Vice President JD Vance has been out using terminology from Catholic theology to defend the specific policies and tactics which the Trump administration has been adopting around immigration, and so there was a brief burst of discussion a couple days ago about the idea of the Ordo Amoris, the order of loves.
You can hear him speak here, but if like me you'd always rather read a transcript, here's the relevant bit:
But 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 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. 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. I think the profound difference that Donald Trump brings the leadership of this country is the simple concept, America first. It doesn't mean you hate anybody else. It means that you have leadership. And President Trump has been very clear about this that puts the interests of American citizens first. In the same way that the British Prime Minister should care about Brits and the French should care about the French, we have an American President who cares primarily about Americans, and that's a very welcome change.
This quickly resulted in a firestorm, with all sorts of people calling Vance out as not understanding Christianity. He tweeted back at them:
Pretty quickly lots of people were lining up to argue about whether Christianity taught that you were supposed to love strangers more or family more.
The problem is: none of this is actually apropos of the actual things that inspired this argument.
I think just about anyone would agree that if a father failed to feed his own children, because he was sending all his money off to feed the poor somewhere else, he would be failing in his duties as a father.
However, the fact that one has the most urgent duty to provide for one's own family and friends and community does not mean that it doesn't matter what attitude you take towards those further away, or what political policies you endorse in regards to their treatment.
It's also worth considering what exactly a nearby need is. If there is someone who is originally from another country who is in want in your particular parish or town, isn't that person's need arguably more proximate to you than people in some other state? The idea of "America first", taken in certain ways, could suggest that we have a closer tie with some unknown person on the other side of the continent who is an American citizen over someone we work with or live next door to who is not.
One thing Vance has become very adept at is turning a policy question into what sounds like a moral balance of absolutely. He famously said as a senator that he didn't care about Ukrainians, and when asked why said it was because his duty was to the people of Ohio.
But of course, it's not a question whether we should care about Ukraine OR the people of our home state. One can easily care to some extent about both. And even if one cares more about local needs than international needs, that doesn't mean that one cannot do anything to help those abroad.
Following that example, total US aid to Ukraine over the three years of war has been $113 billion. That's a lot, until you consider the US government spends $6.8 trillion annually. Ukraine aid has constituted roughly 0.5% of federal spending over the last three years.
Maybe there should be no Ukraine aid at all, maybe it's not a good cause or one the US should be involved in, but if so that needs to be discussed on its own terms. It's not sufficient to say, "Local concerns are higher priority, therefore we can't spend a cent on this particular non-local thing."
Likewise with any number of other issues.
Pointing out that we're called by Jesus to love everyone does not end arguments about enacting some particular policy, and neither does pointing out that we have the greatest duty to those nearest to us and thus most dependent on our personal help. Those are both important principals to recall when making any decisions about policy, but the policies have to be evaluated and chosen based upon themselves and the necessary trade-offs which implementing them would require.
