Why Ordo Amoris Scares the Establishment
Reclaiming Rooted Love in a Rootless World
JD Vance said something obvious: We have a greater duty to our family, community, and country than to distant strangers. And it broke people’s brains.
Christians are called to love all and our loving duties begin with those nearest to us. This does not mean some people are more deserving of love than other people, or that love is a meager resource to be hoarded jealously, it simply acknowledges that in practical terms as individuals we are finite beings with finite resources and we cannot serve every single person in the world in the same way at the same time. For example, it would not be truly loving for a mother to deny her hungry child her last remaining food in order to give the food to a stranger. This is obviously morally repugnant.
But many modern people, even Christians, have become convinced that real love means dissolving all distinctions, prioritizing the abstract over the immediate, and loving “humanity” in theory while neglecting those closest to them in practice. This is not Christianity. This is a bizarre, modern delusion.
In contrast is Ordo Amoris, the concept Vance referenced in the interview. Ordo Amoris is a Biblical concept (1 Timothy 5:8, Matthew 22:37-39, Matthew 15:5-6), further articulated by St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, that elucidates the proper hierarchy of loving duty, which is ordered, active, and rooted in truth. Ordo Amoris does not limit love, it orders it rightly. We are called to love all and serve those placed in our path. Duty has a logical structure and abandoning that structure in favor of ideological abstractions leads to dysfunction, not holiness.
For millennia Ordo Amoris was considered common sense. We are born into families, into communities, into networks of tangibly connected human beings; these ties are not arbitrary - they are ordained. And with them come real obligations.
Throughout history, human survival depended on in-group loyalty, cooperation, and mutual aid. But many people today have flipped this upside down - showing more compassion for abstract causes and distant people than for their own families and neighbors. It is easier to profess our love for distant strangers than to actually love the frustrating people God puts in our lives. The modern liberal version of “compassion” takes advantage of this weakness, encouraging us to feel righteous about abstract charity while neglecting those closest to us.
The Bible passages often used to justify this universal, indiscriminate love are misinterpreted. When Jesus says to “hate” your family (Luke 14:26) or not love them more than Him (Matthew 10:37), He is establishing hierarchy, not rejecting natural bonds. Paul’s “neither Greek nor Jew” (Galatians 3:28) speaks to spiritual equality, not the erasure of distinctions. Loving your enemies (Luke 6:27) means acting justly, not treating all relationships the same. 1 Timothy 5:8 makes clear our duty must encompass those closest to us. And, finally, we have the Good Samaritan, who did not demand Rome take other people’s money for a distant cause, he helped the man directly in front of him, despite the stark differences that divided them. This is Christian love, something abundanat and trangressive that takes hold in real world effort. It is difficult - and something many people, myself included, struggle to put into action.
But the establishment encourages people today to act as the Pharisees did, talking a big game about a nebulous form of holy compassion that did not take tangible form in their daily lives. This can be seen in people who have been taught that it is compassionate to vote for policies that hurt their actual neighbors while taking other people’s resources to give to distant strangers. It is a moral outsourcing scheme that demands love for humanity in abstract while fostering contempt for the actual neighbor if they fail to conform to liberal dogma.
Why does the establishment invert Ordo Amoris? Why does it demand you love the foreigner before your neighbor, the stranger before your kin? Because it serves an agenda - rootless, disconnected, interchangeable people are easier to control. Strong families and tight-knit communities create resistance. If you have no loyalty to family, no ties to community, no love for country, you’re easily absorbed into the bureaucratic, consumer-driven system to become just another cog in the globalization machine.
And the establishment is willing to warp Christian concepts to achieve this. This is one reason why the modern West has produced a Christianity that is sentimental, deracinated, and servile. It is a Christianity that condemns its own traditions, that demands you sacrifice your community, your identity, and your children’s future for an abstract “compassion” that ultimately benefits only the powerful.
Ordo Amoris threatens all of this. It shatters the illusion of a bland, nebulous “love” that exists conceptually rather than in the difficult actions we take in our everyday life. It reclaims the natural loyalties given to us by God, to our family and to the people living around us - regardless of political affiliation. Ordo Amoris prioritizes real relationships over ideological abstractions, reminding people of our loyalty to those closest to us, not the demands of a faceless global order. This is why the establishment hates it – because a world where people love rightly is a world where their power crumbles.
Artwork is The Good Samaritan by Vincent van Gogh