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.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up

Article

Comment

Freedom of Belief

Politics

20 October 2025

5 min read

The UN promised freedom of belief — but 80 years later, it’s still elusive

Flawed, fragile but still vital to those without a voice

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

Trump addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly.

The White House.

It’s been 80 years since the United Nations was founded, at the end of the Second World War, primarily in an attempt to avoid a third global conflict.

So on that score, at least, I suppose one must accept that the UN has achieved its primary objective. But why, then, does the overall feeling towards the organisation today seem negative?

The UN’s founding charter outlined three other major goals alongside maintaining “international peace and security”: developing “friendly relations” among nations; international cooperation in solving economic, social, cultural or humanitarian problems; and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, “without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion”.

Given that the UN is comprised of 193 countries, it is perhaps little wonder that “friendly relations” and “cooperation” between all sides have not always been forthcoming, and that instead clear cliques have formed between Western countries on the one hand, and much of the rest of the world on the other. (Perhaps the clearest such clique at the moment is the 2021-founded “Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter”, the identities of whose members - China, North Korea, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, et al - may lead one to wonder what exactly it is in the UN charter they wish to defend. Short answer: “sovereignty”, code for doing whatever they wish, without interference.)

As for the pursuit of “human rights” - my primary focus as an employee of an NGO - perhaps the greatest obstacle remains the lack of a truly united consensus over which rights should be included in the definition.

The closest that the nations of the world have come to an agreement on this score was the adoption in 1948, three years after the founding of the UN, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was backed by 48 of 58 member states at the time, but which failed to secure the support of others, including apartheid South Africa, the former Soviet bloc, and Saudi Arabia.

A primary objection in the case of Saudi Arabia was to Article 18 of the declaration - the bit about religious freedom and which includes the claim that everyone should have the right to change their religion or belief, an issue that remains problematic for many of the not-so-united nations of the world today.

The UK, meanwhile, was happy to ratify the UDHR but expressed frustration at its lack of legal force, and it was nearly 20 years before another treaty, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, attempted to correct this.

But while the 174 signatories to the ICCPR - including Iran, Russia, Cuba and China (though the latter two without ever ratifying the treaty) - are at least on paper legally obliged to uphold this international treaty, the challenge of enforcement remains. For example, while the signatories of the ICCPR are obliged to provide freedom of religion as defined by Article 18 of the covenant, which closely resembles the same article of the UDHR, few practical tools exist to hold to account any state that fails to meet its obligations.

In the case of persistent violators like Iran - the focus of my work - it seems the best we can currently hope for is to see a “resolution” passed by the majority of member states, outlining the ways in which the particular violator has failed to provide its citizens with the religious freedom (among other things) that should be their right according to the international treaties it has signed, and calling on them to do better.

But when pariahs like Iran can merely continue to deny that such failures exist, call them “biased” and “political”, and all the while prevent access to the country to the independent experts (“Special Rapporteurs”) best able to ascertain the veracity of the allegations, such “resolutions” can at times appear rather hollow.

At the same time, for advocates of human rights in non-compliant countries like Iran, the public shaming offered by such resolutions at least provides an opportunity for otherwise voiceless victims to be heard on the international stage. And when real change inside the country can sometimes appear nigh-on-impossible, you tend to take the small wins, such as hearing the representatives of member states mentioning the names of individual victims or groups in the public arena.

Many mentions are made, for example, about the plight of the Baha’is during every UN discussion of human rights in Iran, and while it is less common to also hear about my own area of interest - the persecution of Christians in Iran - there is usually at least one mention, which for us advocates (and we hope also the victims we represent) provides some comfort and hope for future change.

So 80 years since the establishment of the UN, it is clear the organisation has much room for improvement, but I remain persuaded by the argument that if we didn’t have the UN, we’d have to invent it.

“Friendly relations” - a helpfully loose term - between our disunited nations will always be a challenge, but increased economic ties globally over the past 80 years have also provided potential pressure points for those who fail to follow the rules. (If, for example, Iran wishes to see sanctions removed, Western countries can and should continue to demand improvements in the area of human rights.)

As for the UN’s endeavour to see increased “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms”, the question of what such rights and freedoms should entail will continue to be debated, with persistent areas of challenge including not only religious conversion but also abortion and same-sex relations.

It is not uncommon, for example, to hear representatives of Muslim states such as Iran questioning what Western nations really mean by “human rights” and accusing them of using the term only as a “pretext” for their own “biased” agendas.

But for all its challenges, 80 years after its establishment the UN continues to offer the only forum today where countries of contrasting beliefs can come together to discuss their differences on the world stage.

Whether that is a worthwhile exercise remains a matter for debate, but to the degree that it is, the UN remains the primary channel through which such conversations can take place.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge your gift