There Is Enough for All

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Last week I tried to break some of the myths that have been cropping up about the “Order of Love” in Christian theology and ethics, particularly the way that Vice-President JD Vance and his supporters have used that concept to insist that Americans should take care of their own first because your own people rank ahead of other people in the “Order of Love;” You love your own people and then strangers and foreigners. Some have said that the problem Vance is identifying isn’t a desire to exclude some people from love, but that this is really all about a limitation of resources, that this was the point Vance was trying to make: you feed your family before you feed the stranger. The problem with that idea is two-fold. First, you cannot extrapolate the responsibilities of the individual onto the responsibilities of the most powerful country in the world. Surely, we, as a society and a people, have greater responsibilities than any of us could hold individually. While I, as a husband and father, have very distinct responsibilities to my wife and child, responsibilities I cannot shirk while I run around the world helping others, it’s different when you are talking about a nation… especially a nation like ours. One of the big reasons it’s different is because the idea that we have limited resources and so have to take care of our own before we help the vulnerable in the world is just patently false. There is no scarcity of resources here. We are by far the wealthiest country in the world, holding over 30% of all household wealth. Second behind us is China with 18.6%, then Japan with 5%, Germany with 3.8%, and the UK with 3.5%. Did you catch that, we have over 30% of all household wealth and our siblings in the UK only have 3.5%. So, for leaders in our country to say we do not have the resources to help those fleeing violence and poverty is not just false, it is obscenely false. So, let’s be clear, our country can absolutely reach out in support of others, we can follow international law for the welcome and resettlement of refugees, we can build a new rational immigration policy that is not based on racist quotas, we can do all of that and absolutely still care for our families. Nothing is stopping us. (Other than, perhaps, the wealthy and powerful who would prefer the system keeps benefitting them.) To say that we have to take care of our own people and stop doing our part to take care of the vulnerable elsewhere in the world is the ultimate false choice. We have enough to do both. As a country, we have resources to help the vulnerable. And to insist that the order of love requires us to take care of our own and turn our back on the rest of the world is a twisting of Augustinian and Thomistic theology of the highest order. It is contrary to the very basic teachings of Jesus Christ himself, who calls us to remember that whatever we did for the least of these we did for him. Rightly ordered love, in truth, orders us to extend our love, our resources, out from our own people to heal a world broken by sin, violence, and injustice. Love orders us out, not in. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.