The Problem With J.D. Vance’s Augustine

Since Vance’s conversion, he has frequently referenced Augustine in interviews and speeches, introducing many in the American public to the influential Bishop of Hippo. Most recently, he indirectly cited Augustine in a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity when discussing the “deranged” compassion liberals have for undocumented migrants. Ostensibly with an eye toward defending the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” policy agenda, Vance told Hannity that American leaders’ compassion belongs first to their fellow citizens:

There’s this old school—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—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.

Having received pushback on these remarks from British academic and politician Rory Stewart, Vance told Stewart in a post on X to look up “ordo amoris,” a Latin phrase meaning the order of love, indicating that he had the ordo amoris in mind when describing this allegedly “Christian concept” of scaling our moral obligations. 

Unsurprisingly, Augustine is the progenitor of the ordo amoris, a term he uses in City of God to describe properly ordered love in accordance with the New Testament command to love both God and neighbor. In City of God and elsewhere, Augustine argues that living rightly means loving rightly, and loving rightly means loving God and neighbor differently. While we should love God above all else as the source of our happiness, we should love our neighbor not as a source of our happiness but for the sake of their well-being. Loving our neighbor like God not only deifies the other (and is, thus, idolatrous), but makes them an instrument for satisfying our own desires.

What, then, does Augustine’s ordo amoris have to do with the scope of our moral obligations? Is Vance’s interpretation sound?

Like many theologians, Augustine tried to discern the right relationship between our love for particular people near and dear to us, on the one hand, and our love for human beings with whom we do not have such intimate relations, on the other. Just before he became a priest at Hippo, Augustine seriously considered the possibility that our special relations with family members and fellow citizens are the consequence of the Fall. In On True Religion, he writes:

Loving your neighbor as yourself does not even mean loving in the way members of one’s immediate family, brothers, sisters, children, wives, and husbands are loved, or any other kith and kin, or one’s next-door neighbors or fellow citizens. … After all, we would not have relationships of that sort … if our nature had remained true to the precepts and the image of God.

He even goes so far as to imply that loving your children simply because they are your children betrays a partiality Christian love cannot abide. Augustine’s point is that, ideally, we should love each and every human being as our neighbor by virtue of our shared belonging to God—and not because they happen to be from our family or our country.

Augustine tempered this strictly egalitarian conception of love later in his career. In On Christian Teaching, he argues that “all people should be loved equally. But you cannot do good to all people equally, so you should take particular thought for those who, as if by lot, happen to be particularly close to you in terms of place, time, or any other circumstances.” Vance’s comments in the Fox interview seem to echo Augustine’s point here, but there are still crucial differences. First, Augustine acknowledges that his entreaty to “love locally” is a concession to our creaturely finitude and the providential lottery. Insofar as we simply “cannot do good to all people equally,” we should tend to those who are near to us. Second, Augustine understands our more intimate relationships as schools of virtue in which we learn how to love well. By learning how to properly love our family and friends, our love is shaped and ordered to be more fruitful in public life. As Eric Gregory writes, for Augustine, “providence and finitude affirm special relations, even if love continually expands the circle of neighborly concern.”   

From an Augustinian perspective, Vance is not wrong in acknowledging that we cannot always show compassion to all people equally. In fact, as Sigal Samuel notes, Vance’s comments call attention to a moral quandary hotly debated in secular philosophical circles as well. That said, Augustine and Vance approach this quandary from completely different vantage points. Whereas Augustine starts with the premise that the scope of our love is, due to sin, frequently too narrow, Vance begins by searching for moral justifications for the jingoistic policies of “America First.” Augustine lands on a compromise position—as finite creatures, we inevitably must love partially and thus fall infinitely short of loving like God. Yet, our special relations help us learn how to love better, allowing us to widen the scope of our compassion to strangers. Vance, on the other hand, offers his distorted interpretation of the ordo amoris as a critique of “deranged” American liberals who allegedly love undocumented migrants more than their fellow citizens, as if widening the scope of our love were a bad thing.   

Vance is right to admire Augustine for his incisive criticism of Roman imperialism, but he does so for the wrong reasons. In an essay on City of God, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes that Augustine’s “condemnation of ‘public life’ in the classical world is, consistently, that it is not public enough, that it is incapable of grounding a stable sense of commonality because of its pervasive elitism, its divisiveness, its lack of a common human project.” For Augustine, the problem in our loving is not that it is too public but that it is too private, inordinately delimited to the narrow confines of our individual desires and interests. Like Jesus, Augustine presses us to expand our love outward through self-giving acts of compassion toward those who may be neither near nor dear. “You are all looking forward to greeting Christ seated in heaven,” Augustine tells his congregants at Hippo in a sermon. “Attend to him lying under the arches, attend to him shivering with cold, attend to him needy, attend to him a foreigner. Do it, if it’s already your practice; do it, if it isn’t.”

This article was originally published in Sightings, a publication of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Zachary TaylorMore by this author →

Zachary Taylor is a doctoral candidate in Religious Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His dissertation, “An Augustinian Ethic of Collective Memory,” explores how Augustine supplies moral and theological concepts to justify collective memorial duties indexed to the particular histories of secular political communities. He has been the recipient of the Hank Fellowship in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and the Seminary Fellowship from Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE).