Theology isn’t usually part of the job description for America’s vice president, but that’s not stopping JD Vance from giving it a try just a couple of weeks into his new position.

In a Fox News segment on immigration, Vance laid out what he called “a very Christian concept”: “You love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus [on] and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”

When British politician and former diplomat Rory Stewart challenged Vance on X — calling his take on Christianity “bizarre” and arguing that we don’t need him telling us “in which order to love” — the would-be theologian, Vance, replied: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’”

That’s Latin for the “order of love” or “rightly ordered love.” It’s a concept found in the writings of Augustine of Hippo, one of early Christianity’s most important thinkers, and in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, a medieval philosopher influenced by Augustine. In Vance’s reading, “ordo amoris” means that there’s a hierarchy to our moral obligations: We should prioritize our family and our community over people outside our borders.

There are a lot of problems with Vance’s drive-by exegesis of Christian texts. Not only does his interpretation run against the dominant message of the Gospels (which is about radical love, as bishops and priests have been at pains to point out), it also runs against what Augustine himself actually said.

We’ll get to that. But first, let’s recognize that this isn’t just an argument over religious texts; people can — and do — have much the same argument without invoking faith one way or another. In fact, Vance is capturing an intuition that is pretty popular among religious and secular people alike, as reflected in the contemporary cliche “charity starts at home.”

And Vance didn’t just cross swords with any old online combatant. Stewart is an avid globalist, documenting a two-year trek through central Asia in an award-winning book and serving for a time as a deputy governor in Iraq. More recently, he worked as the president of GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that gives cash to people living in extreme poverty, no strings attached. In that sense, he’s an embodiment of the idea that we should actually be prioritizing strangers in developing countries a whole lot more than we currently do.

Given that all this comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration push and its seemingly successful effort to destroy USAID, the government agency that administers foreign aid, this is really about a clash of worldviews.

At the heart of it is a question that should be of genuine interest to anyone who cares about helping others: Is it right to put your local community first? Or do you owe more than you might think to total strangers living halfway around the world?

Is JD Vance right about ordo amoris?

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