“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.
“A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society. And I think the profound difference that Donald Trump brings to the leadership of this country is the simple concept of America First. It doesn’t mean you hate anybody else, it means that you have leadership. And President Trump has been very clear about this — that puts the interests of American citizens first. In the same way that the British prime minister should care about Brits and the French should care about the French, we have an American president who cares primarily about Americans, and that’s a very welcome change.”
The idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does Anyone?
J. D. Vance
Vice President of these united States
That marrying within your race is a basic principle of the Ordo Amoris was articulated in Church history repeatedly;
“The ancient fathers… were concerned that the ties of kinship itself should not be loosened as generation succeeded generation, should not diverge too far, so that they finally ceased to be ties at all. And so for them it was a matter of religion to restore the bond of kinship by means of the marriage tie before kinship became too remote—to call kinship back, as it were, as it disappeared into the distance.”
Augustine – (A.D. 354 – 430)
City of God, book XV, Chpt. 16
“Love imagines that it can overleap the barriers of race and blood and religion, and in the enthusiasm and ecstasy of choice these obstacles appear insignificant. But the facts of experience are against such an idea. Mixed marriages are rarely happy. Observation and experiences demonstrate that the marriage of a Gentile and Jew, a Protestant and a Catholic, an American and a Foreigner has less chance of a happy result than a marriage where the man and woman are of the same race and religion….”
Dr. Clarence MacCartney – Presbyterian Minister
Colleague of the Great J. Gresham Machen
“It has become fashionable in recent times to talk of the leveling of nations, and of various peoples disappearing into the melting pot of contemporary civilization. I disagree with this, but that is another matter; all that should be said here is that the disappearance of whole nations would impoverish us no less than if all people were to become identical, with the same character and the same face. Nations are the wealth of humanity, its generalized personalities. The least among them has its own special colors, and harbors within itself a special aspect of God’s design.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
These CREC guys want it both ways. They want to come across as perfectly orthodox in embracing the Ordo Amoris in the abstract but when it comes to the concrete suddenly they treat the Ordo Amoris like it is a Cross being presented to Count Dracula.
However, there is another angle to all this and that is the countless number of putative theologians who are coming out of the woodwork to say that J. D. Vance and all of Church history up until 1950 or so are wrong. You can find some of that protest here;
Over on X the Marxist minister Ron Burns is jumping up and down insisting that J. D. Vance and all of Church history is not as smart as he is. It seems Ron thinks that the parable of the Good Samaritan proves Vance wrong. However, it is the case instead that the parable of the Good Samaritan proves that Ron Burns couldn’t grossly mishandles Scripture.
Ron Burns and other on the Christian Marxist left appeals to the Parable of the Good Samaritan as the template that all Christians must use in order to demand that amnesty for illegal immigrants be put in place.
The Good Samaritan has been made the tool of Social Justice Warriors everywhere and by it we are being taught that in order to inherit eternal life we must disinherit ourselves and our children so that the alien and the stranger can inherit the here and the now. This is an exceptionally un-neighborly thing to do to our Children and our descendants. According to this interpretation the teaching of the Good Samaritan means that we must treat our children and our people as Aliens and Stranger in order to treat Aliens and Stranger like our children and our people.
The failure with this interpretation lies in the attempt to universalize a particular obligation. Jesus is teaching here in a very specific and particular situation. The Lord Christ was not laying down policy for 21st century Nation States to take up. He was not creating new policy for Magistrates of all time everywhere to pursue. He was speaking to a religious Lawyer in order to crack his smug confidence that he indeed was a good person.
Jesus is giving ethical instruction, I believe, to the end that the Lawyer would see that he is not an ethical person. Yet the Ron Burns in the Christian world want to see the Parable of the Good Samaritan as a way to say that given their desire for open borders it is clearly the case that they are ethical people. In reality, by using the Good Samaritan parable wrongly the Thabiti Anybwile (Ron Burns) Marxists of the World can preen their self righteousness while seeking to foist guilt upon those who dare disagree with their gross misinterpretations.
The thinking that insists that the parable of the Good Samaritan is about immigration and amnesty policy, if taken literally, would mean the disappearance of borders and nations and peoples. It is a world where we can
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Upon giving this Parable, Jesus was not setting National or International Policy. He was not teaching on the Universal brotherhood of all man. He was not negating the reality of ever widening concentric circles of love whereby we first have to look out for our own and prioritized who are of the household of faith. Jesus was not negating the prioritizing of them who are of the household of faith in terms of our care and affection.
He is simply teaching that in the course of our daily living, as we walk through life, when we come upon a real live human being in desperate need of care we have a duty and privilege to care for the least of these.
Some will retort that by seeing this passage as individual and personal that I am not loving my neighbor. Some will insist that by not championing that the Government open up the borders that I am not loving my neighbor. But what of my next door neighbor who can’t find work? How loving is it to that neighbor to glut the market with cheap labor so he will never find work? What of the minority communities in this country who’s unemployment rate is 25-30% in some quarters? Is it neighbor love to them to insist on an amnesty which will cement their unemployment? Is it neighbor love to fellow Christians to invite in a global population that is hostile to Biblical Christianity? Is it neighbor love to Christian women to open the borders to those from misogynistic cultures?
Those who want to use the Parable of the Good Samaritan to the end of pursuing the Cultural Marxist agenda of Social Justice have only incompletely thought through the matter. In many instances the misuse of the Parable of the Good Samaritan is just a means to advance a liberal humanist non Christian agenda.
J. D. Vance and William Ames centuries before him are right, and the long tradition or the Ordo Amoris going back to Augustine and behind him to the Bible is the Christian way of thinking held to by millennium of Church history. Men like Doug Wilson, Rich Lusk, are poseurs who hold the Ordo Amoris in the abstract but blanch at any real application of the doctrine. Finally men like Ron Burns (Thabiti Anybwile) are just not Christian in contending that the Ordo Amoris is not a Christian Doctrine.
And I might add here in ending that the Kinists are incrementally being seen as vindicated. What Ames, and Luther and countless other Christians advocated centuries ago and what Vance is advocating today is what Kinists have been lambasted for and as seen in the cases against Spangler, Hunter, and Garris, Kinists are still being bashed for holding to the timeless Christian principle of the Ordo Amoris.
