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.
6 comments:
You can't sit this one out; so let's be frank. There is actually an inversion that happens in some parts of the Gospels that rejects that order of loves, and is in many senses a rejection of subsidiarity. It puts the apparent nobility of universal love above anything more proximal and it is the foundation of many offshoots from Christianity, including progressivism. The inversion of the natural, apparently rising above the physical, the biological, the sensible - transcendence, enlightenment, woke - is a hallmark. So what are we going to do or say about this? Both sides are making entirely valid points; and you hang Vance on his degree of rhetorical emphasis rather than wrestling with the fundamental tension between putting as highest in the order two opposite ends of the scale.
I think the Ordo amoris is very much the point. As an example, I know someone who makes $13 an hour at her job. She crossed over $20K in earnings this past year so lost her medicaid. Needs a hearing aid. No health insurance available from work. She has a roommate but still not much extra money to buy health insurance under any circumstances. The JD Vance side of the argument is, "I'd rather take care of this person's health than an illegal immigrant's health." That sounds like a reasonable argument, that a particular government has more duties to its own citizens than to the citizens of other countries. In Steubenville our buildings are falling apart, there's no money to fix the bridge going in to downtown, the roads don't get paved, and my small business, from which we bring home $1000 a month, pays over $2000 a month in taxes. We don't have the money to buy a car or a home - but we would if we were paying less in taxes! At some point it seems like the government is trying to take care of anybody except its own people, and it just doesn't seem fair anymore.
BenK,
I would not say that the Gospels invert the natural order of loves, but I would say there is a certain type of universalizing.
Jesus answers the "who is my neighbor" question with essentially, "Your neighbor is whoever you see who is in need" and also talks about when it comes to serving God we should be ready to abandon close attachments in order to follow God.
But unless I'm missing something entirely I don't think there's a point where the Gospels tell us we should actively neglect those near us in favor of those far away.
All of which leaves us, as you say, having to make a bunch of detailed policy arguments. We have some obligations to those near us. We have other obligations to those far away. We need to sort out what we should mean by "near" and "far". I think there are a number of legitimate positions one could take on those, though I think defining people one likes as "near" and people one doesn't as "far" becomes self serving quickly and should not be done.
I'd originally started to get into actually policy questions in the post, and eventually I stripped those out because at some level, I recognize that we need to have the argument and what we do is probably not going to be what I would like.
Overall, I remain a pretty un-reconstructed early 2000s conservative, so I'd be in favor of letting more immigrants in but not giving them government services and cutting people's taxes and doing all possible to encourage the economy to grow. But I know that's probably not one of the areas people are likely to converge on in 2025.
I think one of the things that those advocating for greater programs for those in need should recognize is that countries with large social safety nets mostly seem to only remain stable when they have pretty limited immigration. You can't announce "free stuff!" and then just let everyone in if you expect to continue to remain solvent.
John Kuhner,
I think the general principle is relevant, I just don't think it's very useful in settling the actual points at issue.
To say that a government primarily has a duty to provide for its own citizens doesn't mean that it has absolutely no duties beyond that. And once we're discussing how much duty to which people, it all becomes a question of trade-offs.
Right now the federal government already spends way more on US citizens than others, since by far our largest programs are Social Security and MediCare, which are open only to legal residents.
But as you point out, there are a whole lot of very legitimate questions about how high taxes should be and how much should be spent on various kinds of programs. Generally I think we'd be far better off if both people with low incomes and businesses with small revenues paid very little in taxes. But there are some taxes I would be fine with seeing higher -- for instance I have really low sympathy for the argument that the state and local tax exemption should be unlimited because families making $400k in NYC are "living paycheck to paycheck".
I think there are some very important issues here. Excepting extreme issues, Christian moral teaching doesn't unambiguously translate into a definite political or practical action. Yes, there are some cases of the former: I think voting for abortion is one such, or not continuing your job (risking poverty for yourself and your children too) if it requires you to formally deny (or forbids you to practice) Christian faith as it sometimes happened during Communism here. But absolutizing every moral command is also clearly against Christian teaching. And ESPECIALLY if it relates to politics. Jesus himself did markedly refrain from interpreting his teaching on the political level. He had a zealot and a tax collector (i. e. collaborant) amo
ng his disciples and he counseled his audience to render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar - which could also be interpreted as contradicting lofty principles like God's people being only under God's rule and betraying the cause of independence.
The decisions about a country's budget aren't, in a way, dissimilar to a family's budget. One has to balance the different needs and priorities; but even the poorest of us (especially the poor in a developed country) has some obligation to give to those who are in need around them. Jesus didn't say that the poor widow ought not to have given her last money in the church. In the Old Testament, the poor widow in Zarephath (sorry if I am misspelling) was actually expected to give her last food to the prophet (a visiting stranger) without reserving some for herself and her son. That's not to say Ordo Amoris is a wrong principle, on the contrary. Christianity and the Bible should not be used to provide moral justification to what one wants to do for political reasons.
A key point to remember is that the Catholic Church does not claim infallibility in all things, but only in matters of faith and morals.
Politics does not fall neatly under either of those categories, so men of good faith can disagree with the prudential judgement of the Church in that area and still remain in good standing.
I would be very cautious trying to apply Catholic (or even Christian) teaching too rigidly to political questions, especially the allocation of resources. I would also call attention to the principle of subsidiarity, which is not respected in any way with much (if not most) of 'benevolent' federal spending.
I would be even more careful to avoid conflating government action with charity. The latter is an individual act of virtue. The former is not. A politician deciding so spend someone else's money to help a third party is not being charitable. He may mean well, but there is a fundamental difference in the nature of the act.
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