What Vance Got Wrong on Ordo Amoris

Another prominent Catholic in public office, another series of contortions of the faith in service of political ends.

Former President Biden and his defenders sometimes liked to tout his reputation as a “devout Catholic” – devout, that is, insofar as it was politically convenient to be so. In his own professed personal views on such grave evils as abortion and possession of nuclear weapons, it was all too clear where his true devotion lay.

And now we have Vice President JD Vance touting his own conversion to Catholicism in defense of a profoundly uncatholic ideology of nationalism, specifically under the banner of, in so many words, “America First”. Here’s how Vance summarized the concept of ordo amoris – meaning an order or hierarchy of love – in a now-infamous Jan. 29 Fox News interview, which he went on to equate with Donald Trump’s “America First” policy priorities:

There’s this old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — 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 is correct up to a point: ordo amoris is an old concept with deep roots in the Christian Tradition. And as an attempt to parse out the duties that moral proximity creates, it contains an element of intuitive common sense: nobody can reasonably be expected to provide for the needs of countless strangers with the same regularity with which one helps one’s own family, not because the strangers’ lives and needs don’t matter, but because practical limitations make it impossible.

That being said, Vance’s interpretation of ordo amoris as a defense of nationalism and of Trump’s policy priorities has two glaring flaws in its moral reasoning.

1. Ordering one’s loves can never be an excuse to hate.

Jesus made it explicitly clear that in his Father’s Kingdom, the command to love your neighbor is not a license to hate even your enemies, let alone anyone who simply happens not to be your neighbor, or your compatriot, or anyone outside of wherever you try to draw a sharp line between the deserving and undeserving of basic human respect. Surely, every human being owes every other human being at least that.

The American Solidarity Party posted a thoughtful response to Vance on their social media pages that insightfully illustrates the distinction between reasonable hierarchies of obligation and abuse of the concept, saying:

It is naturally important for us to act where we can do the most good. You really do have responsibilities to your children you don’t have to other people’s children, because you can parent them and most people can’t.

And yet:

[T]hose responsibilities never permit us to do an inherently evil thing to somebody in a “wider circle” of moral concern, even if it would benefit someone closer to us. The ordo amoris does not give us the right to be callous toward anyone. It also doesn’t mean that a graver responsibility toward someone more distant to you is necessarily a lower priority than a lighter responsibility to someone closer. Common sense tells us that the ordo amoris is not an excuse to ignore a stranger’s toddler wandering into traffic just so your own kid isn’t late for soccer practice.

In other words, a genuinely moral accounting for the unavoidable realities of human limitation cannot be an excuse to intentionally spread false stories rooted in racially charged tropes, or to refer to people in dehumanizing terms, or to show callous disregard for people’s lives and safety based on their country of origin. Given that these are the sort of actions Vance is attempting to defend (at least some of which he has himself participated in) with his nationalist interpretation of ordo amoris, his disclaimer that “it doesn’t mean you hate anybody else” sounds a tad disingenuous.

To avoid being in contradiction with the more fundamental Christian doctrine of imago Dei, any doctrinally sound understanding of ordo amoris must explicitly not include restrictions on intrinsic and universal human worth. Vance is scandalously showing the world what it looks like when a practical concession to the limits of human capabilities is twisted into a prescriptive set of limits put on human dignity.

2. The Church is bigger than America.

Vance’s remarks were primarily concerned with how the concept of ordo amoris might be applied by United States citizens – or, at best, by citizens of wealthy, majority-white countries (he did mention the Brits and the French). But what might he say to Catholic parents in Guatemala or Haiti or the Democratic Republic of Congo who are being unjustly threatened? Do they not also have a particular moral responsibility to their children to keep them safe? And by extension, to keep themselves safe, if nothing else to spare their children the deep and lifelong trauma of losing a parent to violence?

What then is such a family to think when, on fleeing for safety, the response they meet on the part of some self-declared Christians where they are fleeing to is that they must be prevented at all costs from entering the realm of these self-declared Christians’ moral proximity by becoming their physical neighbors?

Can anyone familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan not be reminded, as some Christian commentators (including the above American Solidarity Party post) have been, of the lawyerly question that prompted the story from the man who, “desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?'”