A year ago, I doubt most people had it on their 2025 bingo cards that the sitting Vice President would be tweeting an invitation to “google ordo amoris,” but here we are. It’s not even February, and a brief moment in J. D. Vance’s recent interview with Sean Hannity has already set off an energetic debate about political theology. In context, they were discussing the complexities of illegal immigration, the left’s tendency to ignore American victims of immigrant crime, and the concept of ordered loves. As an American leader, Vance believes he has a duty to his own nation first, other nations second. This, he adds, doesn’t entail hatred for the foreigner, but it follows a natural hierarchy of duties, beginning with family first, then working outward to local community, nation, and the world.
Of course, as the kids say, leftist Twitter could not even with this concept. (This despite the fact that this round of the discourse was launched by a video of Selena Gomez crying over “her people” — i.e., Mexican people. Ordered loves for me, but not for thee?) Most amusingly, British political talking head Rory Stewart objected to Vance’s claim that his view has precedent in Christian thought. Stewart is on record being “passionately devoted to a woman’s right to choose,” so his qualifications for wading into this particular discourse are rather dubious. In any case, a spicy tweet war ensued, in the course of which Vance accused Stewart of being a man with an IQ of about 110 who thinks he has an IQ of 130. I’m not a political animal, but I can’t say I’m not entertained. I could get used to four more years of this.
But there are truly weighty issues underneath the tweet wars, including issues I can’t say I feel adequately equipped to speak into with perfect confidence. What is the precisely proper way to approach the immigration issue? I have my intuitions, but these things are immensely complex. I instinctively resist the sort of manipulative rhetoric that’s designed to pretend complex things are simple. I resist what Thomas Sowell called “the vision of the anointed,” in which there is an obvious solution to a massive, multivariate problem, and anyone not on board with the obvious solution is a heartless git. Sowell calls the opposing vision “the tragic vision,” not the cheerfully phlegmatic vision, precisely because the business of trying to solve massive, multivariate problems is a tragedy.
More fruitful for me, and I think more fruitful for anyone trying to think through these things while Christian, is to ask what it means to order our own loves in our own daily lives. Where do my duties lie? Who is my neighbor? Jesus provides certain guidelines, but they don’t constitute a step-by-step recipe.
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