J.D. Vance and the Hierarchy of Christian Love

What the bible says about loving immigrants

Vice President J.D. Vance recently created controversy with his comments on Fox News about the ordering of Christian love. For those who don’t know, here’s what he said:

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.

Some have defended Vance’s comments by pointing to I Timothy 5:8, “And whoever does not provide for relatives, and especially for family members, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” Fair enough, Christians should take care of their family members. But can we really develop a hierarchical order of love based on this verse?

Kat Armas, writing in the National Catholic Reporter, suggests a Medieval source for Vance’s statement. She writes:

Vance's argument echoes a medieval concept known as ordo amoris — the order of charity, often attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. The idea is that love must be ranked, that a person rightly prioritizes their affections, with family on top. In some ways, it sounds practical, even reasonable. Love is not meant to be an abstraction, floating in ideals without real world engagement.

Read the gospel of Luke and, not only is it difficult to support this argument, but Jesus blatantly contradicts it.

In Luke 12 Jesus says:

51 Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! 52 From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; 53 they will be divided: father against son, and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.’

Here, Jesus challenges the pater familias, the Roman understanding of family power that focuses on the eldest male, by describing how God’s kingdom shatters every form of cultural ideology. These verses are part of a longer speech about God’s judgment, saying that no one knows when the Son of Man is coming, so be ready. Not even the family system, it seems, escapes unscathed.

Is Jesus opposed to family? Probably not, though he gives a strange response in Matthew’s gospel when told his brothers and mother had come to see him.

46 While he was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and his brothers were standing outside, wanting to speak to him. 47 Someone told him, ‘Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.’ 48 But to the one who had told him this, Jesus replied, ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ 49 And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! 50 For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’ (Matthew 12:46-50)

Broaden out wider and it is very clear God has a soft spot for the immigrant and refugee.

Leviticus 19:9-10 says, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.”

Leviticus 19:33-34 says, “When the alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

And who shows up in the genealogy of Jesus, but Ruth, the immigrant, the Moabite woman who is grafted in through Naomi’s cunning. (Matthew 1:5) No, the bible makes it quite clear that God loves the immigrant and refugee, and that God expects the community to care for them.

Unfortunately, there seems to be little interest in what the bible actually says about immigrants and refugees. What matters is ideology, what matters is upholding a way of life by any means necessary. This means using God, the bible, and the immigrant to support ideological principles, in this case, weaponizing religion to support mass deportation. Immigrants and refugees have to be moved from the center, they must be sent back to the fringes from where they came to justify the violence—the anxiety and fear—being unleashed on this community.

In Luke 4, Jesus enters the synagogue and reads from the book of Isaiah. He reads about the hope of God’s liberation, that the captives would go free, and people would be healed. Jesus declares that he is the fulfillment of this hope—that he has come to bring liberation. He comes to liberate humanity from the inward turn of sin that prevents us from getting outside of ourselves and our agendas. Sin fosters idolatry, which elevates aspects of creation, including the family, the nation, and political life, to god like status. In Christ’s death and resurrection the old humanity is overcome, freeing us from the oppression of idolatry and the tyranny of ideology. Jesus comes to free us for a vision of Christian love that is summarized as loving God with all of our being, and loving our neighbor as ourself. Like the scribe asks Jesus, I’m guessing Vice President Vance would ask: “Who is my neighbor?” Believe it or not, Jesus has something to say about that too