JD Vance asked, I answered

On moral responsibility and love of neighbor

Earlier this week JD Vance was interviewed on Fox News. He made some statements about the nature of Christianity and what it does and doesn’t require of us morally. He said,

There is an old school… I think it is 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 in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. …A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.

He goes on to accuse “the left” of hating the citizens of their own country and talks about the best way to “run a society,” which is to prioritize the needs of its own citizens. When people online began to pushback about his interpretation of scripture, he double down, saying,

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?”

Augustine Disputing with the Heretics

Well, since you asked: Yes, I am that “anyone” who thinks my moral duties to my children are the same as my duties to a stranger who lives a thousand miles away. And that’s because I’m not conflating my moral and ethical responsibility as a Christian, to see all created people as image bearers of God, with the measure by which that is expressed. In the words of Glennon Doyle, there are no such thing as other people’s children. I may not be able to address every need equally, but Jesus does require that when it comes to considering the needs of others, I love them and consider them as my own.

The thing about God’s command to love our neighbor as ourselves? It violates common sense. Common sense tells us to prioritize our own needs, invest for the future, consider the risks of care, and insulate ourselves against failure. In contrast, Jesus says, “go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and "come, follow Me,” and, “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his own father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple” (Mark 10:21 and Luke 14:26).

The age old question is if Jesus meant this literally. Or if these commands were for that place and time, and not this place and time. When in doubt, interpret Jesus’s words and all of scripture in light of what he offers as the greatest commandment (also in Mark 10): Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself.

I have to admit I took the bait. I googled ordo amoris. It references St. Augustine, early church father, who famously wrote about ordered loves. Now, I may be a millennial who predictably got a St. Augustine quote as my first tattoo while in seminary, but I am no Augustine scholar. However, it only took about ten minutes reading through a variety of websites, blogs, and research on St. Augustine’s ordo amoris to understand that he was not issuing a once-and-for-all thesis on loving those closest to us before we love those belonging to another community. Instead, Augustine suggests that our love of God must be first and foremost, then love of God’s creation (hello JD, that includes foreigners), then other non-eternal things, like power, money, influence, and beauty.

And if there’s doubt about how God might have us order love of our neighbor, we look again to scripture and God’s examples of what constitutes a neighbor: someone from a different community, someone marginalized, someone sick, widowed, orphaned, poor.

Perhaps JD Vance is getting confused and thinking of The Great Commission in Acts. It describes a similar order of operations when describing how to bear witness to God’s kingdom. Jesus tells the disciples that by the power of the Holy Spirit, they will be God’s “witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). This list of places works like a map, zooming out a little bit more each time to cover a wider area. But this was for evangelism. Not for love. God did not say, “Love your neighbor as yourself in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Jesus simply says, “Love your neighbor,” and then gives an example of a Samaritan caring for a person who despised him.

But JD Vance is right in one sense. I cannot responsibly care for the physical needs of my children and the needs of others outside of my home in the same way. My children need me to buy their groceries and pay for the mortgage on our house in order to live in safety. I owe that to them, as their mother. My moral duty to my own children is to take care of them.

It is also my moral duty, as a Christian, to care for the needs of my neighbor, wherever they are from, wherever they reside. The way I balance responding to that need will vary accordingly to what I am able to do, but that’s not because my moral and ethical call to care for them matters less. The moral duty is the same. The way I work it out is different. I may not be able to fund the aid for foreigners in need of HIV medication or advocate for every immigrant, but I sure as hell don’t think revoking funding for those medications or sending ICE into schools and hospitals is the way to love them.

Even JD Vance does this sort of assessment, I’m sure. Consider his own family with young children. He has said that fatherhood is a great responsibility, and a healthy marriage paramount to a child’s wellbeing. And yet he has taken a job that will require him to spend countless hours away from home. He will be unable to stay home with his daughter if she gets strep throat and can’t go to school. He will miss little league games. He will cancel date nights. And yet he is able to do this because the needs of his family can be accommodated in a myriad of ways, not just with his physical presence. He has decided, by very nature of his job, that the needs of the United States of America are of great enough importance that he will triage the needs of his family in order to meet the needs he perceives for the American people. This doesn’t mean he loves his country more than his family, or that his love for his family suffers in some way (necessarily). It means that he is able to realize that love and care shows up in different ways and at different times for different needs (see: equity). I can imagine he would affirm that his love of country does not cancel out his love for his family.

As Christians, we are called to love and care for all of God’s creation. And our moral identity is marked by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus who came so that all may have life. How we express that love, in faith, will vary by measure and type, but it should always be motivated by the same degree of love. The love we express for one community is not mutually exclusive of the love we have for another. My care for my immediate family does not restrict my ability to care about, and do good in some way, for the elderly at my job, my American neighbors, nor my immigrant ones, nor the people of Gaza, or any others enduring suffering and in need of care.

My children need my provision and presence, and that is how I love them.

My neighbors need me to donate to the food pantry and get involved in my local community, so that is how I love them.

Foreigners need my generosity of spirit, empathy, and advocacy, so I love them by sharing those freely.

The people of Gaza deserve my protests and my prayer, so my love for them is apportioned accordingly.

No, I cannot do everything. And my output will be determined by seasons of life and the needs of my immediate community. Thankfully, love takes many different forms. I do what I can with what I have. Sometimes that means being financially generous, but usually it is smaller than that. It means being an advocate in word and deed for the change I want to see. It means finding ways to stand against sending 30,000 migrants to a concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay. I do not have to choose between those migrants and my children when deciding who to love. As a Christian, I can’t.

Living into this sort of love is really hard, not only because of the material matter of resourcing, but also the heart matter of that whole “loving our enemies” thing. I really wanted to slap the smug look off of JD Vance’s face during Bishop Budde’s appeal for mercy at the Inaugural Prayer Breakfast, but instead God tells me to pray for him. So that is what I keep trying to do. (Not to mention I will never have the opportunity to even test that reactive desire, Thanks be to God).

Even in Vance’s stance, an ordered love is still love, and so the very least it would require is not making decisions that actively harm communities further down his list of priorities. It means considering what a loving response looks like even if it is not at the top of his hierarchy.

A rightly ordered Christian faith requires equal love and respect for all people, divine image bearers. To believe in a hierarchy of need that says otherwise denies their humanity, and in turn, it denies ours too.

A Christian morality is not determined by the best way to run a society. These are two very different categories. Jesus’s life stood in radical opposition to the empire, embodying a loving God who filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.

It is JD Vance’s job now to run a society, and it seems that he and Trump are doing that however they see fit, with little regard for democracy or civil discourse. To tout Christian ideology for their choices so far is the very definition of taking the Lord’s name in vain. It is disordered love. “Running a society” is not what Jesus came to do, and so to superimpose these values onto the office of the president, calling them Christian, is the real inversion of moral responsibility.

Jesus’s death on the cross violated common sense. I don’t expect the the US Government to be able to live into the same level of radical self-sacrifice and victory over evil. By its own history, it has a long way to go before it can operate with that kind of integrity. By my own history, I have a long way to go until I can operate with that level of integrity.

I will, however, not go quietly when the leaders of the world dangerously reinterpret God’s commands to serve their own idolatry.