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February 5, 2025
When you are swimming in water it is often hard to tell that you are wet. We grow accustomed to the air we breathe, to the point we often don’t notice even the obvious features of our situation.
This is the case in the current internet debate over the ordo amoris (the order of love). In an interview last week Vice President JD Vance referred to this idea to help explain some of the policy decisions of the new presidential administration. Given the explosive state of our current political debate in the US, invocation of any kind of Christian principle in support of one policy position or another is likely to generate incredible internet heat. This move certainly did. But it ought not have. The principle is Christian and commonsensical, and Reformed theologian Hermann Bavinck argues that if we reject it, we’ll end up with the guillotine (well, he just about argues it). First, the basics and then the guillotine.
The ordo amoris is a nearly ubiquitous idea in the Christian ethical tradition, with Augustine as the locus classicus. In City of God XV.22 he writes, “it is a brief but true definition of virtue to say it is the order of love.” To live rightly is to have our loves fittingly ordered. In City of God, as in many of Augustine’s works, his chief concern is that we follow the first commandment rightly, that our highest love be given to God alone, the eternal good Who surpasses all temporal goods. As our uncreated creator and our most loving redeemer no one can make as strong a claim on us as our heavenly Father. As Christians, our highest allegiance is to God. We do evil when we love other things ahead of God or more than God, or when we abandon God and His will to cling to mere creatures.
But where do our loves go from there? In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine gives us some direction, saying
“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…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.” I.29
The basic idea is that we have higher obligations toward those we are closest to, and ought to have the strongest affections for them. Our love and concern for others should be proportional to who they are and who we are. After God, the first thing in the order of loves are our families. No one is closer to us than our parents, spouses, and children, so our duties to them have a higher claim on us than our duties to others. Thus, Jesus condemns the Pharisees in Mark 7 for failing to care for their parents and instead donating their wealth to the church. I Timothy 5 teaches that those who do not care for their own are worse than unbelievers (who, presumably, can see by natural reason that they ought to care for their families before they try to do good elsewhere). As Calvin writes in his commentary on this passage, parents ought to care for their children, “For two reasons, both because they are their own blood, and because they are part of the family which they govern.” These are applications of the ordo amoris.
After the family, which comes first, there are a series of different relationships spreading outwards in diverse ways. Having learned to respect the different roles in the household, we can better respect our roles in the broader social world. In Volume I of Reformed Ethics, Hermann Bavinck writes “The one relationship of family is terminal and is the type of all the others. From the household family and its relationships stem all the others in variegated complexity.” (60). He next identifies relationships of civil society like those in business, commerce, private associations, and different financial and aristocratic classes (rich and poor, noble and commoner). He writes, “When various sorts of people live together, relationships come into existence through all attempts to elevate and sustain life, especially through trade and industry” (61). Are you a business owner? You have obligations to your employees that you don’t have to other people. Are you a rich person? You have obligations to others in virtue of your wealth. Are you part of a social club? You have obligations to the other club members. In each case, our specific situation generates obligations of love for those toward whom we can do good.
Rejecting the ordo amoris in practice is not only impossible, but also inhumane.
Next in his ordering comes the state, which involves love of country, service on its behalf including in war, and the duties of citizen and magistrate. Patriotism and devotion to one’s land is part of this natural ordering of affections. It is good to love where you are from, to cherish the local, regional, and national traditions that go with a particular people’s way of life, and fulfill the duties of citizenship. It would be a shame if Maine no longer celebrated lobster, for Kansas City to leave behind its BBQ, or grandma to stop baking apple pie. Bavinck would be down for some monster fireworks on the Fourth of July. Finally, come the broadest and weakest relationships, namely those of general humanity. Since all of “humanity in its successive generation is a unity, an organism to which we are related” (61), we should feel some sense of affection for the whole. If a German or Indian makes some scientific breakthrough, we can be happy for them on behalf of our common humanity. We have a small and tenuous connection to everyone.
Derived both from scripture and natural reason, theologians have held this to be part of the very basic toolkit of Christian living. Differing relationship mean different duties – we are not obligated to everyone in all the same ways. Yet today some Christians have stumbled over this, seeing it in conflict with the calling of Jesus to do good to all and to have charity in our hearts toward all. We are, as Christians, to love our enemies. As Augustine said, we should love all. However, while we can and must love all people, we cannot and ought not love them all in the same way. Relationships are different and should be prioritized in sane and obvious ways. God loves all that He has made, but not all in the same way – His children receive special blessings that the rest of creation does not, for we are a chosen generation (I Peter 2:9).
In practice, this means that you have a duty to buy your children Christmas presents, but you don’t have a duty to buy mine any. I trust that’s what you did two months ago and that you didn’t lose any sleep over it. However, how would the logic of gift-giving work if we actually tried to reject this ordering of our loves? If we don’t have any higher obligation toward family than we do toward non-family, then your obligation to my children is the same as to your children. So, you ought to agonize and feel guilt, thinking, “Why didn’t I buy Talcott’s kids any Christmas presents this year?” On this view, you should indeed feel that deep guilt over not buying the same number of presents for every kid in the world as for your own kid. Literally, on this view, you owe every kid the same thing in virtue of their common humanity, so by picking and choosing some over others you are showing a vicious partiality. And, you probably gave gifts to your own instead of to strangers, which seems to run deeply afoul of the selflessness we are called to by Christ (a point typically emphasized by the anti-ordo advocates). Clearly, when put in this light, rejecting the ordo amoris in practice is not only impossible, but also inhumane.
Indeed, it is impossible to have the same concern and care for those distant that we have toward those that are close, and the attempt to approximate it has led to untold amounts of mischief in the past 250 years. If you start by denying this kind of reasonable localism, you end up in with the guillotine. That’s what Hermann Bavinck argues, at any rate.
The underlying error beneath a view like this is masterfully captured by Bavinck. In volume 1 of Reformed Ethics, he examines human nature through the lens of its inherent relationality: we are always already in relationship with God, our family, our society, and our country. Atheistic modernism, in contrast, views people merely as individuals, all the same, interchangeable, and radically “equal” before God. Bavinck argues this view is monstrous. He writes:
“People cannot be viewed loosely as mere individuals; human beings are not atoms or numbers. This atomistic view was the error of the French philosophers like Rousseau and is the fundamental error of revolutionary thought…For the revolution, humanity is an aggregate mass of individuals who can be arbitrarily combined, like the random collision of Epicurus’s atoms, into state, society, etc.” 49
Well-intentioned Christians who are concerned about Vance’s invocation of this order of love probably aren’t trying to be revolutionary, but their principle absolutely is. And, not revolutionary like the Jesus revolution, but revolutionary like Robespierre. To deny the order of love is to say we are all the same, we are all equal, and that this de-natured equality should govern our public life. When this individualism works itself out politically, as it is attempting to do so again today, Bavinck writes that it is deadly. On this view, “there is no conceivable reason why there should be social hierarchies, why one person should be richer than another, why one should rule and other be subjects. Instead, everything has to be made equal, smoothed out, leveled. (And the guillotine is the instrument to accomplish this)” (50). Having rejected the idea that there are natural differences which can be harmonized through love, a complementarity modeled in the differing relationships in the household, we are led to tear down everything that God has built up in his creation. The rejection of the ordo armoris is this kind of individualistic view, holding that every person is basically the same and interchangeable rather than having different and irreplaceable relational roles in the various spheres of life.
JD Vance invoked this principle to defend President Trump’s enforcement of US border and immigration policy. The prior administration had, Vance argues, been allowing known violent criminals from other nations to remain here and remain free. By doing so, he argued, we were violating our duty to protect our own. Sending violent criminals back to their country of citizenship does impose a burden on that country, perhaps one that falls on a place poorer and less virtuous than our own. However, each country has its own challenges and must deal with them as well as they can. If your neighbor is having difficulties, you should certainly help out to the extent that you can, but if he tries to move into your basement and refuses to leave, you’re eventually going to have to file trespassing charges, wish him well, and boot him out. Likewise, if your neighbor’s kid is showing signs of rebelliousness, you counsel him to whatever extent he’ll listen, but if a known criminal from another county tries to take up residence in your backyard, you call the police and try to have him sent back home.
Contrary to the revolutionaries, local attachments do not undermine Christian love, but rather are the nursery of virtue and piety
Difficult questions of policy remain – what should we do as a nation if a neighboring country is imploding? Should we ever send aid to foreign countries? How much domestic immigration is reasonable and what should the requirements be for those immigrants? Should we mostly bring in people fleeing as refugees from violent homelands or those from the best circumstances who already share most of our virtues? Balancing our personal duties is likewise not easy or straightforward – our family, church, and local community all vie for time and attention. None of these are cookie-cutter issues and all require real prudence. However, real prudence requires reasoning from real principles. We should be thankful we have a vice president who understands the basics.
The principle of Christian love must certainly animate this reasoning. However, Christian love does not destroy the natural things that God has made good. It renews, revivifies, and beautifies those good things. And Christian love does not turn us into infinite creatures. We remain finite, bound to particularities of time and place. As we grow in our love of God we should grow in our love of His works. As we seek the universal and eternal, we should grow more fondly attached to what is local and temporal. In truth, those small and local things are most often the instruments God uses to teach us about Himself. We first learn of love from our mother and father, and in their love we can grow to recognize the love of others and to love in return. These small images, partial participations, show us who God is like, the eternal Love who surpasses all others. Contrary to the revolutionaries, local attachments do not undermine Christian love, but rather are the nursery of virtue and piety. The proof of this is simple: what produces the greatest violence and disorder in society today? Broken marriages and fatherlessness. Having stronger attachments to father and mother do not reduce a child’s social tendencies, but enhance them. Having more local and immediate connections do not make us turn further inward, but draw us out of ourselves.
If you will suffer one final, extended passage from Bavinck, he artfully describes how love within the family produces love in broader society:
“For there in the family from the moment we enter the world we get to know all those relationships that we will enter later in society – relationships of freedom and connectedness, independence and dependence, authority and obedience, equality and difference. And we get to know them in the family not in an abstract academic way, not by theoretical instruction, but practically, in and through life itself; all moral relationships are embedded and interwoven in the family, in the bonds of blood, and they are rooted in the origins of human existence. In the family we get to know the secret of life, the secret, namely, that not selfishness but self-denial and self-sacrifice, dedication and love, constitute the rich content of human living. And from the family we carry those moral relationships into society. One who has learned to honor his father later respects the authority of those through whom it has pleased God to rule over him. One who has truly loved his mother cannot violate another woman’s honor. One who views the family servants as housemates cannot become a tyrant over his own employees. The family is the nursery of love and inoculates society with such love.” – The Christian Family, 134
There may come a day when our border policy is so tough we need to ask whether for Jesus’s sake we oughtn’t take in a few thousand refugees a year, coming from dangerous homelands (say, Christians being persecuted for seeking to homeschool their kids). Likewise, there may come a day when we need to preach against the idolatry of the family since we are too mired down in temporal affections. But that day is not today. With sub-replacement fertility, it is time to double-down on the family. And, with hardly a functional national border, it is decent and proper for the citizens of the United States to say our own house needs to be put in order first, that we might have something to share with those in need.
To read more about the Ordo Amoris see “Ordering Our Social Loves” by James R Wood.
