Is J. D. Vance Right about “Ordered Loves?”

“I didn’t have the VP tweeting ‘ordo amoris’ on my bingo card. We are so back.”

That was Christian Nationalist influencer Eric Conn on X referring to a Fox News interview (and the fallout on X which followed) where Vice President J. D. Vance invoked an “old school” ethical construct “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 your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”

Vance expressed concern that the far left had reversed this order–hating “the citizens of their own country and car[ing] more about people outside their own borders.” Fortunately, according to Vance, Donald Trump has restored moral sanity with “the simple concept of America First. It doesn’t mean you hate anybody else, it means that [you put the] interests of American citizens first.”

Those with even a surface knowledge of the New Testament might have been confused by Vance’s theological musings about a hierarchy of loves. Didn’t Jesus tell the story of the Good Samaritan in order to demonstrate that the “neighbor” we’re asked to love isn’t necessarily someone you know or even share an ethnicity with, but that God calls us to do good to anyone we can? Wasn’t the Christian church supposed to be a new family of differing economic statuses and ethnicities? Didn’t Paul pressure gentile Christians in Corinth to give beyond their means to help Jewish Christians in Jerusalem? There’s considerable evidence that the early church was interested in expanding the boundaries of love, not building walls around it.

Ordo amoris, or “ordered loves,” gets its first major theological treatment by the fourth-fifth century bishop St. Augustine in his classic City of God. But Augustine does not talk about loving your countrymen over foreigners. Instead, he describes wrongly ordered loves as the appreciation of natural things which are of dubious eternal value (like beauty or gold; or perhaps national identity?) more than God. Those who love natural things more than the Creator are described by Augustine as being part of the ethically disordered “city of men.” Thus the reformed pastor Thabiti Anyabwile tweeted, Vance is “describing natural affection, a fleshly notion of love. He’s describing self-love spread over a wider area. He’s not describing Christian or *super*-natural love.”

We get a closer approximation of Vance’s version of the ordo from Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. In Question 26, Aquinas gave various examples that he saw as introducing an appropriate inequality to our loves. For instance, Aquinas opined that we should love those who are closer to God more than those who are disobedient. He also observed that each of us have people that we love in special ways–such as familial love, friendship love, or the love of “fellow countrymen.” Finally, and most importantly for our purposes, Aquinas argued that we should show greater love to those whom we would bear a greater sin for not loving. So, since the Ten Commandments tell us that it is a sin to dishonor our parents, it is appropriate to love them more than strangers. Similarly, since the Apostle Paul referenced a special obligation that a person has to care for their own household (1 Tim. 5:18), love “regards those who are nearer to us before those who are better.”

The trouble with Aquinas’ view of patriotic love is that, despite his intention to appeal to both Scripture and Augustine, neither supports his contention when they speak of ordered loves. Even regarding the familial love which Paul references in 1 Timothy, Augustine unpacks its logic in a way which is superior to Aquinias. In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine wrote that, “all men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.” In other words, the duty to love those close to you in a special way is largely a matter of pragmatism.

Thus, Christian Nationalist influencer and former Trump appointee William Wolfe almost gets it right when he tweets:

“I have a duty to provide for my family that eclipses (almost) every other conceivable natural or social obligation. My duty to the ‘brotherhood of man’ or immigrants or refugees pales in comparison to my duty to my wife and children. Arguably I actually have no ‘duty’ to those types writ large, but rather can exercise *charity* when appropriate and feasible. I have a duty to my country and my fellow citizens that I do not have to global masses.”

Wolfe starts off strong by talking about our duties to our families which tend to practically eclipse the “brotherhood of all men” stuff in our daily lives. But then he sneaks in a duty to our fellow Social Security card holders which is never described in the New Testament. Indeed, this patriotic love is totally eclipsed in the writings of the apostles by the duties we have to our “fellow countrymen” in the kingdom of God.

While we may concur with Wolfe and Vance that the president of the United States should not be over-extending the reach of his power to cover the whole world – even for kind-hearted reasons – there is a danger that this kind of appropriation of the ordo will be (and, frankly has been) used to justify a lower ethical standard for how we treat the foreign-born in our midst. In the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus argues that we have a moral duty to care for those we have the ability to help – and it doesn’t matter if they’re strangers or even foreigners. Love may be practically limited by distance, but it should not be limited by perverted affections which center national or ethnic identity over Christian ethical duties.