The first three weeks of the Trump administration have brought a flurry of executive policymaking, but also three controversies about Christian teaching and its place in government.
The first incident took place at the Washington National Cathedral the day after President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term. There the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, an Episcopal bishop, lectured the president to his face about the illegal immigrants and gay and transgender people who are “scared” because he is president again.
Trump, never to take a slight lying down, blasted Budde as a “so-called bishop” who is a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” while deriding the sermon as “nasty in tone” and the service itself as “very boring and uninspiring.”
But the other two controversies regarding Christianity that have emerged from the Trump administration are the doing of Vice President JD Vance, who in a pair of interviews has invited a cascade of anger from the political Left because of his willingness to challenge their misinterpretations of Christian teaching.
The first interview was with Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face the Nation and centered on the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops expressing hostility toward the Trump administration’s plans to deport illegal immigrants. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, made a rather unusual public statement that criticized the USCCB for being a poor partner in immigration enforcement.
“I think the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops has, frankly, not been a good partner in commonsense immigration enforcement that the American people voted for,” Vance said, “and I hope, again, as a devout Catholic, that they’ll do better.”
Coupled with a suggestion that the USCCB was profiting off of the taxpayer due to a government contract to resettle refugees, it was arguably the boldest challenge to Catholic religious leaders that has ever come from a major Catholic political figure.
But the vice president was not done. In a subsequent interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Vance invoked and explained an old theological principle known as the “ordo amoris” or the order of love:
“There is a … Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”
That, in a nutshell, is the order of love, which has its roots in the Bible but was later articulated by the early Christian philosopher Augustine and then again by Thomas Aquinas in the medieval era. Christians are called to love all people — that is, to desire each person’s good — but in the same respect, how we love each person is predicated on proximity and duty.
But not everyone saw it that way. In the days since, Vance has been accused of distorting Christian teaching to justify harsh border security policies and curtailing foreign aid, much of which is administered by Christian organizations.
In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas writes that “we ought to love one neighbor more than another. The reason is that, since the principle of love is God, and the person who loves, it must be that the affection of love increases in proportion to the nearness to one or the other of those principles. For … wherever we find a principle, order depends on relation to that principle.”
In layman’s terms, a man has a duty to love his wife more than his next-door neighbor or his colleague at work. And a person has a duty to love his parents more than his best friend or the stranger drinking at the bar.
For most people, this principle is fairly innate. We each have a natural inclination to seek to do good to those closest to us before seeking to do good beyond our circle of influence. But as Vance correctly noted, when it comes to government policy, the left has distorted that order of duty and in many ways reversed it.
Liberal prosecutors in big cities, seeking to appease a nebulous definition of injustice, released criminals out onto the street and thus endangered the lives of the people they were charged to protect. The Biden administration implemented an open border policy at the behest of activist organizations preaching compassion for refugees and immigrants, and in doing so harmed the wellbeing of every citizen of the United States of America.
What Vance articulated as the lodestar of the Trump administration’s approach to immigration policy was as much a basic principle of good governance as it was a philosophical principle from Christianity. Political leaders have a duty to the people that they represent. A mayor or city councilman must serve the interests of his city, while the president and vice president of the United States are obligated to serve the people of the United States.
And, after all, that is what Trump and Vance campaigned on when they promised to put America first. America first means a secure border and a consistent application of immigration law is not only necessary for the sovereignty of the nation but for the safety and security of the people. In other words, it means putting the people of America first. And it does not follow that America first means America alone.
This is what makes Vance such an effective ambassador for his administration. It is not simply because he understands and practices the natural instinct to care for those closest to you but because he is able to articulate it in a manner that is easy for the average person to understand and connect with. What’s more, he has thought deeply about the underlying philosophical framework that informs his beliefs, and his very personal intellectual journey that led him from nominal Christianity to Catholicism is an integral part of it.
It is hard to think of any politician of either party who is capable of articulating theological and philosophical principles such as the ordo amoris, let alone has a history of articulately describing the ethical principles that inform his perspective in the way that Vance has done.
He does not simply recite Christian platitudes in service of a predetermined goal as Budde did at the National Cathedral and so many Democratic politicians and liberal pundits have made a habit of. Rather, it is clear that he has thought deeply about and studied extensively the principles and practices that animate Christianity and specifically Catholicism and is seeking to put them into practice.
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When the vice president speaks, as he did in both interviews, his compassion is clear. He carries with him a sincerity, born out of his Christian faith, that speaks to people of all backgrounds. It was obvious during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last year. It was obvious during his debate with Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) during the presidential campaign. And it is obvious today.
The Democratic Party spent so much time laughing at Vance’s “childless cat ladies” remark that they walked into a trap. Rather than highlight the insane soundbites of an unserious radical, as they thought they were doing, they ended up creating a caricature that was divorced from reality, and once that was clear, they were now faced with the reality that one of the savviest and most intelligent Christian leaders in the country is now a heartbeat away from the presidency and the favorite for the next election.