J. D. Vance and the Pursuit of American Happiness

C.C. Pecknold is interviewed by Peter Jamison of The Washington Post on Vice President Vance as Christian statesman, and the meaning of disputes over Ordo Amoris, Immigration Reform, and the USCCB.

Generally, what are your thoughts on Vice President Vance's public profile so far as a Catholic in the White House, and his Christian witness as a prominent, national elected official?

I am very biased, but it strikes me as obvious and reasonable to state that we have never had a more compelling Catholic statesman in the White House. We will be comparing J.D. Vance to John F. Kennedy for many years, not only for their similarities but also for their deep differences as Catholic statesmen. They share, of course, manly vigor and rhetorical power. But where JFK held his faith in abeyance, with Catholic principles subordinated to the rules of liberal order, JDV takes a much more traditional approach — it is among the duties of a Catholic statesman that Christian principles will inform decisions of governance, not be separated from them. To win high office in America at the peak liberalism’s power meant conformity to the liberal arrangement in which Christian faith belonged to a private and personal realm, and religion played no role in public decision-making. Octagenarian Catholic politicians like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi exemplified the weakness of this approach as they showed up at Mass as private persons, but voted against the Church’s moral code in public. The Vice President represents the opposite of this liberal standard. He has stated very clearly that religious liberty is not just about legal safeguards, but it’s about supporting and encouraging faith in God. And he’s not been shy about expressing that faith in a way which actually illuminates government policies such as we have seen in his appeal to the ordo amoris for explaining immigration policy.

What is your take on the dispute that erupted among Catholic thinkers over his interpretation of the ordo amoris?

The dispute which erupted was not really about the ordo amoris — it was about the compatibility between Christianity and Liberalism. To explain this, though, I need to explain why Vance’s correct appeal to ordo amoris triggered this deeper conflict.

The classical tradition frames questions of order very differently than liberal traditions. Instead of a focus on identity and individual rights, the ancients focused on duty and virtue because they saw personal alignment with these things as the key to happiness. Much like Vance, Aristotle will argue in the Nicomachean Ethics that we have obligations first to our parents and siblings, then to friends who share common virtues, then to our fellow citizens, and only to strangers when it doesn’t undermine these prior obligations. These are all keyed to virtues like piety, patriotism, and magnanimity. Cicero’s On Duties is also very typical in that he conceives of governance also in terms of personal alignment with what is good for one’s family or city before all others. Vance was very much alluding to these classical accounts when he said it was an “old school concept,” and then added it was “also a very Christian concept” which builds upon it. The Vice President told everyone to just google “Ordo Amoris,” he did so precisely because it’s an utterly uncontested and standard concept —uncontested, that is, until he connected it to immigration reform.

Augustine recognizes that the classical understanding of these concentric circles of obligation really follow the hierarchy of being and goodness which has been caused by God who created and ordered the world, made it good and intelligible, and so also made it lovable. Since God is Charity Itself which orders and unites every good thing, it is God whom we are to love in all things. The ordo amoris is nothing other that relating the hierarchical order of reality itself to God who is Love Itself.

St. Thomas Aquinas unites these classical and Christian discussions in his famous treatise on “the order of charity.”

He argues that God is the supreme good and the principle of happiness, and so the happiness we get from loving ourselves, our family, our friends, and strangers is nothing other than a share of God’s goodness. There’s a general sense in which we are to love all equally out of charity, but because we’re embodied creatures, it’s impossible to love all equally through our actions. Aquinas says that our love of neighbor thus “increases in proportion to the nearness” of those principles we hold in common with our actual neighbor. So it is entirely reasonable that we love our families and fellow citizens more than we love strangers. This doesn’t mean that one would not show charity to foreigners, but it’s notable that Aquinas thinks that while the refugee should be provided safe passage, but that they should be carefully tested for shared principles over time if they want to enter into “civic friendship,” and become fellow citizens.

Now here is the key to the conflict: neither the classical nor the Christian account of the ordo amoris fits with liberalism, which gives primacy to individual rights, not to common virtues. Liberalism gives primacy to idealistic abstractions over concrete obligations to those with whom we already share principles. At its heart, then, ordo amoris signals an opposition between the classical and Christian values that built Western civilization, and the political liberalism which has slowly eroded it.

In this sense, the conflict is not between different interpretations of ordo amoris —but a conflict over whether Catholic Christianity and Liberalism are compatible or incompatible. This is what is so fascinating to me because postliberal conservatives like myself have been arguing for decades against liberal conservatives about this in all sorts of rarefied ways. But now the dispute is happening on a much bigger scale. Political liberalism —the governing philosophy which drives our right-left way of understanding reality— is crumbling. So by appealing to a preliberal concept of order, Vice President Vance needled the anxieties of those who think Christianity and Liberalism are compatible. A very careful concordat between the two is being unraveled in real time. That’s the heart of the conflict. Christians who have worked out this very careful compromise with liberalism are having to think about what their tradition actually says about order. It could be uncomfortable for a while.

More fundamentally, what do you think about elected officials invoking church teaching to support or oppose government policies?

For the last two thousand years, it’s been incredibly normal for rulers to turn to biblical texts, to pray in public, and appeal to the Church’s teaching authority in support of their laws and policies. This doesn’t mean everyone has always gotten this right, but just to say it’s normal. What’s not been normal is the secular separationist who wants to exclude all of this. That doesn’t work because secularism itself is an anti-Christian pseudo-religion which appeals to its own texts and authorities. If you’re a Christian like me, you want your government to be held to the standard of truth, and that will mean truths which can be known by both reason and revelation since these two cannot contradict each other, but belong together. But even if you aren’t a Christian, you should welcome elected officials appealing to settled authorities which have stood the test of time rather than the ones who give every law a wax nose. I want elected officials holding themselves, and asking others to hold them accountable to standards that last, not ones which are constantly shifting on the whims of public opinion. So, yes, I think it’s unrelievedly good news to have public officials returning to God, returning to classical wisdom, returning to Church teaching which has illuminated many nations long before ours ever existed. This doesn’t require theocracy, or handing the state over to the Church, but it does mean that secularism has failed miserably. It’s time to return to the normal give-and-take of governance that makes regular public reference to God. This works better than godlessness, as the 20th century proved beyond any shadow of a doubt.

From the pope's letter to calls in America to defund the USCCB, an appreciable amount of internal conflict and tension among Catholics has ensued following some of Vice President Vance's statements about the church in the last two months. Why do you think this is, and do you think it was avoidable?

Vice President Vance spoke eloquently about his love for Pope Francis at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, and he also reflected a great deal on how being thrust into public life has also pulled him into long-standing disputes between conservative and progressive Catholics, between Dominicans and Jesuits, and between the laity and their Bishops over the past two months. Vance is not the cause of these tensions, but the gem through which we see those conflicts in a new light. What happens when a Catholic who believes that politics can help Christian faith, and Christian faith can help politics? Not everyone will always agree.

It’s one thing to think abstractly about concord and cooperation, it’s another thing when money is involved. And huge sums of taxpayer money have been given to the USCCB for immigrant and refugee resettlement programs.

Now it’s important to say that the USCCB is not the Catholic Church in the United States, but rather a bureaucratic body which coordinates cooperation between bishops who have authority from Christ as successors to His apostles. Nevertheless, Vance was responding to a hostile interviewer who was trying to drive a wedge between him and the Bishops on immigration reform, and he asked if the Bishops’ Conference were more interested in “their bottom line” than in what’s actually good for the immigrants and the country itself. That question sounded like a rhetorical accusation, and some bishops took great offense. I think that was a mistake. Bishops are fathers. They are meant to be wise, and here they simply swallowed the bait. Was it avoidable? I don’t know. Politics is filled with lots of rhetorical vigor, and sparks sometimes fly even in the most diplomatic contexts.

What I wish the lawyers and leaders of the USCCB had done was to have read the room better, and realized that the funding was going away whether they liked it or not, and to respond in more productive ways that could’ve led to new modes of cooperation. Instead, they responded with lawyers and lawsuits. Pope Benedict once taught in Deus Caritas Est that the Church must avoid any semblance of becoming an NGO which “meets the needs of the moment,” it must avoid becoming “just another form of social assistance.” It is not that the Church’s charitable activity cannot be allied with governmental programs, but Benedict’s point was that they shouldn’t become those programs, and certainly should be wary of becoming dependent upon them. I hope that upon reflection, those who run the USCCB will see that Vice President Vance was helping them take stock of such matters in a different but nonetheless salutary way.

One thing is clear to me: the White House is filled with Catholics now who take the same approach to Christian statecraft that J.D. Vance does — and whatever conflicts or misunderstandings might arise, this new approach is good news for most people. Returning to classical and Christian wisdom about good governance has historically not resulted in tyranny, but in faith, freedom, and civic happiness. It’s too early to predict the future, but the initial signs are promising.