Ordo Amoris and the War Against Chaos

The Christian Doctrine of Rightly Ordered Love in an Age of Disordered Affections

Introduction

I do not often wade into these waters. Not because they are unimportant—far from it—but because my attention is usually drawn elsewhere. Yet, when a subject intersects with things I am already writing, I feel compelled to spill some ink (so to speak). And so, here I am, writing on Ordo Amoris, the ancient Christian doctrine of rightly ordered love.

Vice President J.D. Vance has, of late, taken up this banner, drawing attention to the old truth that love itself—real love—is not mere sentiment but structure. He has spoken of it in relation to the Trump administration’s stance on immigration, and in doing so, he has provoked the ire of the usual suspects. When asked how a Christian could support the deportation of those who have broken the law, he responded simply: Ordo Amoris. That is, there are natural, divinely instituted priorities to love—one’s family, one’s people, one’s nation—which come before a vague and abstract love for all mankind.

And for this, the progressives gnash their teeth. Not because they have no loves of their own, but because their affections are inverted. They place love for the distant stranger above love for father and mother, for brother and sister. They dissolve the natural bonds of home and hearth and call it virtue. They have done worse than abandon the classical doctrine of ordered love—they have reversed it, inverting nature itself like the foolish builders of Babel.

The Ancient Wisdom of Ordo Amoris

The doctrine of Ordo Amoris is not a modern contrivance, nor is it the invention of political convenience. It is woven into the fabric of classical and Christian thought. St. Augustine, in The City of God, wrote that virtue itself is “ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections, in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it” (Book XV, Ch. 22). In other words, to love rightly is to love with order.

C.S. Lewis, following Augustine, put it in even plainer terms:

“The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments.” (The Abolition of Man, p. 24).

A man without rightly ordered loves is a man without a chest, a creature of impulses and slogans, tossed about by every passing wind.

And what is this order? The ancients knew it well, and Scripture itself affirms it:

• Storgē (στοργή)—the natural love of family and kindred, the bond that ties one to one’s own people. This is why lands are called “motherlands” and “fatherlands,” and why the hearth was sacred to the household gods in the ancient world. This love appears implicitly in Romans 12:10, where Paul commands believers to be philostorgoi (φιλοστοργοί), meaning devoted to one another in brotherly love. Though the word storgē itself does not appear frequently in Scripture, the concept is deeply embedded in the biblical view of familial duty. Paul later warns in 2 Timothy 3:3 that in the last days, people will become astorgoi (ἄστοργοι)—“without natural affection,” a tragic loss of this foundational love.

• Philia (φιλία)—the love of friendship and shared bonds, the love that builds cities and knits together brotherhoods and nations. Aristotle held this love to be foundational to civic virtue, writing that “friendship seems to hold states together, and lawmakers care more for it than for justice” (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Ch. 1). In Scripture, Christ uses this love when speaking to His disciples in John 15:13-15, saying, “Greater love (ἀγάπη) has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends (φίλων).” He then elevates them from mere servants to friends (φίλοι), demonstrating the profound bond of philia within the Kingdom of God.

• Eros (ἔρως)—the love of the lover, the wild and perilous flame that, if not guided by reason and virtue, burns and consumes. Plato warned of its dangers in The Symposium, knowing full well how easily passion turns to destruction. While eros is not explicitly used in the New Testament, the concept is present in the Song of Solomon, where love between bride and bridegroom is depicted in deeply poetic and passionate terms: “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me” (Song of Solomon 7:10). The Apostle Paul, recognizing the power of eros, exhorts husbands to direct their passionate love rightly by loving their wives as Christ loved the Church (Ephesians 5:25), channeling the intensity of eros into a sanctified, self-giving love.

• Agapē (ἀγάπη)—the highest love, the self-giving, divine love that God has for man and that man is called to reflect. This love is the defining mark of Christian faith, appearing throughout Scripture. It is the love spoken of in John 3:16, where “God so loved (ἠγάπησεν) the world that He gave His only Son.” It is the love Paul exalts in 1 Corinthians 13, a love that is patient, kind, and never fails. And it is the love that Christ commands in Matthew 22:37-39, when He tells us to “love (ἀγαπήσεις) the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind” and to “love (ἀγαπήσεις) your neighbor as yourself.”

These are not interchangeable. They are not random. And above all, they are not to be confused with one another. Yet this is precisely what the modern world has done. It has elevated agape as a formless, structureless, indiscriminate love, one without flesh or substance, and called it “compassion.” But true love does not dissolve distinctions. It does not erase differences. It does not level everything down to a featureless mass. Love must have shape, or it is not love at all.

One of the most frequently misunderstood passages in Scripture concerns the question, “Who is my neighbor?” This question arises in Luke 10:25-37, when a lawyer tests Jesus by asking what must be done to inherit eternal life. Jesus turns the question back to him, asking what is written in the Law. The lawyer correctly responds:

“You shall love (ἀγαπήσεις) the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor (τὸν πλησίον) as yourself.” (Luke 10:27; cf. Deuteronomy 6:5, Leviticus 19:18)

But seeking to justify himself, the lawyer presses further:

“And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29)

Jesus answers with the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37), in which a Jewish man is beaten and left for dead on the road. A priest and a Levite—both members of the religious elite—pass him by. But a Samaritan, a member of a people despised by the Jews, stops to help, binding the man's wounds, taking him to an inn, and paying for his care. Jesus then asks:

“Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor (πλησίον) to the man who fell among the robbers?” (Luke 10:36)

The lawyer is forced to answer, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus responds, “Go and do likewise.”

This passage is often misread to suggest that neighborly love eliminates all distinctions between people, that proximity determines neighborliness. But note carefully what Jesus does: He does not redefine the neighbor as everyone in the world. Rather, He shifts the emphasis from Who is my neighbor? to Am I acting as a neighbor? The parable does not call for an indiscriminate, structureless love but rather a love that sees and responds to real need within the bounds of one's life and duties.

Additionally, in Matthew 15:24, Jesus affirms that His mission was first to the lost sheep of Israel:

“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

This does not mean that the Gospel is not for the nations—indeed, the Great Commission commands its spread to all peoples (Matthew 28:19-20). But it does mean that love has an order and priority. Christ first ministers to His own people and then extends the blessings outward.

The Bible consistently affirms that duty to one’s own people comes first. In 1 Timothy 5:8, Paul writes:

“But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

This verse explicitly upholds the doctrine of Ordo Amoris. A man who neglects his own family under the pretense of loving others is not virtuous—he is faithless. This is precisely what modern progressives demand: that we treat the foreigner and the stranger with more devotion than our own families, our own people, and our own nation. But Scripture condemns this inversion of love as hypocrisy.

Even in the Old Testament, where Israel was commanded to show kindness to the foreigner, a clear distinction remained. In Leviticus 19:34, God tells Israel:

“You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Yet the same law establishes that Israel was to remain distinct from the surrounding nations, with clear boundaries on intermarriage (Deuteronomy 7:3-4) and worship (Exodus 34:14-16). The love commanded for the sojourner did not erase the priority of Israel’s own people, nor did it mean that all distinctions between peoples and nations were abolished.

Thus, the biblical answer to Who is my neighbor? is not a vague universalism but a rightly ordered love. Love for one’s family and people is not opposed to love for the stranger—but neither can it be abandoned in the name of a false egalitarianism. True love is ordered, measured, and rooted in reality.

The War Against Order

I believe that the attack on Ordo Amoris is an attack on reality itself. The enemy, ancient as Eden, ever seeks to unmake what God has made, to undo what He has ordered. If he cannot make men wicked, he will make them foolish. If he cannot make them hate goodness, he will make them love in the wrong way—disordered, chaotic, unmoored. The corruption of love is, after all, the corruption of all things.

What progressives call love is not love, but entropy. It is time dressed in priestly vestments, a ceaseless churning that erodes all things. It is the ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail—a parody of creation, a mockery of life. T.S. Eliot saw this clearly when he wrote:

“Do you need to be told that even those modest attainments as you can boast in the way of polite society will hardly survive the Faith to which they owe their significance?” (Choruses from "The Rock")

When the right order of affections is lost, what follows is exile. It always has. It always will. When Israel abandoned God’s order and embraced the gods of the nations, Babylon did not simply arrive—they flooded in. Disorder begets destruction. The same happened in Noah’s day, when the world lay beneath oceans of watery exile.

And let there be no mistake: the globalism that erases all distinctions is not loving. It is not natural. It is not classical. And it is certainly not Christian.

So what then? What are we to do?

We must love rightly. We must order our affections. We must refuse to be swept along in the tides of this age. This does not mean we cease to love those different from us—far from it! But it does mean that we do not disorder our loves in the name of sentimentality. We must love our families before we try to love another. We must love our actual neighbors before the distant stranger. We must love the good, the true, the beautiful, and frankly—the natural, before we give a single thought to the wicked, the false, and the profane.

To do otherwise is to be swept away.

And so, in this moment of cultural upheaval, when the very structures of nature itself are under attack, let us remember that love is not an amorphous, egalitarian mist. It is strong. It is ordered. It is good.

And may God preserve this nation in righteousness and truth.