When politicians start talking theology, Christians should be on high alert for distortions of their faith that serve the interests of the powerful. For example, last Thursday, Vice President JD Vance said this in an interview with Fox News: "But there’s this old-school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept 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 then after that, prioritize the rest of the world."
The chyron below read “VICE PRESIDENT VANCE ON THE LEFT’S COMPASSION FOR ILLEGALS OVER AMERICAN CITIZENS.”
One does not need to look beyond scripture to find obvious problems with this position. For instance, Luke 14:26: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” Similarly, Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan leaves the reader unable to dismiss our obligations to strangers — even strangers whose people we may be bitterly at odds with.
Rather than engage these challenges, Vance dug in with a post telling Christians to “google ‘ordo amoris.’” This phrase refers to the Augustinian cluster of ideas that sin is a distortion in our love of things that are actually good: rather than rooting that love in God’s love, we place our love for the created over the love of the creator, which results in evil. As he puts it in City of God: “But if the Creator is truly loved — that is, if He Himself is loved, and not something else in place of Him — then He cannot be wrongly loved.” It’s not clear what any of this has to do with the vice president’s concept of ranking different types of love, or why he’d ask skeptics to google ordo amoris. Given how far Augustine’s actual teaching is from the Vance’s quote, the vice president seems to be doing little more than disguising his own dubious idea under an unrelated theological concept with a similar-sounding name, even as pompous defenses are published to run interference for his characterization.
But when correctly understood, St. Augustine’s ordered love concept can actually inform us about where Vance goes wrong. It is precisely Vance’s love for fellow Americans that he uses to justify the administration’s cruel response to immigrants both in rhetoric and in policy: shutting off refugee resettlement, canceling 30,000 asylum appointments, dismantling USAID, and announcing a concentration camp for migrants at Guantanamo Bay, just to highlight a few.
I too love my fellow Americans and want them to have good lives, and my human limitations mean I’m more able to do good for Americans than for those who live far away. But, Augustine teaches, this love becomes disordered and produces evil rather than good when it pulls us away from the love of God, the prime object and source of our love. As he writes in City of God: “This is true of everything created; though it is good, it can be loved in the right way or in the wrong way — in the right way, that is, when the proper order is kept, in the wrong way when that order is upset.” Vance has plainly warped his love for his fellows such that it becomes brutal punishment for those who he, as an agent of the state, marks as outsiders.
When powerful people invoke theology the way Vance has, Matthew Sitman of the "Know Your Enemy" podcast suggests interrogating their argument by asking, “What are they giving themselves permission to do?” The answer, in this case, is troubling. Theology done in service of giving oneself permission to preside over the creation of a concentration camp is a theology done out of a disordered love. Vance’s hierarchy of love begins with those who immediately concern us, a theological filigree masking a godless selfishness and giving oneself permission to ignore God's clear opposition to that selfishness: “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them” (Luke 6:32).
The devastating truth of Christianity is that Christ rescues us to imitate his love — a love shown by his dying on behalf of those who hated him and by rising to break the yoke of oppression. That is the same love the ordo amoris tasks us to place above all others;. We should accept no counterfeits.
Dawson P. R. Vosburg is a PhD candidate in sociology at The Ohio State University, where he studies how American Christians think about economic inequality. You can follow him at @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social.
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