigners and travelers was to be expected. But surely Jesus could not expect them to love a Samaritan, or worse, a Roman.
Jesus responds with a familiar story that I've written about before. He tells of a Levite and a priest that pass by the injured man and worry more about themselves. What will happen to me if I touch this man? Will I be defiled? What has he done to deserve such a fate? It's important to note that both the Levite and the priest could not imagine themselves in the man's position. They could not empathize enough to see his need for assistance, so they crossed on the other side of the road to avoid him.
The Samaritan on the other hand worried about what would happen to the man if he did nothing. Perhaps, the Samaritan could imagine himself in a similar situation. He knew the treachery of the road and saw how it could have easily been him in that fate.
From the story, we see that the only response to Jesus' question at the end, asking who was the neighbor to the man who fell to robbers, is "he who showed mercy on him." We see that all we come in contact with are people who are our neighbors. And we have the opportunity to be neighborly in response by being the ones who show mercy and love.
Jesus responds with a familiar story that I've written about before. He tells of a Levite and a priest that pass by the injured man and worry more about themselves. What will happen to me if I touch this man? Will I be defiled? What has he done to deserve such a fate? It's important to note that both the Levite and the priest could not imagine themselves in the man's position. They could not empathize enough to see his need for assistance, so they crossed on the other side of the road to avoid him.
The Samaritan on the other hand worried about what would happen to the man if he did nothing. Perhaps, the Samaritan could imagine himself in a similar situation. He knew the treachery of the road and saw how it could have easily been him in that fate.
From the story, we see that the only response to Jesus' question at the end, asking who was the neighbor to the man who fell to robbers, is "he who showed mercy on him." We see that all we come in contact with are people who are our neighbors. And we have the opportunity to be neighborly in response by being the ones who show mercy and love.
Who we are called to love in our order of love, who we are called to those in our order of charity is those that God has brought into our paths. We focus on that proximate connection. The one that God has ordained and brought around us. Not just the nice ones. Not just the ones we choose. Not just the convenient ones.
Our order of love extends to the messy ones, the broken ones, the bleeding ones, the inconvenient ones that are brought in our circles. The ones that don’t look like us. The ones that we disagree with. The ones that we have no other connection beyond a creator. And especially the ones where we have no other connection than a faith, as we love our family in Christ.
So here, it calls us to care for and love to the migrant among us. The refugee.
They are here. They are our neighbors.
For, the order of our love is in God’s control, not ours. So let’s stop trying to justify ourselves. Let’s stop putting limits on what God has called us to.
And if you need more encouragement…
"You shall not wrong nor oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt" Exodus 22:20
"The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens … for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Leviticus 19:34
"For the Eternal your God is God supreme and Lord supreme, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who shows no favor and takes no bribe, but upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger, providing food and clothing — you too must love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Deuteronomy 10:18-19
“Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.” Romans 12:13
“Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling.” 1 Peter 4:9
“Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” Hebrews 13:2
“Rather, he must be hospitable, one who loves what is good, who is self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined.” Titus 1:8
“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.” Matthew 25:35
“Dear friend, you are faithful in what you are doing for the brothers and sisters, even though they are strangers to you. They have told the church about your love. Please send them on their way in a manner that honors God. It was for the sake of the Name that they went out, receiving no help from the pagans. We ought therefore to show hospitality to such people so that we may work together for the truth.” 3 John 1:5-8
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