Latin phrases were intoned, scripture cited, obscure religious tracts sonorously pronounced, accusations of paganism levelled, and things nearly came to blows over questions of doctrine. The Council of Nicea? No, Twitter in 2025, as the Vice President of the United States clashed with a former British cabinet minister over Christian theology.
Rory Stewart, the co-host of Britain’s most popular political podcast, The Rest is Politics, landed on the Trump-Vance radar when he embarrassingly staked everything on a Kamala Harris victory. He poked the bear again on Twitter, in response to a video in which JD Vance was explaining the concept of the “ordo amoris” — Augustine’s ordering of loves. Vance argued that this idea of ordered love meant that your ethical duties to your immediate neighbour, family, and fellow citizens take priority over abstract global ethical obligations. Stewart dismissed this interpretation as “less Christian and more pagan tribal”.
Vance was unimpressed, suggested Rory “google ‘ordo amoris.’” and wondered if he “really thinks his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away?” Because this is Twitter, the Vice President of the United States proceeded to speculate on whether Stewart’s IQ was in the ever-dangerous 110 midwit range, and if this was yet another sign of “elite failure”.
Apart from delighting in the sanguinary pleasures of world leaders who are also digital natives (imagine a man who can not only order a drone strike on your location, but can also brutally dunk on you whilst doing it), I found it an instructive exchange.
These were two men not merely on different continents, but standing on different ideological tectonic plates grinding destructively against each other. Rory Stewart belongs to a world in which sensible centrists set the rules, and in which Christianity is a pilgrim stumbling along in the wake of Fukuyama’s “wagon train”, as history progresses to its inevitable liberal democratic conclusion. In this more innocent universe Christians write worthy letters to an imprisoned Nelson Mandela, and preach the gospel of unlimited compassion to migrants. Christian theology is a closed book, its mission ended, the baton passed on.
Vance is extremely bright, widely read, and more intellectually engaged than many older politicians
JD Vance is a leader in a movement that has torn this book wide open again, even as it has ripped up the liberal rulebook. He’s a man who has been on a journey of his own, from the crushing poverty and social dysfunction of the Rust Belt, to the enterprising world of San Francisco tech and finance, before scaling the heights of American conservative politics. His ideas changed along the way, first taking a conventional “bootstrap” view of his own impoverished background, before starting to question more deeply if the community he had grown up in was the source of its own woes, or if it had been betrayed by America’s elites.
Vance is the youngest man in the White House for over a hundred years, and the first millennial to reach the heights of the executive branch. He is also the first to have grown up online, messaging in group chats and bantering on podcasts. His past was easily mined and leaked in an attempt to embarrass him. But like many of his generation, especially those attracted to politics, he is extremely bright, widely read, and more intellectually engaged than many older politicians. The shock of a millennial VP seemed to count against Vance at first, as his digital past was raked over by a hostile liberal press. But a brutally competent debate against rival VP candidate Tim Walsz showed the strengths of a youthful, intellectually curious and self-made figure. His deep commitment to his Catholic faith, and his willingness to apply it politically, is a startling shift, but one familiar to those who have been online over the past decade.
On Vance’s side of the tectonic plate, liberal shibboleths have long since been toppled. Not every person crossing a border for a better life is a refugee on the level of Jews fleeing Nazi genocide, international law is not a synonym for morality, and victimhood is not the same thing as virtue.
Read it all in The Critic
