Vance’s Twisted Christianity Is No Alternative to the Left’s Morality

The news of JD Vance’s meeting with Pope Francis just before the pontiff’s death featured news of an “exchange of opinions” over immigration policy between the vice president and Vatican officials. That exchange likely resurfaced questions raised by a controversy in January, when Vance, a Catholic convert, invoked an idiosyncratic spin on Catholic theology to justify the Trump administration’s policies. In February, the Pope fired back with a statement calculated to rebuke Vance.¹

Underscoring the controversy between Vance and the Vatican, when Robert Prevost was elected as the new Pope, news quickly emerged that in one of his few pre-pontifical tweets, he had also posted two articles critical of Vance’s interpretation of Christianity.²

Why the controversy? Notably, Vance had argued that it was “very Christian” to think that we should love our family before neighbors, fellow citizens, and the rest of the world.³ Pressed by critics, Vance later cited the concept of “ordo amoris” (meaning: order of love), a doctrine attributed to St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.⁴ 'For some reason conservatives feel the need to spin their own cherished Christian ideology to distance themselves from the left. The unspun version of that ideology is actually closer to what their enemies on the left practice.' Share on X

It’s far from obvious that deporting thousands of peaceful, hardworking people who’ve sought to live as our neighbors really does protect the interests of one’s family and one’s nation. But let’s bracket that for the moment to explore what’s significant about the fact that American conservatives are invoking an obscure medieval doctrine to justify their policies. It isn’t every day that such technicalities break into mainstream discourse.

“Ordo amoris” is the most sophisticated idea that conservatives have recently invoked to oppose what they take to be the ideological essence of their left-wing opponents. Vance, for instance, complained that the far left seems to “hate the citizens of their own country, and care more about people outside their own borders.” That’s not what motivates every critic of Trump’s immigration policy, but there are reasons to think this is the deeply disturbing premise that explains much of the left’s policy agenda.

By now many critics of Vance have come forward to argue that the medieval doctrine does not say what he thinks it says, that it would not likely justify his administration’s policies. But there is something about the doctrine, when spun a peculiar way, that makes it look like it might support those policies. This is what’s significant about the controversy. For some reason conservatives feel the need to spin their own cherished Christian ideology to distance themselves from the left. That’s a sign that the unspun version of that ideology is actually closer to what their enemies on the left practice.

This raises a question for anyone who finds the left’s advocacy of renunciation for strangers overseas actually outrageous. What does it look like to search for a genuine alternative to it? Well-hidden inside the doctrine of “ordo amoris” is an important clue, but one that its latest champions have been unwilling to acknowledge.

The Illusory Moral Alternative of “Ordo Amoris”

In what sense does the left “hate the citizens of their own country, and care more about people outside their own borders”?

Broadly speaking, the left works from the premise of egalitarian altruism, according to which the moral worth of an action or policy is measured by its detachment from an individual’s self-interest. This is symbolized by Peter Singer’s idea of the “expanding circle,” the idea that humanity is most morally developed when individuals treat needy strangers on the other side of the globe as of equal concern to friends and loved ones close to home. This idea motivates the left’s defense of the welfare and regulatory states, of global climate policies, and of foreign aid programs like USAID, among other policies. Outside of politics, it also motivates the left-leaning “effective altruist” movement that encourages people to make a fortune only to give it away to the poorest people around the world.

There is something absurd, even obscene about the idea that each of one’s most cherished friends and loved ones should count for no more, morally speaking, than a random stranger abroad. To think of the value of personally meaningful relationships as just one number in a lengthy column of figures is dehumanizing and alienating. So anyone who thinks there is something irrational about the egalitarian altruist’s idea should want to look for alternative views of morality.

Yet anyone who looks closely at the doctrine of “ordo amoris” will not find a real alternative to the dehumanizing leftist egalitarian view. In substance, it amounts to a subtle variation on the same theme.

As many critics have pointed out, the idea that Christian ethics is not really focused on concern for others well beyond friends and family is on its face implausible.⁵ “Love thy neighbor” is a central message of Christianity. Importantly, the “neighbor” in question is not the next-door neighbor of the American suburbs. When a critic asks Jesus “who is my neighbor?,” he answers with the famous parable of the Good Samaritan.⁶ None of the Judeans in the story care to attend to a man wounded by robbers. Only the Samaritan, a foreigner from a country traditionally hostile to Judea, stops to help.

Appealing to the work of St. Augustine does nothing to soften the blow of the demands of the message of the Good Samaritan parable. The passages from Augustine most frequently cited in defense of Vance’s “ordo amoris” are from Book I of On Christian Doctrine. The context of the passages reveals a position starkly at odds with a modern, American approach to the value of family. The overall point of Book I is that the only thing worthy of our true “love” is God.⁷ No one should love other people for their own sake, but only as a channel for the sake of God.⁸

Why then does anyone think “ordo amoris” allows for some personal prioritization for those one loves? Here is the crucial passage from chapter 28 where Augustine assigns some kind of order to those others we are to “love”:

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.⁹

Note that Augustine insists up front, in striking parallel to the modern egalitarian altruists, that all men are to be loved equally. Augustine just thinks we cannot possibly help them all, so we somehow have to prioritize our time and resources. His view that we are all corrupt, imperfect sinners surely plays a role here, along with the fact that in the impoverished fourth century, most had little in the way of resources to spread around. Arguably the egalitarian altruists are simply updating Augustine’s doctrine for the twenty-first century. As Peter Singer often stresses, the average suburban American has easily enough luxury surplus that he could sacrifice much of it for indigent foreigners while still being well-fed and housed.

It’s also revealing that Augustine equates the accidents of time, place and circumstance that introduce people to each other with the drawing of lots. It shows that the “closeness” used to decide whom we help is not that of personal meaningfulness. Like drawing lots, “accidents” of time and place don’t reflect deliberate decisions about who in our life is of value to us. In the Christian view, personal meaningfulness shouldn’t matter: everyone is at most a replaceable channel for the “love” of God. If accidents of time and place should drop a complete stranger from overseas squarely on our doorstep, “ordo amoris” would hold we should treat him the same way as we treat those in our midst we love for personal reasons.

This Augustinian Christian view is a dramatic departure from the modern American view of love, in which we love our friends and romantic partners for being the irreplaceable individuals they are, not for being interchangeable proxies for some alleged higher power. The American Dream is about marrying the love of your life, achieving career success, and enjoying the wealth you’ve earned; it’s not about finding a merely adequate vessel for discharging otherworldly obligation. Importantly, the Christian view is no less dehumanizing than the egalitarian view that we are channels for the needs of strangers overseas. The strangers, at least, are inhabitants of the natural world!

So there’s really nothing in Augustine’s heavily Christian doctrine to justify prioritizing real love for those who are meaningfully close to us, over “love” for strangers who aren’t. Much the same (with a few important exceptions) is true when we look to the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.

The passages from Aquinas on “ordo amoris” come from a section on beneficence from his magnum opus, Summa Theologica.¹⁰ Here Aquinas cites passages from the same Augustinian text discussed above, reiterating that we should want to help everyone equally, but that because this is practically impossible, we should at least “be prepared in mind to do good to anyone if we have time to spare.”¹¹ As with Augustine, this may mean we should help strangers and even enemies we come face to face with if they are in greater need than family. For Aquinas, personal preference for those “who are most closely connected with us” (friends and kin) is only relevant for prioritizing “other things being equal.”¹²

An earlier section from the Summa, “On the order of charity,” reveals more of the same.¹³ There we see Aquinas making the same basic point that we must love God before all others and that our love for others is just an expression of love for God.¹⁴ Further, he clarifies that we must love a neighbor closer to us “first” only in the sense that he’s the first we encounter: it is “not because his neighbor is more lovable, but because he is the first thing to demand our love” (my emphasis).¹⁵

Christian doctrine is obviously an alternative to left-wing egalitarian altruism in one respect. It holds that we are to “love” God above all other people and things, whereas the left-wing view is secular and focused entirely on obligations to other people. But in practice, the Christian view is that we express our higher obligation to God through our obligation to others, but God comes first. This implies no real privileging of personally meaningful achievements or relationships with friends and family. Christ, after all, is supposed to have said in the Gospel of Matthew that to be perfect, we should sell everything we have and give it to the poor, so as to follow him instead.¹⁶ In Matthew, Christ also says he has come to “set at variance ‘A man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, . . . and the enemies of the man are his own household.’”¹⁷

In his February letter to American bishops, Pope Francis responded to Vance’s invocation of Christian doctrine directly:

Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! . . . The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan.”¹⁸

Pope Francis’s own support for leftist “progressive” causes over the years helps demonstrate that secular egalitarian altruism and Christian humility are ultimately variations on the same moral theme of the renunciation of personal interests. Indeed, I would argue that secular altruism historically derives its core message from none other than Christianity. A symbol here is that Peter Singer, the champion of secular egalitarian altruism, cites the following line in defense of his case for dramatically sacrificing our wealth to save starving people overseas: “whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance.”¹⁹ The line is from none other than St. Thomas Aquinas.²⁰

So, conservatives who appeal to these medieval ideas in the hopes of finding some alternative to the ideas of the left are likely out of luck. Christianity and leftist egalitarianism are variations on the same ethical theme that dominates our culture. But the desperation to twist Christian ideas to look like they don’t imply the renunciation of personally meaningful interests reveals a subtle self-consciousness that there is something at the core of Christian ethics that is as irrational as the left’s doctrine of sacrifice for strangers. The desperation would come not just from the need to distance themselves from their enemies, but to distance themselves from the ridiculous demands of their own moral code.

A more honest response would be to jettison the code entirely. Among those who honestly wish to find an alternative, the recent controversy does provide clues about where to look. But only for those curious enough to pay attention.

The Anti-Christian Alternative Hidden Inside Aquinas

There are important though subtle differences among the various Christian interpreters. Some are truer to what makes Christianity distinctive from other ideologies; others offer blends with other traditions. The difference between Augustine and Aquinas is especially revealing in this respect. Anyone looking for a rational alternative to today’s dominant, pro-renunciation moral trend should look more closely at the sources hidden inside Aquinas that makes the difference.

Compared to Augustine, Aquinas is the synthesizer. His greatest struggle is his attempt to integrate the seemingly alien thinking of pagan Greek philosophy with Christianity.²¹ Throughout the passages we’ve surveyed, we see numerous, cryptic references to “the Philosopher,” Aquinas’s term of honor for Aristotle (he’s referenced some fourteen times in the section on the order of charity). Augustine, by contrast, knew little of Aristotle and, to the extent that he did, disparaged him as exemplifying everything he opposed about pagan thought.²² Aquinas’s attempt to bring Aristotle into dialogue with Christian thought is one of his most noteworthy distinctions.

Yet the tension between Athens and Jerusalem is strong, and this shows itself especially on the issue of love. Try as he might, Aquinas ultimately can’t reconcile Aristotle’s view of love with the Christian view. And that’s a sign that the work of Aristotle offers a real alternative to Christian moral thinking.

A prominent example is Aquinas’s discussion of Aristotle in his chapter on the order of charity. He quotes the Philosopher’s discussion of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics which famously argues that “a man’s friendly relations with others arise from his friendly relations with himself.”²³ Aristotle notably believes that when a virtuous man loves a virtuous friend he sees him as “another self.”²⁴ Indeed, Aristotle thinks the virtuous man loves himself most of all.²⁵ The conflict between this idea and Christianity’s injunction to love God above all things must have been palpable to Aquinas.

To save his respect for the Philosopher and show how his views do not offend against Christian humility, Aquinas argues that Aristotle’s view that we must love ourselves more than even our friends does not imply that we must love ourselves more than God. Aquinas invokes Augustine’s distinction (mentioned above) between loving oneself for one’s own sake and loving oneself for God’s sake.²⁶ As with one’s love for others, one is to love oneself only as a channel for one’s love for God. He cites Augustine’s claim that the only self worth loving is one wholly focused on loving God, one whose “whole life is a journey toward the unchangeable life, and [one’s] affections are entirely fixed upon that.”²⁷ Aquinas’s explanation for why we should love ourselves more than others confirms this: we should love ourselves at all only because one “himself has a share of the Divine good” and so somehow directly takes part in that higher universal good, whereas one’s access to God through others is less direct.²⁸

While this reading preserves the semblance of superficial verbal agreement with Aristotle, Aquinas’s reasoning amounts to a substantive repudiation of the Philosopher.

Unlike Aquinas, Aristotle denies there is such a singular (Platonic) Form of goodness that exists over and above all particular goods in which individuals merely participate.²⁹ He also thinks that even if there were such a good, it would be of no concern to us since it would not be something we could achieve.³⁰ Aristotle’s view of friendship is in fact radically different from the Christian view of love. He thinks that love for other virtuous people bottoms out in our love for our (virtuous) selves. Those who matter the most to us deserve our greatest attention and assistance, not as a form of renunciation but as a form of reciprocity. And while Christianity’s ultimate virtue is humility, Aristotle holds that the crown of the virtues is pride.

It’s no wonder Aquinas had to work overtime to try to make Aristotle even look respectable to Christian eyes.

But the fact that a thinker as sophisticated as Aquinas feels the need to reconcile it with Christianity is a sign of the rational power of Aristotle’s view. To the extent that anyone is rationally attracted to Aquinas’s attempt to privilege personally meaningful love as an alternative to the egalitarian altruism of the left, they could do a lot worse than to look to Aristotle.

Arguably, it’s precisely Aquinas’s attempt to incorporate elements of Aristotelianism into Christianity that makes his spin on “ordo amoris” look like it offers an alternative to the leftist egalitarian view. Aquinas’s attempt doesn’t really offer that alternative, but Aristotle in his original, unadulterated form does.

Aristotle, after all, openly rejects the idea that we owe generosity to anyone simply because they are impoverished. He even thinks it is a vice to aid “people who ought to be poor” rather than those of sound character.³¹ He also rejects the notion that feeds the secular egalitarian view, the notion that virtue requires an ever-expanding “circle” of concern for distant others. The good, he states, is not achieved by a solitary person living by himself, and includes family, friends, and fellow-citizens. But he also thinks “we must impose some limit; for if we extend the good to parents’ parents and children’s children and to friends of friends, we shall go on without limit.”³² Aristotle argues that it is even good not to seek too many friendships of virtue, as such people should have time and space to live with and spend time with each other, and since one can have the greatest feelings only for the greatest people.³³

This points to the essence of what makes both the egalitarian and the Christian views of love irrational: they demand promiscuously extending our “love” equally toward others. But real love by its nature means differentiating among those who are of greater vs. of lesser value to us. If we “love” everyone equally, we stop differentiating and empty the concept of any meaning. As Aristotle frames this, “those who have many friends and treat everyone as close to them seem to be friends to no one. . . .; it is impossible to be many people’s friend for their virtue and for themselves.”³⁴

Of course, the rational power of Aristotle’s ethics comes from its thoroughgoing commitment to the power of reason. His ethics begins with the idea that moral virtue is a kind of health or excellence of character necessary for the achievement of happiness, a phenomenon we learn about by studying man as a natural living organism. It is not a series of revealed commandments from a God who demands obedience and subservience.

So anyone who appreciates the rationality of Aristotle’s ethics must reject not only egalitarianism but the faith-based, blatantly irrational, approach of Christianity.

Toward American Aristotelianism

What makes the elements of Aristotle in Aquinas rationally appealing in contrast to egalitarian altruism is, fundamentally, that it privileges values that are intimately  connected to, meaningful to . . . the self. Anyone who genuinely wants to put not only America but the interests of their friends and families first must know, on some level, that what differentiates their nation and their family from strangers in countries overseas is that both are closer and dearer to themselves,to their own personal interests.

In what now seems like the distant political past, conservatives were targeted by the left as the party of “greed” because they once ostensibly tolerated the interests of business, free markets and the profit motive. Of course, this tolerance was at odds with their own traditional Christian morality. On some level they must have sensed this, which is why they only tolerated self-interest. Now whatever tolerance they have for vague remnants of the pursuit of happiness they seek to cloak in equivocal doctrines like “ordo amoris.” At heart they seem tortured by guilt that their ostensible enemies are the more consistent advocates of the morality they themselves claim to practice.

And the remnants of concern for the right to the pursuit of happiness are vague indeed. Returning to what we had bracketed: it is far from obvious that a policy of hostility to free trade and free immigration actually protects the rational, long-range self-interest of Americans. Such a long-range interest is far from the same as caving to the demands of the most obnoxious nativist interest groups who are more concerned with turning overseas trading partners or immigrants into scapegoats to justify their pursuit of power.

An approach to morality that sought to discover actual principles of mutually profitable long-range human interaction would abjure this latest turn toward cynical short-range pragmatism. But that is possible only by repudiating the Christian-egalitarian equation of principle with the morality of renouncing personal happiness, and searching for an alternative, rational source of moral principles.

Looking at the Aristotelian approach to morality buried (and obscured) in the recesses of Aquinas’s Summa is one way to begin to search for such an alternative. Aristotle’s own system is, of course, ancient, and has well-known flaws that derive from the limited knowledge of his time.³⁵ There are, however, modern Aristotelian ethicists who offer principles updated in light of a modern scientific world view.

Like Aristotle, Ayn Rand emphasized the importance of developing virtues or excellences of character needed for the pursuit of happiness.³⁶ But she radically updated the Aristotelian approach for the modern world, recognizing the central role of productive work in the creation of the material values human beings need to thrive, and the root of this value in the free use of the human mind. So versus a cynical short-range pragmatism skeptical of free trade or free immigration, she identified principles of self-interest that imply a politics that is consistently pro-America, pro-business, and pro-individual freedom.

Don’t take my word for it, or Rand’s for that matter. You can start by reading Aquinas and then Aristotle for yourself. See if you can resolve the conflict that appears to result from marrying the outlook of pagan Greek philosophy with Christian religion. Whatever you do, give it more than the cursory treatment and outright distortion that it’s lately been given by social media flame wars and vice presidential sound bites.

1. Pope Francis, “Letter of the Holy Father Francis to the Bishops of the United States of America,” Vatican.va, February 10, 2025.
2. Robert Prevost, x.com, February 3 and February 12, 2025. See Kat Armis, “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” National Catholic Reporter, February 1, 2025, and Sam Sawyer, “Pope Francis’ letter, JD Vance’s ‘ordo amoris’ and what the Gospel asks of all of us on immigration,” February 12, 2025, America Magazine.
3. “JD Vance: President Trump is looking after American citizens,” Fox News YouTube channel, January 30, 2025.
4. JD Vance, x.com, January 30, 2025.
5. See, e.g., Sigal Samuel, “JD Vance accidentally directed us to a crucial moral question,” Vox.com, February 12, 2025.
6. Luke 10:25-37.
7. St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, James Shaw (transl.), (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887), Book I, Ch. 4, 5, 8.
8. St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book I, Chapter 22.
9. St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book I, Chapter 28.
10. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica,Fathers of the English Dominican Province (transl.), Second and Revised Edition (1920), II.II, q. 31. Cited by, e.g., Edward Fraser, x.com, January 27, 2025.
11. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.II, q. 31. a. 2, ad 1.
12. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.II, q. 31. a. 3, ad 1.
13. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica,II.II, q. 26.
14. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.II, q. 26, a. 2-4.
15. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.II, q. 26, a. 2, ad 1.
16. Matthew 19:21.
17. Matthew 10:35-36.
18. Pope Francis, “Letter of the Holy Father Francis to the Bishops of the United States of America,” Vatican.va, February 10, 2025.
19. Peter Singer, Famine, Affluence, and Morality (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 23.
20. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.II, q. 66, a. 7.
21. Compared to Augustine’s views on love, Aquinas’s views are also maddeningly complicated, filled with numerous competing considerations. He enumerates multiple species of “love” which we owe in different proportions to different kinds of people. We owe different “love” to those who are virtuous and closer to God, to our family, to fellow citizens, to comrades in battle, etc. His dizzying array of distinctions is a sign of an uphill battle to reconcile multiple conflicting lines of thinking.
22. See St. Augustine, Confessions, Book IV, Ch. 16.
23. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.II, q. 26, a. 3. Aristotle’s view is in Nicomachean Ethics Book IX, 1166a1-3.
24. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Terence Irwin (transl.), (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985), p. 246 (Book IX, 1166a 30-32).
25. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 255 (Book IX, 1168b29).
26. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.II, q. 26, a. 3.
27. St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book I, Chapter 22. See also St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.II, q. 100, a. 5, ad 1: “true self love consists in directing oneself to God.”
28. Aquinas thinks one should love oneself because one’s own happiness is a part of some greater whole (“the common good is always more lovable to the individual than his private good” (Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.II, q. 26, a. 4, ad 3)). It’s not because one’s own happiness is an end in itself (closer to Aristotle’s view). He thinks God is the basic principle and source of the good, like unto a Platonic Form in which man only imperfectly participates (Aquinas, On Christian Doctrine, I.I, q. 60, a. 5, ad 1).
29. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, pp. 10–11 (Book I, 1096b 10-25).
30. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, pp. 12–13 (Book I, 1096b30-1097a15).
31. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 91 (Book I, 1121b5–10).
32. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, pp. 14–15 (Book I, 1097b10-15).
33. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, pp. 262–63 (Book IX, 1170b30-1171a15).
34. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 263 (Book IX, 1171a15-20).
35. His elevation of contemplative reason over practical reason and his (consequent) justification for slavery are major examples.
36. See Onkar Ghate, “Finding Morality and Happiness Without God,” New Ideal, May 4, 2018.