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It’s always awkward when you’re feeling smug about having won a social media spat over the nature of Christian love, and then the literal pope comes along and tells you you’re wrong.
That was the fate of Donald Trump’s number two last week — no, not Elon Musk, but vice-president JD Vance. He converted from atheism to Catholicism in 2019, choosing as his patron Saint Augustine who first wrote, in the fifth century AD, about the idea on which this distinctly 21st-century spat centred.
A clip had circulated of Vance defending Trump’s “America First” policies. “As an . . . American citizen your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens,” he told Sean Hannity of Fox News. “There’s this old school — and I think it’s a very Christian — concept . . . that you love your family, and then you love your neighbour, 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 prioritise the rest of the world.”
Rory Stewart, the British politician-turned-centrist-dadcaster, took issue with Vance’s “bizarre take”, describing it on X as “less Christian and more pagan tribal”, and suggested that when “politicians become theologians” we should all be concerned. To which Vance retorted (before making some decidedly un-Christian digs about Stewart’s IQ): “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’ . . . 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?”
I find this a very interesting question, in terms of not just Christian doctrine but secular ethics more broadly. I also think it no bad thing that a politician might take theological or moral questions so seriously. But that’s not to say that Vance has understood the nature of Christian love correctly.
It was clear whose side Pope Francis was taking in the debate when he published a letter to American bishops last Monday. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” he wrote. “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ . . . that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
It is perhaps a mark of respect that Vance, who wrote in 2020 that “too many American Catholics have failed to show proper deference to the papacy, treating the pope as a political figure to be criticised or praised according to their whims”, has engaged in no backchat (unlike border tsar Tom Homan, who told a TV camera that “pope [sic] oughta fix the Catholic church”). But, at the risk of seeming impudent, I’m not sure that pontifex has really grappled with the nuance of what Vance was getting at; and neither did Stewart.
We can all think of people who appear far more able to show compassion for the suffering of those who live thousands of miles away — who are easy to idealise as blameless victims — than for people closer to home who, perhaps, have different political views to their own. It is fair for Vance to criticise this impulse. And while it is all very well for the pope to talk about “a fraternity open to all”, it is also, surely, morally right and proper to love your own family more than you do a random stranger. As the philosopher Bernard Williams wrote, the man who has to think about whether to save a stranger or his wife — when both are in peril, but only one can be saved — has had “one thought too many”.
But what about when a stranger’s need is greater than your family member’s? This is where Vance doesn’t appear to have quite got his head around the nuance, according to David Fergusson, regius professor of divinity at the University of Cambridge. While Thomas Aquinas, who expanded on Augustine’s idea of the ordo amoris, did suggest we have obligations to those near to us, it is not the case that we must always prioritise them. “Obligations can be overruled when someone further away is in greater need,” Fergusson tells me. “Exigency can over-rule proximity.”
Having politicians who express interest in Christian theology publicly might be no bad thing. What is more pernicious is when they seek to use religion as some kind of intellectual or moral cover, particularly when they get it wrong. The vice-president’s mangling of Aquinas is symptomatic of the shallowness and pseudo-intellectualism of much of the Maga project. Vance, clearly, is an intelligent man. But is he less dazzlingly bright than he believes himself to be? Well . . . is the pope a Catholic?
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