Love Thy Neighbor in Nationalism

Vice President J.D. Vance advocates for an "old-school, very Christian" love, in which not all neighbors are created equal.

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Wednesday evening on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, Vice President J.D. Vance shared his thoughts on the “old-school, very Christian” concept of neighborly love: “You love your family, then you love your neighbor, then you love your community, then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” You don’t need to have been raised in the church to read that statement and feel as if you are playing Monopoly with Draco Malfoy. I would honestly expect to hear a more compassionate interpretation of neighborly love from a talking Ring Alarm.

The Vice President continued, further innovating the meaning of the second commandment by turning it into a grudge, “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.” One wonders where women and non-white people might fare in the ordered-love ranking of loving yourself more than your neighbors, and then other neighbors below that, if you even have the time. The idea of love as a hierarchy is almost secondary to the overall energy of the Vice President’s statement, which appears to combine the quadratic equation with the transitive property of “I’m rubber, you’re glue,” landing firmly in the old-school, very Christian province of “it’s mine, because I’ll smack you in the face.” And by whatever divine reasoning we might have thought that love could mean equality or that all of God’s children could have ever possibly inherited the Earth, there is, instead, a list based on your passport.

J.D. Vance was loosely raised evangelical, he then became an atheist, before converting to Christianity because he was drawn to the mystical enlightenment of forcing everyone to play by really old rules. The old-school part of the Roman Catholic Church is what J.D. Vance loves most of all about his brand-new religion. At a conference in 2021, he explained the choice as if he had been sitting around, trying to make a selection from an array of rare and expensive cheeses: “I really liked that the Catholic Church was just really old.”

In a longer piece for The Lamp, he wrote about how he decided to become Catholic. The essay is titled “How I Joined The Resistance” and it was published on April Fool’s Day in 2020, information that feels like reading with a strobe light flashing in your face, a strange accompaniment for an essay that is long and boring, and, mostly, says that J.D. Vance doesn’t know how to be a good person without reasons that are really old. After quoting Saint Augustine lambasting a time in which “everyone has a prostitute.” He writes, “It was the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read. A society oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue.” And, while the essay has a strange emptiness that feels like eating old cereal, there is one rare and fleeting instant when J.D. Vance is saying something that feels deeply authentic and true. I do not doubt for a minute that man has never experienced pleasure.

I don’t want to speak for Jesus here, but it just so happens I saw Mary Magdalene’s tooth at The Met earlier this week. I feel compelled, perhaps by the spirit of Mary Magdalene leaping from her dental reliquary, that it was her gospels that were buried when Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity for the purposes of political control, not to mention the fact that Jesus came to her first. One of the oldest, indeed, one of the most old-school old things is the straight line from the modern-day Roman Catholic Church to the fourth century, when the teachings of Jesus were stuffed into a kaftan and painted over with a sign that says, “No Girls Allowed.” In the year of our Lord 2025, women are not allowed to be priests. I am also offended after eighteen years being forced to attend church in the East Coast suburban Italian sect of Catholicism, and having those two feelings at once is a bit confusing. It’s a patriarchal cult, and you don’t even go here!

In his personal essay for The Lamp, Vance writes of being guided by “above all: a faith centered around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily.” The perfection that Vice President Vance seems to believe is that perfection means enforcing old-school rules on a society that he squints at as sinful while wearing The Bible like a hat. But far be it from me to claim that Vance’s interpretation of Christianity is violent and insane, for evidence of the Vice President’s expertise on the true meaning of love, look no further than his kind smile, easy laugh, the way he carries himself through the world, a man notorious for nothing if not his bright and beautiful joy.

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