Everybody wants to save the world; nobody wants to help mom with the dishes
In the tweet heard round X-world: “Google ordo amoris,” our newly minted Vice President, J.D. Vance, brought to the fore a neglected yet essential common-sense doctrine of the Christian faith. The “ordo amoris,” or, ordered loves, emerges from Scripture and was first articulated as such in the 5th century by Augustine in City of God.
Augustine addressed how love goes wrong—namely by giving an object or person affection or love that does not accord with what is due. He says “When the [cheapskate] prefers his gold to justice, it is through no fault of the gold, but of the man; and so with every created thing. For though it be good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately…” Our loves should be ordered, that is, appropriate in degree, not just when relating to objects but also to people.
James R. Wood expounds on this in his excellent essay Ordering Our Social Loves,
Christian moral theology has emphasized this through exposition of the fifth commandment. We are commanded to honor our father and mother. This relationship is not a voluntary society, which is the preferred social mode of liberalism. No, you do not choose your parents—and the parent-child relationship is the most fundamental for one’s identity (apart from one’s relationship to God).
Augustine, in his exposition of the ordo amoris, describes other relations similarly. Though we are commanded to love everyone, priority in our loves should go to those “who are most closely bound to you by place, time, or opportunity, as if by lot.”
To Augustine, virtue was found in rightly ordered loves. And this encapsulates so much of what’s wrong with love in 21st-century America. We live in a time of dis-ordo amoris––many would rather virtue signal on social media, exercise charity by off-loading it to a governmental program delivering who-knows-what to who-knows-where, or love their neighbor with a theoretical love for anyone but their actual next-door neighbor.
This is where PJ O’Rourke’s pithy saying sums up disordered loves so well: “Everybody wants to save the world; nobody wants to help mom do the dishes.” You’ll have to forgive me for having never read his book that birthed that gem, but his quotable sentence found its way to me ages ago and lodged deeply into my psyche as a young mom battling guilt over all sorts of bizarre “obligations” that weren’t mine to bear. As many young mothers can attest, there is a temptation to be always thinking of the good you can’t do (but feel like you should do) somewhere out there rather than lean into the duties set before you by God in your own home.
The Lord gives us, by providence and circumstance, particular duties and obligations—when you’re a new mom or dad, these duties have a tiny face and a fresh name, they are not nebulous duties to be done by donating to some cause out there brought to you by the siren song of a sad Sarah McGlothlin, they are concrete tasks for the well-being of another small human.
This brings us to Vice President Vance’s statements on Fox News: “There is a Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that…”
I offer one addendum to the Vice President’s remarks: Ordered love starts with love for God.
Trying to order our loves without God at the center is like a wheel without a hub, a ladder without a frame, a house without a foundation, a tree without roots. It can’t be (rightly) done. And when it is tried, you end up with rank hypocrisy, which is precisely what the Vice President was criticizing the far left for. When you try to love the people and objects around you without first loving the God who made the world, who made fathers and mothers to have children, who made neighborhoods and nations, who made the Minnesota winters and the west Texas heat, who is himself the author of love, then you end up trying to be God—that is, redefining love on your own stupid terms. It is far easier to pretend that love is some sort of nebulous goodwill disseminated by pork bills pushed through Congress for the “common good” than to be loyal to the one true God and discipline yourself to do what he’s required of you day after day for the good of the people he’s put next to you day after day.
Mom says, “Hey, can I get some help with these dishes?” and too many are puffed up with their mini-god visions of grandeur, “Sorry mom, the smelt fish needs me!” or, more realistically, “Sorry real-life people, the internet needs me!” The people and tasks of our normal lives are largely unglamorous—which is why it’s incumbent upon us to care for these first and so prove ourselves able to do more (and God will certainly give us more). The Pharisees were condemned for ignoring the command to honor their father and mother as they tried to make themselves more spiritual than God. They took what would have gone to their parents and turned it into a pious offering (Mark 7:9–12). But God wasn’t pleased with that kind of hypocritical virtue-signaling.
My encouragement to the Vice President is to keep going. Remind the citizens of the United States that their loves should be rightly ordered, reject the false piety of the left, which, in the name of love and goodwill, transmits so much immorality to the ends of the earth. But we must be sure we are beginning with:
“one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible,”
“one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvationcame down from heaven,”
“the Holy Ghost the Lord, and Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son…”
who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified…”
Image Credit: Unsplash
You are a woman. Why are you writing for the public? Don’t you have a floor to scrub?
NO conservative woman had any right to exist in public whatsoever. If being a domestic doormat is women’s only purpose then you need to lead by example and shut up. Show us just how powerful a penniless, powerless housewife is!
The usual hysteria and absurd caricature from Karen.
Why are you allowing a woman who has a husband to speak in public at all? Your version of the Bible teaches that women are supposed to be silent, mindless domestic drudges not editorial writers. No conservative women should ever be seen out of doors and certainly should never speak in any kind of public place. Lead by example and follow your own teaching.
Just stop. You should be embarrassed to act with such immaturity in public.
Why should I stop telling the truth? Every single time American Reformer publishes a woman’s article, you expose yourselves as liars. You do NOT really think that being a homemaker is enough for every woman. You accept women as leaders as long as those women tell the rest of us to get back to scrubbing floors in oppressed silence. I want you to be consistent; if abused silence is all women need, then abused silence is even more important for your women. Lead by example and keep all your women indoors forever.
You’re not telling the truth. That’s the point. Also, you keep using the word you, as if I were somehow associated with American Reformer. I’m not. I’m just a reader, but I can’t stand your over-the-top hysterics and dishonest caricatures. They’re absurd and unhelpful.
Karen, it might surprise you to learn that most Christians don’t believe what you appear to think they believe.
Lydia was one of the Apostle Paul’s converts in Macedonia, and she was a merchant. We’re given no evidence that Paul commands her to stop selling her wares when she becomes a Christian.
The Bible doesn’t prohibit women from speaking in public. Paul says women should be silent in church (1 Cor 14:34), but that command is interpreted differently among different conservative Christian circles. Some say Paul is correcting the error of women prophesying in church, some say he’s talking about only preaching or prayer (or both), others say he means all speech. Similarly, Paul’s teaching that women should cover their heads in church (1 Cor 11) also has a range of interpretations depending on who you ask.
You have a number of misconceptions about the Christian faith that seem to be backed by some deep-seated personal bitterness. I suggest taking a more open-minded and charitable reading of the authors’ intentions at AmRef.
I am very much aware of the differing interpretations Christians have for the role of women. Abigail and Lydia are my two favorite Bible characters. If I had had a daughter I would have named her ‘Abigail Lydia.” I belong to a church that ordains women to all positions and encourages women to use our gifts in all areas of society.
My objection is that conservatives, like those who write for American Reformer, teach that women should have no public roles whatsoever, and then put women like the writer of this piece in public roles. Phyllis Schlafly is the perfect example of this: an antifeminist who ran for Congress when her oldest child was two, always had nannies and maids, always had a very public role telling other women to live in exactly the opposite way she did. If a person believes women should be confined to the home, I expect that person to live that way. No public roles for women at all. Either be a feminist or have only males in any kind of important position.
It may be that we confuse love with desire. It appears we have so many loves but we do not understand what the books call divine love. Everything that has been written…everything that will ever be written about love is not love. We have disorder because we do not know what love is and we accept what others or books or whatever has told us about it. It may be that all that we know is a personal love and we justify it because we see only our physical/psychological survival in it…and we call that nature (because the animals do it)? It might be that to glimpse love not created by thought we must go within, deeply where no one can help us. It is interesting that many of the innumerable ancient texts on their versions of truth, at their core, usually hidden under centuries of dogma, point to the thing that the following words try to point to: “Know Thyself”
What does it mean to find out what divine love is when one sees the fact that no one in the history of the world…no one in the future of the world can help them? It might be that a responsibility of the greatest magnitude can be found. If you are interested in the truth you have a responsibility (you alone) otherwise one can sit back and quote from books and others that have conditioned ones mind and that allows one to escape. There is no escape my friends. Please, belief has nothing to do with this and the biggest mistake is to believe anything one has typed here.
While the strange interlude about whether or not allowing Dodds to ‘teach’ here is interesting …
in part because countless Christian Nationalist or Christian Authoritarian preachers went off on women – on the ‘Left’ – who were ‘Jezebel spirits’ – once Trump won had NOTHING to say about loud b-tchy women being nominated and appointed to Trump Administration power OVER MEN – because they happen to like THOSE loud b-tchy women …
let’s move on the topic of a Godly ‘ordering of our loves. In that matter, THANK YOU DODDS for noting that Vance said little – or was it ACTUALLY NOTHING!? – about God! WOWzee poo poo if he said nothing about God. Saying nothing or little about God says a lot – not a little – about Vance.
How wonderful Dodds brought us to God’s direct, explicit – tangible, observable – command of moral duties regarding out parents. Upon my father’s death I wrote a short homily to contribute to the memorial service referencing that command of God and how good it is. But my sister – in a ‘Jezebel spirit’ mode – leveraged her power with Mother to keep my homily out. I let Mother read it later, after some time of grieving and recovery. Dodds reveals how ‘false pieties’ and ‘virtue signaling’ can distort the good commands of a good God. Yes, that is a powerful tug of fleshy self pride, self indulgence, self aggrandizement. That’s the fleshy pull Apostle Paul talked so much about, the will take over our lives, unless we have the life of God’s Spirit.
Indeed, the ‘Left’ has aplenty of fleshy ‘false pieties’ and ‘virtue signaling’. But so does the ‘Right’ and so explicitly does ‘Trump cultural Christianity’. Dodds exclaims against the ‘cultural Christianity’ of the Left but appears to ignore the ‘culture Christianity’ of the Right. Trump suck-ups spew ‘false pieties’ about Trump, Vance, Musk, et al countlessly! About Musk alone I’ve seen unending scrolls of what a pious Christian he is, how much he loves God, what goodness God is bringing out of Musk’s brilliance, etc … I suspect most of these are AI-created sites, posts, videos (yes, long videos about the Godliness of Musk!). There is clearly a demonic power of AI being deployed to glorify Musk; just as Internet had/does boundlessly glorify Trump; IMPROPERLY ordering our loves … away from the true God … toward a false God.
Dodds, where is your commentary on the unbounded idolatries and blasphemies gloryifying unbounded fleshy pursuits of poverty, privilege, wealth … and POWER – by Dominionist, Christian Nationalist, Christian Authoritarian, and other ‘Right’ sycophants? If you wanted to discuss that over dishes … with Mother I always preferred to wash, rather than the dry.
Also,
you UTTERLY MISS something VAIN VANCE missed: IF you are not NOTICING the poor, sick, distressed, hurt, etc where you live – who ARE IN FACT NEAR TO YOU – you ARE ALREADY NOT ‘ordering your loves’ by God’s command!!! If you are not SEEING/ENCOUNTERING/ENGAGING the poor, sick, distressed, hurt, etc at the grocery where you shop, at the school where the kids go, the guys/gals who pick up your garbage, etc … these and many more are GIVEN TO YOU, AS PART OF YOUR LIVING that you are care about, too. They are not RANDOM or INCONSEQUENTIAL. Jesus’ ‘Samaritan tale’ is about that: THE encounters are NOT RANDOM. THEY ARE IN GOD’s ORDER. Some avoided their moral duties. The Samaritan did not.
And a thousand years of teaching in the Hebrew scriptures about ‘strangers in the land’, immigrants/refugees, widows and orphans, all those in need of your attention and/or care – that Jesus of Nazareth AFFIRMED AND FULFILLED – are commands to YOU, Dodds, and all who claim to follow Jesus.
Are they not?