The “Ordo Amoris” and Doctrine that Tastes Good

(Guest post from ~lagrev-nocfep)

Given the recent discussion of ordo amoris and the morality of foreign aid, there’s an important elaboration or modification of naïve biblical morality (the sort of surface reading that less-lettered Christians fall prey to, or which is used rhetorically by leftist religious leaders) which the Book of Mormon adds. The BoM is explicitly conspiracy-theoretical, which means it adds a layer of nuance concerning subversion. Should you care more for people suffering overseas than for children in your neighborhood is one question. Should you try to solve the problems that you personally know, or the problems that a network of untrustworthy—possibly hostile—possibly malicious—people inform you exist and will be solved if you take the actions they tell you is another.

The origin point for this discussion is the statement by Vice President JD Vance that,

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

In a follow-up, Vice President Vance clarified that he referred to ordo amoris, the Christian belief in a “a hierarchy of obligations”. (Indeed, this order of love is Confucian and Taoist as well: classical moral theories prioritize proximity.)

Many have scoffed at Vance’s interpretation. Citing the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Sermon on the Mount, interlocutors of Catholic, Protestant, LDS, and secular persuasions have attacked Vance’s theology, demanding instead a utilitarian calculus of needs that prioritizes overseas tragedies over cleaning one’s own home and town.

However, the hierarchy of responsibility and love is good doctrine. “It tastes good.” Elder Neal A. Maxwell taught that,

The same God that placed the star in a precise orbit millennia before it appeared over Bethlehem in celebration of the birth of the Babe has given at least equal attention to placement of each of us in precise human orbits so that we may, if we will, illuminate the landscape of our individual lives, so that our light may not only lead others but warm them as well. (That My Family Should Partake, p. 86)

Elder Maxwell saw, here and elsewhere, a divine significance in our encounters, beginning with our families, but grounded in the reality of personal contact. Other prophets and apostles have taught the same. This fits comfortably with the gospel’s emphasis on the body, on being an actual person in a actual place with specific relationships. The creeds and their secular versions have always been more comfortable with abstractions. But LDS thought underscores that you are a real, material body, in the image of God the Father, set in a particular time and place to work a particular work.

In the prepared high-room/he implements inside time and late in time under forms indelibly marked by locale and incidence, deliberations made out of time, before all oreogenesis/on this hill/at a time’s turn/not on any hill/but on this hill. (David Jones, The Anathemata, 52-53).

Paradoxically, Jesus taught both a doctrine of willingness to reject one’s family if they reject the gospel (e.g. Luke 14:26), and a doctrine of allegiance, such as his concern for his mother at the foot of the cross. What these have in common is that they are personal: it is the encounter of two souls, like Philip and the eunuch or Stephen and Paul, which is the catalyst of conversion. Even commands to the apostles to save the nations require them to go forth in person and testify.

The Book of Mormon embraces a morality much like the New Testament’s. However, the critical addition, which is both explicit and demonstrative, is that Cainic oaths are a civilizational toolchain attack. That is, the introduction of “secret combinations” undermines the social trust that makes society possible. Like a computer virus, once the oaths have been introduced one cannot trust anything without verification.

The Nephite dissenters did not all discover the oaths of Cain, although once introduced the forms were reused again and again. What they had in common were deceitful attemps to manipulate the morality of the common Nephite. The kingsmen and the robbers alike appealed to liberty and rights. The Gadianton robbers cloaked their appeal in a secular rhetoric, as Giddianhi wrote to Lachoneus, attempting to beguile the faithful Nephites to betray themselves by a false adherence to their principles (3 Nephi 3:10):

I hope that ye will deliver up your lands and your possessions, without the shedding of blood, that this my people may recover their rights and government, who have dissented away from you because of your wickedness in retaining from them their rights of government.

The Large Plates of the Book of Mormon retain an undercurrent of anxiety from the days of Mosiah onwards about the Jaredite record and its consequences. The Cainic oaths destroyed the Jaredite civilization. Their existence was considered hazardous to even know about. Alma charged his son to not reveal this information (Alma 37), knowing that it would sweep like a wildfire through the high-trust Nephite society. And however Kishkumen discovered or recovered the system of oaths (seemingly by catastrophe), once introduced they burned indeed. Gadianton perfected the system as an anti-covenant.

Furthermore, the Book of Moses expansion in Joseph Smith’s New Translation recounts something like what must have been on the brass plates or the Jaredite record:

²?And Satan said unto Cain: Swear unto me by thy throat, and if thou tell it thou shalt die; and swear thy brethren by their heads, and by the living God, that they tell it not; for if they tell it, they shall surely die; and this that thy father may not know it; and this day I will deliver thy brother Abel into thine hands. … ³¹And Cain said: Truly I am Mahan, the master of this great secret, that I may murder and get gain. Wherefore Cain was called Master Mahan, and he gloried in his wickedness. (Moses 5:29, 31).

The Book of Mormon came forth into a world already rife with conspiracies both virtuous (the Order of Cincinnatus) and malign. (The Freemasons straddle this line, but I do not want to get sidetracked into “classical” conspiracy theory.) The Book of Mormon is uniquely concerned with this “conspiratorial” worldview because it recognizes that the American experiment into which Joseph Smith was born, and which was prepared and selected for the restoration of the Gospel, was and would be torn and contested and controlled by secret combinations.

An ethical framework, such as utilitarianism, which weighs the personal responsibility of a parent for a child precisely as much as the abstract responsibility for a stranger 8,000 miles away is not ethical at all: it denies the body; it is grossly immoral. Such opens up the family to be destroyed by sapping resources and attention, an exercise in spending a dime and losing a dollar. But even if not, permitting such a morality into one’s worldview is a Trojan horse for exploitation.

We already live in a world in which spiritual wickedness in high places sets the desperate against each other for their own gain. The Cainic oaths are sworn, if not explicitly, then by proxy as those involved seek gain at the cost of destabilizing their families, towns, states, countries, and societies. No appeal to sweet words of Christian charity can cover the real effects of secret combinations. Indeed, such are sugar to let the poison down