Article

Church and state

Creed

Politics

3 February 2025

6 min read

JD Vance and Rory Stewart have both missed the point when it comes to who to love

An unlikely Internet spat can help us understand ourselves better

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Side by side pictures of JD Vance and Rory Stewart

Everyone seems to be leaving it these days, but be that as it may, the other day something quite extraordinary happened over on Elon Musk’s X.

In case you didn’t see it, the Vice President of the United States of America and a Yale Professor, who is also a co-host of the biggest politics podcast in the UK, found themselves arguing about an abstruse aspect of Augustinian theology. Before we get on to the theology itself, just pause for a moment to think how remarkable that is. For decades we have been told that religion is on the way out. The secularisation thesis claimed that the more wealthy and sophisticated societies become, the less religious they will be. Religion, we were assured, is a part of humanity’s infancy, and now we're grown up, we don't need that kind of nonsense any longer. Religious language and ideas would fade from the popular mind as quickly as the church numbers decline, and we’ll all be better off for it.

And yet here we have something straight out of the middle ages - politicians and public thinkers arguing the toss about the interpretation of one of the greatest of the early Fathers of the church. Yes, church numbers continue to fall. Yet we cannot rid ourselves of religion and theology as vital sources for thinking about our life together. God may have been shown the door. But he continues to haunt the building.

Now JD Vance and Rory Stewart are both serious Christians, the former having converted to Roman Catholicism, the latter a baptised and recently confirmed Anglican. Sharing a common faith, of course, doesn't mean they will agree upon everything - and they don't. The argument emerged from an interview in which JD Vance claimed that there was a Christian ‘order of love’ by which your first calling was to love your family, then your neighbour, then your immediate community, then your fellow citizens and then the rest of the world. The ‘far left’, he claimed, had inverted that, by putting the love of the stranger above the love of our immediate neighbour.

Rory Stewart responded by saying it was ‘a bizarre take on John 15:12-13 - less Christian and more pagan / tribal.’ And in the usual social (or unsocial) media fashion, others weighed in on both sides of the argument, some pointing out quite rightly that it related to Augustine's teaching on the ‘ordo amoris’ – the order of love.

JD Vance may have done his theological research via Google, but it’s hard to criticise him for that. Vice Presidents have a day job after all, and at least he tried - it’s hard to imagine his boss quoting the ordo amoris anytime soon. And he has a point.

Jesus does say that the second great commandment after loving God is to love our neighbour – literally the person ‘nigh’ - right next to you. Yet who is my neighbour? It’s complicated. The parable of the Good Samaritan seems to suggest that your neighbour may well be a person who you happen to find in great need, yet awkwardly, may belong to the entirely opposite tribe to you. For the Democrat, it might be a hated Trump-voting gun-toting Republican. For the arch-Conservative, it might be the blue-haired, nose-ringed woke activist in the local café. Jesus also suggests at times that love for spouses, parents, brothers or sisters might come second to the call to love his friends: “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ Pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers!”

Loving my family teaches me to love my friends. Loving my friends teaches me to love my neighbours. Loving my neighbours teaches me how to love the stranger.

St Augustine, in the City of God (Book 15, if you’re interested) does talk about the importance of the right ordering of our loves. Yet he doesn’t delve much into love of family, community, nation and so on. His point is about directing our loves and desires at the right things. He mainly wants to tell us (something both Vance and Stewart both seem to have missed) that the primary object of human love ought to be not your family, your neighbour, or the immigrant applying for asylum - but God. And as we learn to love God, we learn a different kind of love than the kind we are used to.

The problem comes when we think of love as like a kind of cake. There are only so many slices of cake and you have to be careful who you give them out to because sooner or later they will run out. In this way of thinking, love is a limited commodity where you have to be sparing who you love, because there isn't enough to go round.

Yet divine love is a bit more like fire. When you take a light from a candle and light another candle with it, the first candle is not diminished, but continues to burn brightly. Fire can be passed on from one place to another and spread widely because it's not finite in the way that a cake is.

Augustine's understanding of love is that if this kind of divine love has grasped your heart, then love becomes something that you are rather than something that you do. There can never be a conflict between loving God and your neighbour or even your neighbour and your enemy, because divine love extends to whoever it comes into contact with, like fire warming everything with which it comes in contact. This kind of love, unlike ours, is not drawn out by the attractiveness of the beloved, but it just loves anyway. Which is why it is capable of loving the enemy as much as the friend.

They may have missed the key point, but I tend to think both JD Vance and Rory Stewart have much to learn from each other. Our love does begin with those closest to us. It is entirely natural to love our family, friends and those we encounter every day. Yet to suggest that somehow this is an alternative to the love of the stranger is a mistake.

Of course, loving your family and friends may sound easy. But it doesn't take much to realise it's not always that straightforward. Families and marriages are not always a bed of roses. Loving a difficult spouse or an errant child teaches you to keep on loving that person, even when they (or you) are acting badly, precisely because you have a stronger bond than just the attraction you initially had for them. This kind of experience begins to teach you this different kind of love. Loving our family and friends is therefore a kind of tutorial in divine love, the kind that spreads like fire. Practising the art of love on those closest to us helps us learn the skills of loving others. Loving my family teaches me to love my friends. Loving my friends teaches me to love my neighbours. Loving my neighbours teaches me how to love the stranger. And loving the stranger might even help me learn to love my enemy.

The Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote:

“The task is not to find something loveable, but to find whatever has been given to you or chosen by you, loveable, and to be able to continue finding them loveable, no matter how they change.”

If this brief internet spat directs us towards this kind of love, then it will have been a good argument, not a bad one.

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Article

Belief

Creed

Spiritual formation

3 April 2025

6 min read

The young are sold jumbled nonsense in exchange for their spiritual birthright

Is our religious Compare the Market selling us short?

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A perplexed looking woman hold her cheeks up with her fingers.

Sherise Van Dyk on Unsplash.

There is an old joke that goes around the Church of England. It concerns a parish that was having problems with bats who had nested in the roof of the local parish church. The vicar calls up the Archdeacon to ask for advice on how to get rid of them. The Archdeacon replies drily: “Just get the bishop to confirm them. They’ll leave the church pretty soon after that.”

This joke came to mind when reading of a recent report by the Pew Research Centre which suggested that 36 per cent of those raised as Christians in the UK now no longer self-identify as Christian.

As a bishop, I regularly go round parishes leading confirmations, a service where people make a public commitment to living as a Christian. With adults or older teenagers, I'm usually fairly confident they are serious about their faith because it takes some swimming against the tide to make such a counter-cultural move. When I confirm younger children - 10- or 12-year-olds, perhaps - I confess to a little niggle of doubt in the back of my mind. I’m sure some have a sincere faith. Yet in many parishes or even schools it can be a bit of a rite of passage, the kind of thing everybody does, which ironically takes more courage to resist than to go with the flow. The joke stings when I meet adults who were confirmed as kids, yet who left the church as adolescence kicked in, never to darken its doors again.

The detail of the Pew report reveals a more complex picture. In a list of countries where adults have changed religious categories from the one they grew up in, the UK comes sixth, behind such countries as South Korea (where the number is 50 per cent), Spain and the Netherlands. It’s about the same in the UK as in Australia, France Germany and Japan, which all come in at 34 per cent.

In other words, what we have here is a global trend of people, mainly in western, or western-influenced countries, exploring different religious options from the one in which they were brought up. Two factors lie behind this trend. The first is that in countries like the UK, where religion is in decline, you’re unlikely to face ostracism if you change faith, as you might if you stopped being Christian or Muslim in certain parts of the Philippines, Sudan, Pakistan or Indonesia. In the west, the pressure to remain is just not there. In places like India, Nigeria, Israel and Thailand, places where either religion is core to national identity, or where there is severe religious tension, 95 per cent of adults say they still belong to the religious group that they were raised in.

The second factor is that in western cultures, individual autonomy, the right to choose, is paramount. We are used to shopping as one of our primary activities. The right to shop around for spiritual alternatives, in a kind of religious version of Compare the Market, is hardly surprising.

Put this survey next to another recently published by OnePoll, suggesting that Gen Z people (in their teens and twenties) are much less likely than their parents to be atheists, and more likely to describe themselves as ‘spiritual’, and a more interesting picture emerges.

It is like thinking that it would be a good idea to learn another language and deciding to mix German verbs, Spanish tenses, French grammar, Portuguese nouns and Arabic verbs.

Most of the switching, says the Pew report, involves people moving to the ‘unaffiliated’ category. Rather than changing from Christian to Muslim, they're changing from Christian to, well, nothing. Or perhaps everything.

People are moving away from fixed forms of religion to a more general and diffuse sense of spirituality. The 20-something, brought up nominally Christian, now feeds her own inner life by enjoying nature, reading Tarot cards, shopping for crystals or buying a mindfulness app on her phone rather than going to church. It’s do-it-yourself religion, perfectly fashioned by an acquisitive age that wants us to be restless and dissatisfied so we buy more things that we think will make us happy. As Dan Kim has persuasively argued elsewhere on Seen & Unseen, there is a whole industry out there waiting to exploit our openness to the spiritual and mystical to sell us their stuff.

It‘s common to find forms of ‘spirituality’ these days that choose the bits it likes from a number of spiritual traditions of the past, while leaving saside the less attractive parts. It’s like a fruit smoothie mixed in a blender – a statue of the Buddha, a little Native American wisdom, a touch of feng shui, a whiff of incense, all mixed together to make you feel peaceful and more in tune with the world. The goal of all this is usually some sense of personal serenity or calmness. Yet this is typically far from what the spiritual traditions of the past had in mind.

It is like thinking that it would be a good idea to learn another language and deciding to mix German verbs, Spanish tenses, French grammar, Portuguese nouns and Arabic verbs. You might prefer French nouns to Latin ones, but the result will be highly idiosyncratic and not make a great deal of sense. As Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, religions operate like a language in having a set of practices that make sense in relation to one another and to the underlying beliefs that hold the thing together. Each spiritual path has an integrity within itself which doesn’t work if you try to blend them all together.

To think we know better than the ancients who over centuries developed the spiritual traditions of prayer found in the different methods of religious practice is, not to put too fine a point on it, a trifle arrogant. Whatever we come up with might bring us a sense of momentary peace, but it is unlikely to have the long-term effect that the deeper traditions of spirituality were meant for.

Prayer was never meant to be a technique to de-stress, to find personal tranquillity. It was not a way to find yourself, but to find God, and then you might find yourself – and the tranquillity - as a by-product. It was not a way to reassure you about your familiar ways, but to disturb you into new ones.

If spirituality is about finding personal peace, confirming us in our own individuality, endlessly stimulating new desires and longings, then swapping a Christian upbringing, with its insistence on attending church, and sitting next to awkward people who aren’t like you, confessing sins and learning to pray, for this kind of jumbled, personal spirituality seems very attractive. But what if spirituality is about learning practices that focus your mind and heart not on the trivialities of TikTok videos or Candy Crush, but on the true source of all goodness, beauty and truth? What if it is about learning the counter-intuitive skill of loving your neighbour as much as you love yourself? If so, then the kind of communal practices lying right under our noses, learned in a place like Church with all its flaws - a tried and tested spiritual path laid out for us by those experienced in the spiritual life in generations gone before, might just offer the most benefit in the long term.

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