By Catherine Pepinster
While US President Donald Trump has been busy signing off trade tariffs and cutting aid programmes, his vice-president J D Vance has made theology his focus. It began with a remark during an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, that charity begins at home.
He was speaking in reply to questions about violent crimes committed by immigrants, and perceived compassion for illegal immigrants over American citizens, when he introduced his thinking on how “America First” is underpinned by Christian theology.
However, his detailed exposition of his religious beliefs led to a social media storm and an online spat with the former Conservative MP and podcaster Rory Stewart.
So what did Vance say?
During the interview, Vance spoke about a “hierarchy of responsibilities” rooted in Christian teaching, so that believers should prioritise family, neighbours, the community and then fellow citizens, while concerns about others around the globe come way down. Interview is here, comments 4’40’’ in:
He said: “As an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders, 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 neighbour 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 prioritise 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. Country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.”
Rory Stewart’s response and the Twitter / X exchange
Rory Stewart (581,000 followers) posted on X in reply to the footage of the Vance interview, that the vice-president’s views were “A bizarre take on John 15:12-13 – less Christian and more pagan tribal. We should start worrying when politicians become theologians, assume to speak for Jesus, and tell us in which order to love…” (John 15: 12-13: This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man thatn this, that he lay down his life for his friends”)
Vance (3.3 million followers) posted on X: “Just google “ordo amoris.” Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone? … I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: the problem with Rory and people like him is that he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130. This false arrogance drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years”.
Why was JD Vance talking about religion?
Vance was brought up in poverty, “loosely raised” as an evangelical. In 2019 when he was 35, he started to explore Christianity with Dominican friars, at St Gertrude Church, Cincinnati. Eventually he was baptised and received his first communion there, choosing St Augustine of Hippo as his patron for confirmation.
Augustine’s 5th century book “The City of God”, describes a society where people relinquish worldly pleasures for the truth of God, found in Christianity. JD Vance has said: “Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way”, and his faith has become one of his main drivers in political thinking.
The idea that there are particular responsibilities because society grows organically, so they begin with the family, is rooted in the thought of the Ancient Greeks, particularly Aristotle, and the Greeks had a profound influence on early and medieval Christian thinkers, such as Augustine and Aquinas
In his Twitter/X exchange, he quotes “ordo amoris” (order of love), which Augustine explored, saying that living a life of virtue is the process of rightly ordering our love, considering those who are more closely united to us.
Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, took this further, saying we ought to be most beneficent towards those who are most closely connected to us. Aquinas said, in his vast work “Summa Theologicae” that reciprocal obligations that are incurred through birth and upbringing are self-evidently stronger than those we freely undertake through circumstances we find ourselves in – and he says this is consistent with what it says in Scripture.
What of Rory Stewart’s beliefs?
Rory Stewart has described his Christian faith as “the most wonderful cornerstone in my life”. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he identifies as a regular churchgoer from the “reticent wing” of Anglicanism. He has spoken of how his faith informed his politics when he was in government as the prisons minister.
He spoke then of how “the Christian virtue of hope” provided the backbone for prison reform, with the idea that each person is a “unique inheritor of God” underpinning the project of rehabilitation, with the hope that lives can be changed and people can be forgiven.
When interviewed about his spat with Vance on Radio 4’s Today programme, he said that Vance had picked up an obscure reading of Aquinas, to use it to suggest Jesus encouraged us to put family and country first and by extension not to care much about anyone else. He said this was an eccentric reading of Christianity.
He explained this mattered in the context of Trump’s executive order to stop aid programmes, including help for 470 million people in extreme poverty in Africa.
What made Christianity radical, he said, was to think about people outside our circle, citing the parable of the Good Samaritan.
The debate continues
One of the most notable supporters of Rory Stewart was the high profile American Jesuit, James Martin, who used the same parable to challenge JD Vance. He said on X: “Actually no. This misses the point of Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10: 25-37). …Jesus’s fundamental message is that *everyone* is your neighbor, and that it is not about helping just your family or those closest to you. It’s specifically about helping those who seem different, foreign, other. They are all our ‘neighbors.’”
Prof John Milbank said on Twitter/X that JD Vance had trounced Rory Stewart: “Ordo Amoris. Read Augustine on this. The Samaritan came close. Jesus refused to shun his neighbour, the prostitute. But a ‘widening out’ to live the remoter was also always taught. Nonetheless the remote have their own intimate circles of neighbours”.
Edward Feser, Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College, California, commented on Twitter/X: “The correct view (common to Confucius, Aristotle, Aquinas, and the common sense of mankind in general) is that our social nature and its consequent obligations manifest themselves first and foremost in the family, then in local communities, then in the nation as a whole, and only after that in our relationship to mankind in general”.
In past debates, the atheist philosopher Bernard Williams was clear about this. He reckoned that the man when faced with saving his drowning wife or a drowning stranger who pauses to think about it, has had one thought too many.
Meanwhile the JD Vance / Rory Stewart spat has come down to an IQ test, with Vance declaring: “I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: the problem with Rory and people like him is that he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130. This false arrogance drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years.”
