What are we to make of J.D.Vance, the American Vice President? (No, please don’t answer. That was a rhetorical question.) Among his other contributions to debate, particularly that infamous exchange in the Oval Office, he was recently quoted as saying this:
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 and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.
This set of priorities has been described as Vance’s hierarchy of love, and apparently it’s his justification for ‘America First’. It drew a multitude of reactions. Someone said: ‘I guess, my opinion is, if you feed your neighbor while your child is starving, you’re not a good person’. On the other hand, someone else speculated that if, by some immigration error, a starving Sudanese seven-year old child turned up on J. D. Vance’s doorstep, he would in fact feed him, despite the poverty that remained within his own country.
So how do we feel about J.D.Vance’s hierarchy of love? It drew a lot of criticism. But mightn’t there be some honesty in it? I’m sure we too would feed the starving child at the door. But don’t we in practice, rightly or wrongly, usually prioritise in the order: self and family, then local community, then country, and only then the rest of the world?
Our Government has decided to prioritise defence over overseas aid, in other words, home over world. Needs must, they say, and we understand that. A Government’s job of priority is to defend the country and its citizens, and we understand that too, and it fits with J.D.Vance’s hierarchy of love. The Government could, of course, have decided to break its own self-imposed fiscal rules, but decided for whatever reason not to, and indeed would have incurred much criticism had it decided to do so.
But there are other rules that can be applied, rules of freewill and choice, and most notably the Christian rule. The Christian rule is a challenging rule: a hard rule, in fact. And it’s in this afternoon’s St Luke’s gospel reading. ‘If you want to be a Christian’, Jesus said – and I am paraphrasing – ‘if you want to be my follower, you may need to prioritise that over family and even life itself’. And now I’m not paraphrasing: ‘Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple’.
A cross is a terrible thing to be asked to carry: think of Jesus with his Cross. But we need to take this possibility into account. Perhaps not literally a cross or any loss of life, in most of our relatively civilised world. Jesus was prone to making his points with hyperbole, exaggeration – it’s one of his trademark teaching methods. But he certainly made his point then as he does now for us. There is a cost as well as joy to being a Christian, in what is expected of us. And we need constantly to be sure we are prepared. In Jesus’s comparisons that we heard in the reading, a builder needs to estimate the cost before he starts on his tower, and make sure he has enough to finish it, otherwise there will be derision from onlookers; and a king needs to be sure he can win a battle against superior forces before he decides not to sue for peace. (Putin, take note!)
Jesus’s hardest demand comes at the end of this: ‘So therefore’ he said’, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions’. I’m not sure what would happen to the world and its economy and civilisation as we know them if we all did that literally. Perhaps another of Jesus’s hyperboles. But exaggeration to make a serious point.
If I asked what you felt was the characteristic feature of moral life that Jesus commanded, what would you answer? You might repeat Jesus’s quotation from Hebrew scripture: love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself. Jesus’s interlocutor, you’ll remember, asked who the neighbour was who had to be loved as himself, and got the answer of the famous Good Samaritan story. The victim in the story was almost certainly Jewish, but the hero was a Samaritan, a semi-foreigner, a rival in religion, with much hatred dividing his kind from the pure Jews. So Jesus’s story was pretty radical, with the hated Samaritan exemplifying love of neighbour. Interestingly, Jesus then asked his questioner: ‘[Who] was neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ Clearly the Samaritan was the hero who showed love to his neighbour. But on the basis of the Samaritan also being neighbour to the wounded Jew, love is also due from the Jewish robbery victim to his Samaritan rescuer, who was ‘neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers’. There was to be reciprocal love, based on this incident, with reconciliation between these representatives of the two rival sects.
So where do we go from here? The Government has hugely reduced its overseas aid budget. If we regret that, if we seriously regret it, then perhaps we need to do something about it. We can protest if we wish, and it maybe, in the light of dramatic world-wide events, the Chancellor may be persuaded to reconsider her fiscal rules. But, more immediately, we can, individually and privately, decide to do something by way of offsetting the gap in overseas aid. Christian Aid Week is coming up soon. That way or another, we can make a significant contribution to overseas development. Christian Aid of course, and Oxfam, Medecins sans Frontières, the Red Cross and so on. And some have issued appeals on precisely this ground, of trying to make up a little of the reduction in Government aid to desperate people.
I’d like, this afternoon, to single out one particular charity as an example to illustrate this, known as Practical Action. It was founded in the wake of a book called Small is Beautiful, written about 50 years ago by the economist E. E. Schumacher. The charity’s original name was ‘Intermediate Technology Development Group’, which is a good indicator as to what they are about. They help poor local communities overseas develop locally sustainable means to improve their lives and livelihoods. Some years ago, my wife and I attended an open-air demonstration of what was current at the time. Do you remember when vehicles had leaf-springs underneath? Practical Action were demonstrating how poor farmers overseas could be shown how to heat old leaf-springs from derelict vehicles and beat them into useful plough shares. At the same exhibition, they had imported some natural materials from Africa, and showed how, with the right mixture, poor villagers could be shown how bricks could be made with just the sun to bake them. Nowadays, Practical Action promotes small-scale solar energy projects to provide light in the evenings for children’s study, and cooking stoves that don’t produce noxious fumes. But some developments are still simple ones. In a village called Kapalia in Bangladesh, there have been two problems: shortage of protein and shortage of vegetables. Practical Action have helped them build large, but simple, cages in the nearby river, to breed semi-captive edible fish, and to grow nutritious vegetable over the cages, drawing water from the river. What could be simpler or better?
If these organisations reported significant and sudden increases in giving, how persuasive that might be for the Government, either now or in the future, to restore the 0.7% target of GDP to which it is in principle committed.
Some say ‘Charity begins at home’. Yes, it certainly does. But, even in Vance’s hierarchy of need, charity doesn’t stop there. And it certainly extends to those in most need. And as Canon Roly reminded us in last week’s Community News, when people asked John the Baptist, ‘What then shall we do?’, he answered:
Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.
That’s a tough challenge for the world’s well-off nations, for our Government, and for us all.