Criticize J. D. Vance’s ordo amoris comments all you want—but please, leave Jews out of it

As a Jewish professor in a Catholic theology department, I try to stay current on public conversations in the Catholic and broader Christian worlds. These usually have little to do directly with my area of research: the Hebrew Bible in its ancient Near Eastern context, centuries before Christianity or Catholicism existed. However, they matter to my students, my colleagues, and my university—and therefore to me. So when Vice President J. D. Vance, who is Catholic, took to X and urged his followers to google ordo amoris, the Christian idea of the “order of love,” I paid close attention.

Vance was expanding on comments he had made earlier on Fox News, where he’d argued that, according to Christianity, people are responsible first and foremost to those near to them, such as family or citizens of their own country—not to those who are remote from them, such as strangers or citizens of other countries. This, he argued, shows that the Trump administration’s “America First” agenda has a sound Christian basis. By contrast, the notion that we should prioritize helping those remote from us is, he alleged, a leftist inversion of authentic Christianity.

This was an extraordinary invocation of a rather technical Christian idea on the most public of stages. It was also a disturbing escalation of the new administration’s Christian nationalist rhetoric. Progressive Christian theologians—and even some more conservative ones—swiftly pointed out that, actually, ordo amoris is not the Latin translation of “America First.” Writing in the CENTURY, Mac Loftin called Vance’s comments “ill-informed and odious,” a cover for racist policies. At Church Life Journal, published by the University of Notre Dame, Frederick Bauerschmidt and Maureen Sweeney urged that “the overall impetus of Christian love . . . ought to widen the scope of our concern to encompass even those who might seem distant or unlovable.” Most notably, Pope Francis himself sent a missive to the US Catholic bishops in which, rather unprecedentedly, he alluded to Vance, stating bluntly, “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is . . . love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”