Theology isn’t usually part of the job description for America’s vice president, but that’s not stopping JD Vance from giving it a try just a couple of weeks into his new position.
In a Fox News segment on immigration, Vance laid out what he called “a very Christian concept”: “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.”
When British politician and former diplomat Rory Stewart challenged Vance on X — calling his take on Christianity “bizarre” and arguing that we don’t need him telling us “in which order to love” — the would-be theologian, Vance, replied: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’”
That’s Latin for the “order of love” or “rightly ordered love.” It’s a concept found in the writings of Augustine of Hippo, one of early Christianity’s most important thinkers, and in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, a medieval philosopher influenced by Augustine. In Vance’s reading, “ordo amoris” means that there’s a hierarchy to our moral obligations: We should prioritize our family and our community over people outside our borders.
There are a lot of problems with Vance’s drive-by exegesis of Christian texts. Not only does his interpretation run against the dominant message of the Gospels (which is about radical love, as bishops and priests have been at pains to point out), it also runs against what Augustine himself actually said.
We’ll get to that. But first, let’s recognize that this isn’t just an argument over religious texts; people can — and do — have much the same argument without invoking faith one way or another. In fact, Vance is capturing an intuition that is pretty popular among religious and secular people alike, as reflected in the contemporary cliche “charity starts at home.”
And Vance didn’t just cross swords with any old online combatant. Stewart is an avid globalist, documenting a two-year trek through central Asia in an award-winning book and serving for a time as a deputy governor in Iraq. More recently, he worked as the president of GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that gives cash to people living in extreme poverty, no strings attached. In that sense, he’s an embodiment of the idea that we should actually be prioritizing strangers in developing countries a whole lot more than we currently do.
Given that all this comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration push and its seemingly successful effort to destroy USAID, the government agency that administers foreign aid, this is really about a clash of worldviews.
At the heart of it is a question that should be of genuine interest to anyone who cares about helping others: Is it right to put your local community first? Or do you owe more than you might think to total strangers living halfway around the world?
Is JD Vance right about ordo amoris?
First, let’s talk about the Bible.
A big part of what made Jesus’s message so radical was that he did not advocate putting biological family or tribe first; instead, he imagined a new family of believers, which anyone could join. When Jesus was told that his mother and brothers were waiting for him outside, he famously said, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? … Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”
Another famous proof text is Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan. The Jesuit priest and writer James Martin, who took to X to refute Vance’s claims, summarized the parable like this:
To try to undermine this picture, Vance supporters have brought up texts from elsewhere in the Bible — like 1 Timothy, where the apostle Paul appears to prioritize helping one’s own family, saying, “Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”
But a little historical context goes a long way. As the National Catholic Reporter explains, in early Christianity, “widows, among the most vulnerable, became a litmus test for whether the church’s love could be more than abstract words. But there was tension — some families in Ephesus [then a hotbed of Christian evangelism] were neglecting their responsibility to care for their own, assuming the church would shoulder it all.” Hence Paul’s reminder that you can’t just ignore your own family’s needs altogether.
We could spend ages investigating other scriptural texts — like when Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” But it’s actually more instructive to go straight to Augustine himself and ask whether he in fact said what people like Vance think he did. Here’s Augustine on ordo amoris:
Further, all men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you. For, suppose that you had a great deal of some commodity, and felt bound to give it away to somebody who had none, and that it could not be given to more than one person; if two persons presented themselves, neither of whom had either from need or relationship a greater claim upon you than the other, you could do nothing fairer than choose by lot to which you would give what could not be given to both. Just so among men: since you cannot consult for the good of them all, you must take the matter as decided for you by a sort of lot, according as each man happens for the time being to be more closely connected with you.
Augustine is not saying that your family intrinsically has a greater moral claim on you than strangers. Instead, he suggests that ordo amoris is a concession to a pragmatic limitation: “You cannot do good to all.” To understand how this works, he invites us to consider a specific scenario where the commodity you’ve got is one that “could not be given to more than one person” and where none of the potential recipients has a greater moral claim on you than another.
What would be a scenario like that? Imagine that you’re sailing on a stormy sea, and you see two people drowning. There’s only time for you to save one. Both are in equal need and both are strangers to you. Augustine says the fairest thing would be to, essentially, flip a coin (rather than picking the stranger who promises to pay you handsomely if you save them, for example).
In life, when we face the pragmatic limitation of “you cannot do good to all,” Augustine says that we can treat the accident of birth as the coin toss: I can save my own relative, not because they’re intrinsically more deserving, but because fate happened to make them my relative.
But notice that this situation is not at all parallel to the situation Americans are in today when it comes to helping people abroad. This is not a “you cannot do good to all” scenario. The United States has so much wealth that it absolutely could do more for others. It’s the richest country in the world, and many Americans are in the global 1 percent.
And money, thankfully, is a commodity that can be given to more than one person — you can just divvy it up. It’s not like the drowning strangers scenario, where you can’t help both and have to choose just one. America can help both its own citizens and people abroad — the only question is how much money to put in each bucket — and currently, less than 1 percent of the national budget is going to foreign aid.
Finally, people in low-income countries definitely do have “from need … a greater claim upon you than the other.” Poverty in America is horrific and should absolutely be better addressed. At the same time, people living in extreme poverty in low-income countries are in even more dire straits. And money donated there can save and improve more lives (if it’s used wisely), because a dollar goes further abroad.
So Vance’s attempt to map Augustine’s ordo amoris onto our current situation doesn’t make any sense.
That said, it captures an intuition that many people share: Don’t we have a special duty to those near and dear to us? Completely apart from any religious debate, this is a question that modern philosophers have clashed over a lot as the rise of globalization has forced us to think about how our action — or inaction — might affect people we’re never going to meet.
The philosophy of drowning strangers
Utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer proposed a famous thought experiment: Imagine that a child is drowning in front of you. You see her flailing in a shallow pond, and you know you could easily wade into the waters and save her. Your clothes would get muddy, but your life wouldn’t be in any danger. Should you rescue her?
Yes, of course! Walking past the child would be incredibly callous. But according to Singer, we’re all basically walking past that child every day by neglecting to donate to people in poor countries. Since we live in a rich society and giving up a little bit of our wealth wouldn’t substantially harm our lives, we should give to save the lives of the millions of kids who die every year from preventable causes.
That argument has been very influential, both in the ivory tower and beyond. It helped inspire the effective altruism movement, which encourages people to donate as cost-effectively as possible — to give where their money can do the most good — instead of just donating to their local community or pet causes. It’s about doing good impartially rather than prioritizing your nearest and dearest.
But Singer’s argument has also stirred up a lot of debate and confusion, as people who try to optimize their giving for maximum cost-effectiveness sometimes end up feeling callous when they ignore those suffering right in front of them.
According to philosopher Bernard Williams — a staunch critic of utilitarianism — people are right to feel squeamish about ignoring those who are near and dear. In another famous passage related to drowning strangers, Williams said that if a man sees two people drowning, and one is his wife and the other is a stranger, and he pauses to consider whether rescuing his wife would maximize the overall good more than rescuing the stranger, he has had “one thought too many.”
Williams argued that moral agency does not sit in a contextless vacuum — it is always some specific person’s agency, and as specific people we have specific commitments. A mom has a commitment to ensuring her kid’s well-being, over and above her general wish for all kids everywhere to be well. Utilitarianism says she has to consider everyone’s well-being equally, with no special treatment for her own kid — but Williams says that’s an absurd demand. It alienates her from a core part of herself, ripping her into pieces, and wrecking her integrity as a moral agent.
By extension, there is something reasonable in Vance’s claim that it’s morally appropriate to give preferential treatment to citizens of your own country. America is a democracy, and the prime responsibility of a democratic government is to respond to the needs of its citizens.
But here’s the thing: It does not follow — at all — that America should gut foreign aid or keep out immigrants.
Foreign aid and immigration are not the reasons why some US citizens aren’t well provided for, and pretending otherwise is a distraction from government-enabled wealth inequality — which the Trump administration could address, if it wanted to, by raising taxes on billionaires instead of lowering them. The foreign aid agency USAID actually bolsters Americans’ own interests. And immigrants, we know, grow the economy, making everyone better off on balance.
So, whether at the level of government or at the level of the individual, the real question is not whether to (in Vance’s words) “love your fellow citizens” or “prioritize the rest of the world,” but how best to divvy up the budget between them.
There is likely no one objectively right answer to this question — a perfect formula that tells us the optimal allocations. Still, that doesn’t mean all splits are equally convincing; some will be a lot more credible than others.
For the richest country in the world to spend less than 1 percent of its budget helping other countries seems, if anything, too low. Likewise, for Americans as individuals to devote less than 1 percent of our charitable giving to the most cost-effective charities out there (which is what we’re currently doing) seems somewhat absurd.
Balance is important; this is not an argument for only ever giving abroad. But when you look at the data on giving, it’s clear that the scales are actually extremely imbalanced right now — they’re weighted almost entirely toward helping Americans. Against that backdrop, there’s a strong case for both the American government and the American individual to devote more to others.
Or if you want to put it in religious terms: “You are all looking forward to greeting Christ seated in heaven. Attend to him lying under the arches, attend to him hungry, attend to him shivering with cold, attend to him needy, attend to him a foreigner.”
That quote, by the way, comes from Augustine.