{"id":34697,"date":"2025-02-09T17:55:08","date_gmt":"2025-02-09T22:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/?p=34697"},"modified":"2025-02-10T17:53:30","modified_gmt":"2025-02-10T22:53:30","slug":"what-vance-got-wrong-on-ordo-amoris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2025\/02\/09\/what-vance-got-wrong-on-ordo-amoris\/","title":{"rendered":"What Vance Got Wrong on Ordo Amoris"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"J.D.
Vice President Vance\u2019s interpretation of\u00a0ordo amoris as a\u00a0defense of nationalism and of Trump\u2019s policy priorities is flawed in its moral reasoning. | Image courtesy ofGage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America<\/a>, CC BY-SA 2.0<\/a>, via Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Another prominent Catholic in public office, another series of contortions of the faith in service of political ends.<\/p>\n

Former President Biden and his defenders sometimes liked to tout his reputation as a \u201cdevout Catholic\u201d \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"And now we have Vice President JD Vance touting his own conversion to Catholicism<\/a> in defense of a profoundly uncatholic ideology of nationalism, specifically under the banner of, in so many words, \u201cAmerica First\u201d. Here\u2019s how Vance summarized the concept of\u00a0ordo amoris<\/em> \u2013 meaning an order or hierarchy of love \u2013 in a now-infamous Jan. 29 Fox News<\/em> interview, which he went on to equate with Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d policy priorities:<\/p>\n

There\u2019s this old school \u2014 and I think it\u2019s a very Christian concept, by the way \u2014 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Vance is correct up to a point:\u00a0ordo amoris<\/em> 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\u2019s own family, not because the strangers\u2019 lives and needs don\u2019t matter, but because practical limitations make it impossible.<\/p>\n

That being said, Vance\u2019s interpretation of\u00a0ordo amoris<\/em> as a\u00a0defense of nationalism and of Trump\u2019s policy priorities has two glaring flaws in its moral reasoning.<\/p>\n

1. Ordering one\u2019s loves can never be an excuse to hate.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Jesus made it explicitly clear<\/a> that in his Father\u2019s Kingdom, the command to love your neighbor is not<\/em> 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\u00a0that<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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

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\u2019t have to other people\u2019s children, because you can parent them and most people can\u2019t.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And yet:<\/p>\n

[T]hose responsibilities never permit us to do an inherently evil thing to somebody in a \u201cwider circle\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019s toddler wandering into traffic just so your own kid isn\u2019t late for soccer practice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, a genuinely moral accounting for the unavoidable realities of human limitation cannot be an excuse to intentionally spread false stories<\/a> rooted in racially charged tropes<\/a>, or to refer to people in dehumanizing terms<\/a>, or to show callous disregard for people\u2019s lives<\/a> and safety<\/a> 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<\/em>, his disclaimer that \u201cit doesn\u2019t mean you hate anybody else\u201d sounds a tad disingenuous.<\/p>\n

To avoid being in contradiction with the more fundamental Christian doctrine of\u00a0imago Dei<\/em>, any doctrinally sound understanding of ordo amoris<\/em> must explicitly not<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

2. The Church is bigger than America.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Vance\u2019s remarks were primarily concerned with how the concept of\u00a0ordo amoris<\/em> might be applied by United States citizens \u2013 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<\/em> safe, if nothing else to spare their children the deep and lifelong trauma of losing a parent to violence?<\/p>\n

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\u2019 moral proximity by becoming their physical neighbors?<\/p>\n

Can anyone familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan<\/a> 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, \u201cdesiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, \u2018And who is my neighbor?'\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cdevout Catholic\u201d \u2013 devout, that is, insofar as it was politically convenient to be so. In his own professed personal views on such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2932,"featured_media":34742,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225,137,1311,728,138,1145,135,130,136,1331,133,1336,419,52,192,919,139,1243,132,75,13,319,2139,1391,1519],"tags":[2720,2717,2723],"class_list":["post-34697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-america","category-appalachia","category-biblical-scholarship","category-catholicity","category-darfur","category-dignity","category-ecumenism","category-education","category-evangelization","category-guest-post","category-gun-control","category-homily","category-hospitality","category-immigration","category-interpretation","category-life-dignity-responsibility-of-the-human-person","category-literature","category-moral-theology","category-morality","category-nationalism","category-politics","category-public-policy","category-the-trump-administration","category-throwaway-culture","category-us-catholicism","tag-american-solidarity-party","tag-jd-vance","tag-ordo-amoris"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat 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