Opinion: The problem with JD Vance’s theology of mass deportation
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A homie ended an email to me recently saying, “Today, I will surrender to God’s arms, then choose to be those arms.” Mystic and translator of mystics Mirabai Starr states plainly that “once you know the God of love, you fire all the other gods.” The God of love is the one who loves without measure and without regret. The one with wide-open arms, hoping we’ll love as we are loved.
I won’t pretend to a particularly deep understanding of St. Augustine’s notion of ordo amoris — about which Vice President JD Vance has encouraged us all “to google” — or of St. Thomas Aquinas’ further refinement of ordered, hierarchical love in his “Summa Theologica.”
Vance’s analysis is that we must prioritize. You love God first, of course, then “you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” he told an interviewer.
I suspect we need to fire the god who thinks there isn’t enough love to go around.
In keeping with L.A. tradition, demonstrators blocked a local freeway as they protested Trump’s hard-line policies.
Pope Francis weighed in a letter to U.S. bishops that rebuked the Trump administration’s plan for mass deportations of migrants. He posited that “the true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover … by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
A puny, self-absorbed, projection-of-ourselves God wants to be loved. But the God we actually have is self-effacing, spacious, wildly expansive and generous with love. In fact, God’s dream-come-true is the “fraternity open to all.”
Loving is our home. Once we discover that, we’re never homesick. Loving is where flourishing joy is located. It can’t be depleted. Indeed, “love never fails” (1 Corinthians: 13) and anyway, it is the thing that makes progress possible.
“Open arms” does not mean “open borders.” (Perhaps I’ve missed it, but I’ve never heard anyone advocate for open borders, for all the times the accusation has been leveled.) The pope in his letter merely asserted that there was enough love to protect the dignity of migrants, to protect our communities and to safeguard the truth that we belong to each other.
A coalition of immigrant activists calling itself ‘the Community Self-Defense Coalition’ says it will alert the community to ICE agents.
The hope is that we align our hearts to the God of love and then become the generosity of God in our world. An ordered, hierarchical love, in contrast, is fearful that we’ll run out of love. It betrays a “too much tribe, not enough village” disposition that shrinks our ability to be as magnanimous as our open-armed God is. Fear will do that.
What Vance, and perhaps even Augustine and Aquinas, couldn’t see is the “God who is always greater,” as St. Ignatius tells us. Always greater than our hierarchical, ordered notions.
It would seem that Jesus took four things seriously: inclusion, non-violence, unconditional loving-kindness and compassionate acceptance. This tracks with being God’s arms in the world.
The God of love wants us to find our way to the margins, knowing that if we do, the margins get erased. Rather than limiting our love to a priority list, we should stand with the poor, the powerless and the voiceless, with those whose dignity has been denied and those whose burdens are more than they can bear. Rather than depletion, we find fullness among the easily despised and readily left out. Our wholeness increases when we accompany the demonized and the disposable, so that the demonizing ends and we stop throwing people away.
Gov. Newsom’s office said he would again veto a bill that sought to restrict state prison officials’ cooperation with federal immigration authorities seeking to deport felons.
For 40 years, I’ve accompanied gang members as they seek to re-imagine their lives, leave behind desperate violence and embrace God’s hope for them. At Homeboy Industries we embrace two fundamental principles: Everyone is unshakably good; no exceptions. We belong to each other; no exceptions.
These principles don’t allow us to limit ourselves to a “first we love here, then we love there” checklist. We cherish as God cherishes. Cherishing is love with its sleeves rolled up. It enhances our ability to conceive of a humane system of immigration, rather than hinders it. It keeps millions of people from dying after the United States Agency for International Development funding stops. It even focuses us to tend to the environment, address mass incarceration and care for those least able to care for themselves.
Let’s fire the gods who keep us from discovering our true selves in loving. Like the homie who chooses to be the arms of God, we can find flourishing joy in welcoming the unwelcomed. We won’t ever be homesick.
Gregory J. Boyle, a Jesuit priest, is the founder of Homeboy Industries in L.A. His latest book is “Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times.”
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