If you Google ‘Are Christians welcoming to Migrants’ or ‘Are Christians welcoming to LGBTQ people,’ you will find that a remarkable amount of ink has been spilled to highlight the hypocrisy of Christians in taking—as they typically do—a negative stance on political mismanagement of immigration or the ubiquitous presence of Pride propaganda in the West. Then, of course, you have the now famous case of JD Vance’s defence last month of the classical Christian notion of the Ordo Amoris—the ‘ladder’ or ‘correct order’ of love—amid a Twitter spat with British writer and former UK politician and diplomat Rory Stewart. But can policies which are tough on immigration or progressivist ideological movements be defended from Christian premises? What about the story of the Good Samaritan, for example?
Christians were not commanded by Jesus Christ to love ‘humanity’ or ‘man,’ but ‘neighbour.’ That is to say, genuine love cannot be a vague sentiment that conjures in the subjective self a positive attitude towards an abstraction. Love is a concrete pursuit of the flourishing of this or that actual person whom one knows, in whose life one is implicated. Vance in fact made this very point in an interview with Fox News last month, in which he said the following:
As an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. That doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders, but there’s this old-school [concept]—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family, and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.
A point that Roger Scruton used regularly to highlight was that natural national loyalty or patriotism differed from the ideology of nationalism in that patriotism did not connote hatred for those beyond one’s borders. Vance, in the excerpt above, echoes this. In fact, he conveys almost without alteration the case made by that great defender of Christian civilisation amid the tumultuous epoch of revolution in the 18th century, Edmund Burke, who so influenced Scruton:
To love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.
Note that Burke does not here say that mankind cannot be the object of one’s love, only that it is the least concrete object of love, and thus necessarily the least loved. As I put it in my 2023 book Conservatism and Grace:
One’s ‘neighbour,’ the concrete person one encounters and must live and engage with, is not interchangeable with ‘man.’ On the Christian account, it is not an abstraction, a category, or a member of a species-kind as member of that species-kind that I must see from God’s perspective. It is this concrete person, whom I know by name—whom I encounter and call to account, and by whom I am encountered and called to account—that I must see from God’s perspective. If the Christian is called to love humankind, it is as a conglomerate of irreplaceable and non-substitutional individuals, not as an abstract category.
In short, Christian caritas is conditioned by the Amoris Ordo. The chief reason why genuine love must be ordered, is because love requires distinguishing between persons. If persons are not distinguished (dare I say, discriminated), then it is impossible to determine what justice affords to each, and thus it is impossible not to commit injustices—which is to fail in loving.
If being ‘welcoming’ entails a grave injustice to, say, a settled people with their own way of life and inherited way of responding to moral imperatives, then being ‘welcoming’ is incompatible with the requirements of Christianity. Fortunately, Christians have never interpreted the call to be ‘welcoming’ along these lines, but have subordinated such a call to the Amoris Ordo, so that hospitality and tolerance do not become the enemies of love.
All the above is really to indicate that a chaotic admixture of unanchored abstractions and shallow sentimentalism is not the best way to identify right action when faced with the significant moral demands of the Gospel. Christians have a long tradition of hospitality, welcoming, and tolerance, and that tradition has survived because it has been situated within a sophisticated account of justice. I wish to suggest, then, that it is not some mysterious rise in ‘Christian intolerance’ that people ought to be worried about.
Rather, people should be worried about, for example, the importation into the West of religious and cultural traditions that not only have a very undeveloped convention of tolerance, but structurally have intolerance built into them. If you do not like, for instance, Christians complaining about the presence of rainbow flags on every street, you likely really won’t enjoy homosexuals being thrown off the tops of buildings. That, though, is the kind of ‘tolerance’ you’re going to end up with in the West unless you start taking seriously the notion that, as the old saying goes, charity begins at home.
Welcoming at What Cost? Why Christian Charity Begins at Home
Photo: Nan Palmero from San Antonio, TX, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
If you Google ‘Are Christians welcoming to Migrants’ or ‘Are Christians welcoming to LGBTQ people,’ you will find that a remarkable amount of ink has been spilled to highlight the hypocrisy of Christians in taking—as they typically do—a negative stance on political mismanagement of immigration or the ubiquitous presence of Pride propaganda in the West. Then, of course, you have the now famous case of JD Vance’s defence last month of the classical Christian notion of the Ordo Amoris—the ‘ladder’ or ‘correct order’ of love—amid a Twitter spat with British writer and former UK politician and diplomat Rory Stewart. But can policies which are tough on immigration or progressivist ideological movements be defended from Christian premises? What about the story of the Good Samaritan, for example?
Christians were not commanded by Jesus Christ to love ‘humanity’ or ‘man,’ but ‘neighbour.’ That is to say, genuine love cannot be a vague sentiment that conjures in the subjective self a positive attitude towards an abstraction. Love is a concrete pursuit of the flourishing of this or that actual person whom one knows, in whose life one is implicated. Vance in fact made this very point in an interview with Fox News last month, in which he said the following:
A point that Roger Scruton used regularly to highlight was that natural national loyalty or patriotism differed from the ideology of nationalism in that patriotism did not connote hatred for those beyond one’s borders. Vance, in the excerpt above, echoes this. In fact, he conveys almost without alteration the case made by that great defender of Christian civilisation amid the tumultuous epoch of revolution in the 18th century, Edmund Burke, who so influenced Scruton:
Note that Burke does not here say that mankind cannot be the object of one’s love, only that it is the least concrete object of love, and thus necessarily the least loved. As I put it in my 2023 book Conservatism and Grace:
In short, Christian caritas is conditioned by the Amoris Ordo. The chief reason why genuine love must be ordered, is because love requires distinguishing between persons. If persons are not distinguished (dare I say, discriminated), then it is impossible to determine what justice affords to each, and thus it is impossible not to commit injustices—which is to fail in loving.
If being ‘welcoming’ entails a grave injustice to, say, a settled people with their own way of life and inherited way of responding to moral imperatives, then being ‘welcoming’ is incompatible with the requirements of Christianity. Fortunately, Christians have never interpreted the call to be ‘welcoming’ along these lines, but have subordinated such a call to the Amoris Ordo, so that hospitality and tolerance do not become the enemies of love.
All the above is really to indicate that a chaotic admixture of unanchored abstractions and shallow sentimentalism is not the best way to identify right action when faced with the significant moral demands of the Gospel. Christians have a long tradition of hospitality, welcoming, and tolerance, and that tradition has survived because it has been situated within a sophisticated account of justice. I wish to suggest, then, that it is not some mysterious rise in ‘Christian intolerance’ that people ought to be worried about.
Rather, people should be worried about, for example, the importation into the West of religious and cultural traditions that not only have a very undeveloped convention of tolerance, but structurally have intolerance built into them. If you do not like, for instance, Christians complaining about the presence of rainbow flags on every street, you likely really won’t enjoy homosexuals being thrown off the tops of buildings. That, though, is the kind of ‘tolerance’ you’re going to end up with in the West unless you start taking seriously the notion that, as the old saying goes, charity begins at home.
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