JD Vance is wrong about Christianity, again

The doctrine of ordo amoris does not instruct us to be nationalists

Feb 09, 2025

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 on and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that…

Vance is alluding here to the doctrine of ordo amoris, at least in his interpretation. It’s one of those things that you care very much about if you’re a Catholic, but that other Christians can take or leave. Personally I don’t find it very illuminating. More importantly, it’s patently impossible to square what Vance is saying here with Jesus’s parable of The Good Samaritan, which teaches us that our neighbor is anyone we can show mercy to. And insofar as I have to choose between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Augustine and Aquinas — which is where this doctrine comes from — guess who I’m going to pick?

That said, I really don’t think you have to choose, because as far as I can tell Vance’s understanding of ordo amoris is, at best, a crude misreading. The basic principle comes from Augustine, who in The City of God writes:

And thus beauty…is not fitly loved in preference to God…for though [beauty] may be good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love…But if the Creator is truly loved….He cannot be evilly loved…[and] we do well to love that which, when we love it, makes us live well and virtuously. So that it seems to me…is the order of love.

Even heavily abridged like this Augustine’s prose may be difficult to understand, but the gist of his argument is pretty straightforward. Augustine says that we can love most things (like beauty) for good reasons or evil reasons — but that if we truly love God, we can only love him for good reasons. He then says that if we love God, this makes us “live well and virtuously,” and that we will then love other things (like beauty) for good reasons, too. What this means, he concludes, is that there is an “order of love” that we should observe: God first, and other things second.

You may have noticed that there is no talk here about loving one’s country before the rest of the world or anything like that. No basis here for Vance’s doctrine whatsoever.

The second source for ordo amoris appears in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. The key arguments appear in articles seven and eight. In article seven, Aquinas argues that

…we love more those who are more nearly connected with us, since we love them in more ways. For, towards those who are not connected with us we have no other friendship than charity, whereas for those who are connected with us, we have certain other friendships, according to the way in which they are connected.

The key point to notice here is that Aquinas is not being literal when he talks about people who are “nearly connected” to us. We do not, that is, only have an obligation to love people who we are actually touching. What Aquinas is actually talking about here is the degrees of intimacy in our relationships with others. His argument is that when we are emotionally or personally “close” to someone, we relate to them “in more ways”; for example, your wife is your friend and your lover and your partner. Thus you have more opportunities to express your love for your wife — as a friend, as a lover, and as a partner.

Meanwhile, Aquinas observes, there are people “who are not connected with us” in any of these ways; thus the only love we ever extend towards them is the Christian’s love for humanity. Aquinas continues:

Consequently this very act of loving someone because he is akin or connected with us, or because he is a fellow-countryman or for any like reason that is referable to the end of charity, can be commanded by charity, so that, out of charity both eliciting and commanding, we love in more ways those who are more nearly connected with us.

Here Aquinas is making a complicated point about how our different ways of relating to people — as kin, as friends, as fellow-countrymen, and so on — should express our love for them as Christians. He is also reiterating the point he made above: that the closer we are to someone, the more ways that we have of relating to them. But in any case, you will notice the one thing he is not doing here is giving us a list of what is prioritized over what. Where does Vance get this idea that our relationship “as fellow-countrymen” should be closer than our relationship as fellow citizens of earth? Not from here, that’s for sure!

Aquinas continues in article eight:

Now intensity of love arises from…the different kinds of union…Accordingly we must say that friendship among blood relations is based upon their connection by natural origin, the friendship of fellow-citizens on their civic fellowship, and the friendship of those who are fighting side by side on the comradeship of battle.

This one shouldn’t be too hard to understand: here, Aquinas is just saying that the “intensity” of our love will depend on the basis of our relationship. It will have one degree of intensity with blood relatives, and the reason for this is that our relationship has a “natural origin”; it will have another degree of intensity with fellow-citizens because that relationship is based on our “civic fellowship”; and so on.

But again: nothing in this passage tells us which kinds of relationships take priority! Perhaps our relationship with fellow soldiers we have fought “side by side” with should take priority over our relationships with people who are merely fellow citizens; perhaps not.

I’ve selected these passages because they come the closest to what Vance wants to argue, and yet you can look for yourself: nothing like what he says actually appears in Aquinas. There is no listing of what kinds of relationships take priority over what or even any basis for extrapolating that from the text. Aquinas talks about the “nearness” of relationships, but he is plainly using that in the same way that we talk about how “close” people are — he is talking about the degree of intimacy, not about spatial distance.

How does Vance defend his understanding of ordo amoris? Who knows — but in Compact’s JD Vance is Right About the Ordo Amoris’, R.R. Reno attempts to make the argument for him. But here, Reno, too, runs into the same problem: Augustine and Aquinas may say that we should prioritize certain relationships over others, but the only specific priority they give us is that our first priority should be our relationship with God.

If you don’t believe me, just read through the article and look for the part where Reno justifies (say) prioritizing one’s nation over the globe. Reno certainly makes the case that “we should not love all things in the same way and to the same degree”. He also makes the case that we are “to love with greater devotion those for whom we have greater responsibility”. But where is the argument that we have greater responsibility for people who are (physically) near than for those who are (physically) distant? Here’s the best Reno has:

Neglecting the needs of someone in Syria by failing to make a donation to a relief organization may be sinful. (I emphasize may.) But standing by with indifference when one’s neighbor is in distress is likely a far graver sin.

Look at all those “mays” and “likelies” — Reno can’t even stand behind his own position! He writes that neglecting your neighbor is likely a graver sin that neglecting someone in Syria, but here, at the very moment when he should be justifying this claim, he goes silent.

Later we get a second argument:

Remember Aquinas’s principle—our obligation to love is proportionate to the sin committed in acting against that love. Treason is a grave crime. I cannot commit treason against China or any other nation than my own. Therefore (if you will permit me a moment of scholastic logic), we should love our own country more than any other country.

This may be scholastic logic, but it’s also sloppy logic — one can’t commit treason against another country, but that is merely true by definition. One can, however, obviously commit other terrible crimes against other countries, like waging war. The better comparison here would be to compare starting a civil war in the US to starting an unjustified war against China. Which one is the greater sin? Don’t ask me, but don’t ask Reno either.

JD Vance and Compact may think that ordo amoris provides a Christian justification for nationalism, but the case they make is profoundly weak, and the original texts do not, as far as I can tell, provide any further basis for it. Augustine is interested in saying that we should prioritize our love of God before everything else, and Aquinas is making points about how different kinds of relationships have different kinds of obligations, but there just isn’t in City of God or Summa Theologiae any rationale for making our nation a priority. There’s nothing in Christianity that justifies nationalism, but the Bible does say a whole lot about false prophets who distort God’s word. While Vance is educating himself on ordo amoris, maybe he should read up on that, too.

UPDATE: Pope Francis, in a letter to US Bishops, has explicitly rebuked Vance’s understanding of ordo amoris:

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.

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