J.D. Vance is Wrong about Everything

As a professor trained primarily in Christian Ethics, there is plenty that I find absolutely horrifying about some of the most powerful and popular appearances of Christianity in the United States. The fact that the tradition has been hijacked by hate-filled, white supremacist, nationalists, not the least. This brings us to J.D. Vance, not the most offensive of the bunch, but certainly one with a massive podium for doing harm. This week a clip from an interview has been circulating in which he makes the following claims:

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 neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.

As will be unsurprising to anyone familiar with Vance, his claims here get just about everything backward.

Let’s start from the beginning. Jesus was a celibate, itinerant, anti-imperial preacher. His teachings on the family were anything but “family first.” In Matthew 10, Jesus is represented as teaching:

For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. (Matthew 10:35-36).

Here, and consistently elsewhere Jesus contrasts primary loyalty to one’s family with primary loyalty to him and his movement.

The idea that Jesus preached love of the citizen before the non-citizen is laughably ignorant. Jesus was not of such a status that he could even be a citizen of the Roman empire in which he lived. And he certainly was not preaching loyalty to that empire.

Jesus did teach love of neighbor, but when asked to specify what that meant in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is represented as telling the story of the Good Samaritan. This is a story which exactly subverts any notion that your “neighbor” is simply a person local to you or a person like you. The Samaritan is a person defined by his foreignness, an outsider, one who is alien. And yet, he is the one who becomes a neighbor by extending mercy. ‘Go and do likewise’ says Jesus (Luke 10:37).

In Matthew 25, Jesus speaks of the judgment of the nations. But he does not prioritize family and nation. He prioritizes and identifies himself with the poor, the hungry, the homeless, and the stranger.

Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me (Matthew 25:34-36).

No doubt, the church eventually moderated the radical nature of Jesus’ early ministry movement, but it never entirely rejected Jesus’ prioritization of the universal over the particular in its morality or its spirituality.

In his discussion of the priorities of love, St. Augustine assigns the highest place to God. But God is not, in Augustine’s thought, some being that competes with others for our love and attention. God is the all-encompassing creator and end of all things. God is the broadest category one could imagine. All particular loves find their place in God, but what comes first is the whole, or rather, that which even transcends the whole: God.

The continuing emphasis on celibacy among clergy, monks and nuns is another way that institutionally, the Church continued to push back against the dangers of reducing love to one’s family or one’s immediate community. While the Church eventually accepted that people do have legitimate ends found in institutions like the family, Christians were always reminded that their ultimate end lay beyond these institutions and the loves they represented. To prioritize the family or the nation was, after all, a form of idolatry.

And, when the culture fell too far in the direction of love of these imminent goods, it could face rebellion from the most devout of Christian quarters. The Franciscan revolution of the 13^th century and following was exactly such a movement. Drawing on the idea of the imitatio Christi (the imitation of Christ) St. Francis and his followers chose itinerant, propertyless lives of service over those imminent priorities that Vance seems to think so central to Christianity.

Even the parts of the medieval church that embraced natural law more fully never fell into the kind of prioritizing that Vance imagines. Figures like Thomas Aquinas certainly recognized that as natural beings, humans all do love their families and local communities. But he always saw such loves as imperfect, and only perfected by their extension beyond such boundaries. This was an extension that came with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, infused into the person by the grace of God.

Even with the Reformation, which had a tendency to sacralize institutions of mundane life, one does not find Vance’s prioritization of family and nation as an ideal within Christianity. Calvin praised such institutions, but not as priorities. They were what he called “common graces.” They were beginning points for the expansion of love to larger and larger circles of humanity. They were good first and foremost because they broke the individual out of the smallest of circles: love of self.

In short, while Christianity has often accepted that family, local community, and nation play some proper role in the list of Christian loves, Christianity has always seen challenged the primacy of such goods as potential idols that get in the way of the universalizing scope of Christian love properly considered.

When Vance cites this “old school,” and “Christian” concept of prioritizing love of family, nation and fellow citizen, he is not thinking of anything old or Christian. He is thinking of modern fascism masquerading as a form of Christianity. It is shameful that this kind of thing has ever been passed off as something worthy of the followers of a God who transcends even the universe, and that many will believe him is a sign of the complete failure of Christianity to ever take root in American evangelicalism.