Metro Voice News Celebrating Faith, Family & Community
Vice President J.D. Vance’s recent comments about Christian love sparked intense debate across religious and political lines.
“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,” he said. “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.”
Critics accused Vance, who found his way to Christianity after being an atheist, of ignoring the parable of the good Samaritan. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, disagreed.
“Vance was not taking issue with the biblical injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself,” he said. “This obligation is found in the Old Testament (Leviticus 19:18) as well as in the New Testament (Mark 12: 28-34). He understands that ‘our neighbor’ means everyone. He is simply offering a practical understanding of the locus of love. It should begin with our family and then extend outward.”
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar found that humans are capable of having 15 good friends, 50 friends, 150 meaningful contacts, 500 acquaintances and 1,500 people they can recognize. Therefore, loving neighbors is a tall order, one most likely to be achieved by first loving family members and then embracing those outside the family unit.
“It may be that the reaction against Vance has less to do with what he said than it does with who he is,” Donohue said. As a recent Catholic convert, “he is a young convert to Catholicism, a conservative and vice president of the United States. Ergo, Christians on the left have their antennas in the stratosphere looking for anything he says that they can pounce on. They are off to a lousy start.”
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice
