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J.D. Vance: Full-Time Vice President, Part-Time Public Theologian

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In a remarkable exchange this past week, America’s sitting vice president took progressive Christians to church over the historic Christian understanding of moral duties and rightly ordered loves.


I’ve heard it said that “lukewarm Christianity has become so normal that Biblical Christianity seems radical.” There’s much truth to that statement.

But in light of the multi-day and furious debate sparked last week when Vice President J.D. Vance simply articulated centuries-old Christian teachings on moral duties and obligations, let me offer a tweak to that quote: “Liberal Christianity has become so normal that Biblical Christianity sounds radical.”

And J. Gresham Machen wept.

In an interview with Sean Hannity addressing the left’s compassion for illegal immigrants over American citizens, Vance took an opportunity to put into plain language what is referred to as the ordo amoris, which is Latin for “ordered affections” or “ordered loves,” or as it is often put, “rightly ordered loves.”

Here’s what Vance argued:

“…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.

A lot of the far Left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.”

Given the backlash, you would have thought that Vance argued something like, “There’s this old-school Christian concept that teaches us to support killing the unborn in the womb” (sorry, that’s Evangelicals for Harris); or “There’s this old-school Christian concept that teaches us to support transgenderism and open borders” (sorry again, that’s woke Episcopalian Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde); or “There’s this old school Christian concept that teaches us to kick puppies” (okay, I don’t know anyone who supports that).

Every progressive Christian and Catholic who hasn’t yet fled X for BlueSky (which is still quite a few) and every liberal academic and armchair liberation theologian (also legion) immediately started shrieking, “That’s not what Jesus taught!”

Let’s take one example. Rory Stewart, a far-left British politician and professor at Harvard University, responded to Vance by claiming that his comments were “A bizarre take on John 15:12-13 – less Christian and more pagan tribal. We should start worrying when politicians become theologians, assume to speak for Jesus, and tell us in which order to love…”

Vance responded to Stewart, issuing what is undoubtedly one of the most incredible replies to ever fly off the fingers of a sitting American Vice President and onto a social media feed:

“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?

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: the problem with Rory and people like him is that he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130.  This false arrogance drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years.”

So, who is right? Vance encourages us to take it to Google to find out. Even better, he appeals to common sense: Do these angry progressive “Christians” really think that they have the exact same moral duty to a stranger halfway around the world as they do to their own children sitting at their kitchen table?

The answer is obviously no. But hypocrisy has a long half-life.

America hired Vance to be our vice president, not a public theologian. This makes it all the more remarkable that Vance is taking these progressive Christians to church over this historic Christian understanding of moral duties and rightly ordered loves. It’s fun to watch! It’s also a sad commentary on the state of Christianity in America, much of which has been hijacked by progressivism to the point that they are claiming Christian ethics are “un-Christian.”

As Pastor Michael Clary put it,

“Every Christian would agree that Jesus taught us to love our enemies, but Jesus did not teach that we must love our enemy in exactly the same way and to exactly the same degree. Progressives can’t grasp the most basic idea that we can truly love two different people while also loving one more than the other…Frankly, it’s embarrassing to have Christian thought leaders and pastors get schooled on basic doctrine by a politician.”

I try to assume the best of my readers, so I’m banking on the fact that you just “get” why Vance is right and his detractors are wrong. But this is a teaching moment, so let me briefly explain why in three closing points.

1. The ordo amoris is “Christian” because it’s natural. It’s how God made the world to work. I’ll give you Bible verses in a second, but we can deduce this from what’s called the “creation order” or natural law. If you’re married, you love your spouse more than anyone else’s spouse (or you’re supposed to, at least), and everyone knows that.

If you have a child, you are obligated to love, care for, and provide for that child above and before any other child in the world. If you, as a parent, refused to feed your kid but instead took his food every night and walked it down to a homeless person on the street, you’re not being charitable or noble; you’re failing as a parent. When Child Protective Services shows up because your kid is starving to death, you can’t plead, “But I was loving everyone else!” No, you were failing to love that which you should love more — your own flesh and blood.

As for marriage or a family, so for a government. A government that takes its citizens’ tax dollars and ships them around the world while leaving its borders open to invasion is fundamentally failing at its most basic duty — to protect its own citizens and ensure their wellbeing.

Ben Dunson, professor of New Testament at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, helpfully makes this connection:

“I have a civic duty toward my fellow citizens that does not exist with regard to the citizens of other nations, even if they are Christians. I certainly must treat foreigners and foreign guests in a way that is consistent with the Bible’s ethical teaching, but the spiritual bond that exists among Christians does not negate the enhanced civic duties that exist among fellow citizens according to God’s creation design.”

Remember: We live in a created world, ordered by God. God instituted marriage. God made the family. God ordained the government. He bestowed obligations and moral duties on each of these institutions. We can deduce this from reason.

But we can also read about it in special revelation — the Bible.

2. The ordo amoris is clearly taught in Scripture. This concept is found in the fifth commandment: “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you” (Exodus 20:12). As I’ve argued before, “Putting your nation and your neighbor citizens first is a natural outworking of the command to ‘Honor your father and mother.’” And so it is.

You can also find it in 1 Timothy 5:8, which warns, “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” There it is, right from the pages of Scripture — the command to order our loves rightly.

If someone who does not care for their own family is, according to Paul, “worse than an unbeliever,” what would it mean if an entire government refuses to care for its own citizens by doing things like (if you can imagine it) letting in tens of millions of illegal aliens, sending billions of tax dollars taken from its hard-working citizens to other countries, all while letting crime skyrocket, cities burn, and overall living conditions deteriorate at a seemingly exponential pace?

We don’t have to imagine. We watched that exact scenario play out over the last four years. As Vance put it so well, that’s completely “inverted.” That’s a government that hates its own citizens and “loves” something else entirely. And it’s not just wrongly ordered — it’s sinful.

3. The ordo amoris has been defended by some of the best Christian thinkers throughout the centuries. You can find robust explanations of rightly ordered love from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas to C.S. Lewis, to name a few. You can read more about Augustine and Aquinas here, but I want to give you Lewis.

In The Four Loves, Lewis argues,

“We all know ‘this love’ [that is, the love of country] becomes a demon when it becomes a god. But some begin to suspect that it is never anything but a demon. Then they have to reject half the high poetry and half the heroic action our race has achieved. We cannot keep even Christ’s lament over Jerusalem. He too exhibits love for His country.”

In other words, it’s good and right for Christians to love their own country and prioritize its prosperity and well-being over any other country. Americans should do that for America, and the British should do that for the UK. Even Jesus did that for Jerusalem.

Lewis also unapologetically defends love for his own particular homeland and its way of life, cheekily recalling,

“As Chesterton says, a man’s reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons for not wanting his house to be burned down; because he ‘could not even begin’ to enumerate all the things he would miss.”

Creation order and common sense, the Bible, and Christian history all side with Vance against the ordo amoris deniers in this debate. They might cherry-pick passages like the Parable of the Good Samaritan and misinterpret it in service of their gnostic globalist agenda, but the bottom line is that they are the ones with disordered loves — not the Christian who wants to see the American government put American citizens first.

In fact, those dogpiling Vance remind me of the people indicted by the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who suggested that “Abstract love of humanity is nearly always love of self.”

This is what those who deny the reality and the goodness of ordo amoris are really doing. They are the priest and the Levite in the Good Samaritan, who cross to the other side of the road to avoid loving the family of Laken Riley or the people of Springfield, Ohio, or the unborn in the womb, all while telling themselves that they are “good people” because they “welcome the stranger.”

They could try welcoming their American citizen neighbors for a change. And by doing so, finally begin to order their own loves rightly.



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