21st Century Presidential Appeals to Augustine – from Obama to Vance

The use of Augustine in presidential political rhetoric has shifted from Obama’s global liberal realism to the brash nationalist integralism of  J.D. Vance’s most recent invocation of ordered love to justify the current administration’s policies on  immigration and deportation. These two views appeal to conflicting faces of Augustine’s view of neighbor love and threaten to empty Augustine’s famous notion of properly ordered love and the virtue of humanity. Such opposing appeals do not indicate incoherence in Augustine’s view of neighbor love but rather stem from an inadequate grasp of the complexity of Augustine’s view of horizontally ordered love of neighbor. Augustine adapted the Stoic ethical concept of oikeiosis to depict the competing concentric circles of affection that social and political leaders must mediate in fulfillment of their role-specific obligation to those near and far.