The order of love: Texas state rep. disagrees with VP Vance

By Easton Martin | January 14, 2026

In a podcast interview on The Ezra Klein Show, Texas State Representative James Talarico pushed back on how Vice President J.D. Vance described the nature of love in a Fox News interview.

Vance said:

“And as an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders. But 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 in your own country. And then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”

Talarico, taking issue with Vance’s view on the priority and order of a Christian’s love, said:

“That’s not the Gospel. And I don’t think I’m saying this as a Democrat. I think I’m saying this as a fellow believer, JD Vance and I are part of the body of Christ together, and I think this is antithetical to the Gospel. The Gospel is all about prioritizing those on the outside, those who are least lovable. That’s what’s so revolutionary about it. There are some strange passages in the New Testament, and one of them is when Jesus tells his followers that they have to hate their mother and father. I don’t think Jesus was speaking literally. I don’t know, but I don’t think so, because I think we should love our moms and dads. I love mine. The Ten Commandments require us to. And Jesus was a devout Jew, the day he was born till the day he died. But I think he’s using shocking language to teach us something. And that is that sometimes our little loves — for our parents, for our friends, for our children, for our neighborhood, really important, crucial, beautiful, profound loves — sometimes those smaller loves can get in the way of the big love. The love for the stranger, the love for the outcast, the love for the foreigner, which are — and I should add love for our enemies, the hardest love to achieve.”

I want to first approach this by saying that I think Talarico’s concern for what Jesus is teaching is admirable. Does that mean that I agree with his conclusions? Not exactly, but I think approaching questions like this must always put Jesus’s words and Scripture as a whole as the final and most important authority.

Analyzing Vance’s statement about the order of our loves, we can see that he is referencing the ordo amoris, Latin for “order of love.” This concept was developed by Thomas Aquinas, drawing heavily from Augustine. Aquinas essentially argues that our loves must be rightly ordered in order to avoid a sort of moral collapse that follows from disordered love. When one fails, for instance, to love God before they love their spouse, then their love is disordered.

Paul teaches in Ephesians 5:25, “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the church….” How can one then love his wife if he does not love Christ first? It is from Christ’s self-sacrificial, gentle love for us that one learns properly to love his wife.

Aquinas ranks the ordo amoris as: God–Self–Neighbors–Our bodies. For Aquinas, the ordo amoris is not a checklist of who to care about and who to ignore, but rather a blueprint for how grace perfects our natural inclinations. He argues that while we are indeed called to love all people, strangers and enemies alike, with the love of charity (caritas), we are not required to love them all with the same intensity or priority of action. In Summa Theologiae (II-II, Q. 26, Art. 6), Aquinas writes, “The affection of charity, which is the inclination of grace, is directed to each according to the state of each.” He posits that since God is the principle of our love, those who are closer to us, either by blood, by marriage, or by shared community, have a greater claim on our immediate duty because God has placed us in a specific relationship with them.

This “priority of proximity” does not mean we love the stranger less in an absolute sense of wishing them well. Rather, it reflects the reality of our finite nature. We cannot serve everyone at once, and to neglect a wife or a neighbor for the sake of a distant stranger would be, in Aquinas’s view, a violation of the very order God established. He suggests that our love for those closest to us is actually the “model” for our love of the stranger. If we do not love the person we can see and touch, the “one flesh” of a spouse or the “one blood” of a parent, our claim to love the abstract “outsider” risks becoming a hollow sentiment.

Thus, responding to Talarico’s concern, Aquinas would likely argue that “big love” and “little loves” are not inherently in competition. Instead, the “little loves” are the training ground for the “big love.” While Talarico is right that we must never allow our local affections to turn into a closed-off tribalism that excludes the stranger, Aquinas would caution that we cannot rightly love the stranger by bypassing the specific moral obligations we owe to our own household. In the Thomistic view, an ordered love is expansive enough to include the enemy, but it is rooted enough to first provide for the family.

Further, the passage that Talarico quotes, Luke 14:26, when Jesus says, “If anyone comes to me does not hate his own father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple,” does not entail that those loves do not matter. Jesus is making a polemical point, emphasizing to his disciples and followers that they must love him more than anyone or anything. Where Talarico goes wrong is identifying the “big love,” as he calls it, as the love of neighbor. Not once does Talarico mention that this big love, the meaning of Luke 14:26, and indeed what Jesus refers to as the entire Law and Prophets hinging on, is “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

It is an unfortunate error to leave out Jesus’ primary command, “Love the Lord God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”

Jesus ties this in with the love of neighbor. Unfortunately, it is all too common in progressive circles to ignore the first part and use the second part as a battering ram against conservative policy.

I think Vance’s original point wasn’t to say, “don’t love the foreigner, love only those closest to you.” Instead, I think what he is saying is that if we are deficient in loving God, if we are deficient in loving our spouse, if we are deficient in loving our family, how can we then seek to love others more than the people God has put most closely to us in our lives?

You see, in Luke 14:26, Jesus is refocusing our loves. If we are not willing to sacrifice everything for our love for him, if that is not the primary love and purpose of our lives, how could we possibly follow him?