Last week, I attended a conference on rural poverty. It was the annual meeting of Together for Hope, a coalition of nonprofits scattered from the North Carolina coast west to the Four Corners region and from Northern Minnesota to the Rio Grande Valley.
They are laser focused on reducing persistent rural poverty in the 338 poorest counties in the country, those in which more than 20% of the population have lived below the poverty line for three decades. Together for Hope engages rural poverty through education, health and nutrition, housing and environment, and social enterprise (facilitating business start-ups in small towns).
The coalition is a mix of Christian, church-related organizations (of many flavors), universities and think tanks and humanitarian funding agencies such as the Kellogg Foundation.
Richard Conville
During a panel on maternal health, one presenter sadly observed, “Our Christian values don’t always translate into policy.” In that setting we all knew what she meant — and agreed.
But then I wondered: Outside those doors, in our current world of bare-knuckled politics and rapidly changing demographics, how would those words go down? Whose Christian values are we talking about?
The presenter was expressing values that come out of progressive and Mainline Protestant and progressive and moderate Catholic understandings of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, teachings found, for example, in the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 5-7 (The Sermon on the Mount), in the fateful sermon Jesus preached in his hometown of Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30) and in Jesus’ Parable of the Good Samaritan.
Consider the parable. To those who heard it, there was no such thing as a “good” Samaritan. They were scum; they had rejected the God of the Jews whose home was the temple in Jerusalem; they were unclean in every way and were to be avoided at all costs. Yet, that Samaritan man, of all people, demonstrated the kind of love Jesus had taught when he quoted Leviticus 19:18, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
“Love and its close cousin, empathy, can be risky and costly.”
The Samaritan showed great empathy when he stopped to help the injured man beside the path. And that empathy was risky: the hoodlums who robbed the injured man might have remained nearby; the Samarian spent time helping the injured one; and he spent money for his lodging and care. Love and its close cousin, empathy, can be risky and costly. A positive return is not guaranteed. It is not a transaction.
But there are other voices, prominent in the current administration, who espouse vastly different values they claim are Christian values. Vice President JD Vance is one of those. Vance whistles past those explicit teachings of Jesus cited above and urges us to believe love (empathy) is to be hoarded, then carefully extended to others “in proportion to their worth,” to family first then to neighbors then to one’s community and then to citizens of one’s country.
This is the concept of ordo amoris (order of love). Despite originating with St. Augustine (354-430 CE), the concept has been rejected by both Pope Francis and Pope Leo and by most Catholics. Leo has been quite explicit: “JD Vance is wrong. Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
Vance and the Trump administration have used this theological concept to justify their America First agenda that resulted in the virtual abolition of USAID. Public health programs for AIDS prevention and treatment in developing countries, principally in Africa, were terminated as were hunger prevention programs in war-torn regions and early warning systems for tracking viruses such as Ebola and COVID-19 around the world. These and other programs were cut so their funds could be redirected to America. What we got at home, though, were more cuts — to SNAP, the ACA and Medicaid.
Conclusion? Vance and the presenter at the rural poverty conference are doing the same thing: applying their values to their politics. Vance would have us hoard our empathy, saving it for those closest and dearest to us, while the conference presenter (and, given her religion, Jesus) would have us extend our empathy freely to the world. Those vastly different values, when they guide political decisions, yield vastly different political outcomes, as we’ve seen vividly over the last 10 years.
So vote next Tuesday, for sure. Vote keenly aware of your own values, especially if the values of the politicians in power seem alien to yours. Vote your values.
Richard Conville is professor emeritus of communication studies and service learning at the University of Southern Mississippi and a long-time resident of Hattiesburg, where he is a member of University Baptist Church.