Paterfamilias: JD Vance and The Imperial Caste System
“The normalization of hierarchy starts right away in our lives, with adults ruling over children (or minors as the state defines them). In the patriarchal bourgeois family, imposed as the norm over the last couple of hundred years of colonial conquest and industrial development, the father reins over the mother and the children. This model in the family merely reflects the father’s experience at work, where a boss rules over him. The chain of hierarchy goes up to the state, where the president looks over his citizens like stern father. The extension of the nuclear family as an expectation of social arrangement for all classes and races has an uneven history, and today it’s questionable to what extent anyone actually experiences anything like this idea. But still, for most, the family is the fallback position of care and dependency, and in the primacy of parental rights it replicates forms of control. This form of social organization not only took over more communal living arrangements for the European peasantry, it also erased the histories of different forms of kinship that Indigenous people practiced in the Americas and in Africa, as well as other colonized territories. The model was later imposed on descendants of these groups—in the USA, specifically to hold up racist ideologies of blood quantum and Blackness—as a value from which to judge an excluded group’s inability to assimilate. The replacement of extended kinship structures with nuclear families severs networks of care that everyone needs to survive, and ties us into the eternal bonds of blood belonging that often feel inescapable and harmful.”
The above passage comes from Shuli Branson’s book, Practical Anarchism: A Guide For Daily Life, which I’m currently reading and which seemed exceedingly relevant given the recent remarks made by U.S. vice president, JD Vance, in which he attempted to clumsily use Catholic theology to justify Trump’s cruel immigration crackdown. Apparently, Vance attempted to whip out the Augustinian concept of ordo amoris arguing that:
”There’s this old-school [concept] — and I think 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 in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world, A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”
Pope Francis quickly rebuked Vance’s twisted Christian nativism writing that
”Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups … The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.
But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.”
It’s great to see the Pontif responding so strongly and quickly to twisted theology like this, a response by a pope that Mother Jones describes as “nearly unprecedented in modern history.”
Considering all of this, what strikes me as very interesting is what Vance’s claim about the left actually might exposes about his own values, needs or beliefs. Vance claims the left inverts the Ordo Amoris and (according to The New Republic) “seem to hate the citizens of their own country, and care more about people outside their own borders.” Along with psychologist Marshall Rosenberg I find we can generally think of negative moral accusations made against other persons (or a group of persons) as essentially twisted expressions of our own conflicting values or unmet needs, meaning that when we criticize or blame someone (or in this case a group of someones: the “left”), we are actually confessing, reflecting our own needs that aren’t being fulfilled, rather than truly judging the other person’s actions as inherently wrong. Vance’s idea of a “blood-related family first” love exposes a belief and desire for a type of first century love alright, but the Pope is correct that it’s not Christian love. It’s imperial Roman love.
Most scholars I have encountered on this subject describe the first century imperial Roman concept of family (familia) as being deeply hierarchical and patriarchal, serving as the foundational unit of Roman society and the empire itself. Paterfamilias: The male head of the household held absolute authority over the family, including his wife, children, slaves, and extended relatives. This authority extended to matters of life and death, property, and legal decisions.
Contrast this Roman imperial understanding of family with Jesus’ radical redefinition of family in Mark 3:31–35, when he responds to news about his mother and brothers waiting for him by saying “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” This statement by Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, this call to radical discipleship, can be seen not only as challenging patriarchy but is oftentimes interpreted as intending to subvert traditional hierarchical family structures by prioritizing spiritual relationships (or internal relations) over blood ties.
Now since we know JD Vance likes to throw around latin theology phrases we should reflect on another one he intentionally (and, again, conspicuously) did not throw out: imago dei, a concept many (including me) consider to be a foundational aspect of Judeo-Christian belief with regard to the fundamental understanding of human nature. Imago dei simply means that we all bear the royal image of God! As Rev. Thomas Airey has beautifully written:
”When I read the Gospels through the lens of this radical royalty, Jesus jumps off the page, pitching the idea of a reign of God that belongs to peasant people who have been incessantly lied to and deceived by the propaganda of priests and politicians devoted to what the Romans called “the paterfamilias,” the imperial caste system, their version of the human hierarchy of value, with Caesar at the top and children at the very bottom, just below the women, the working poor, the sharecroppers and slaves, the chronically sick and injured.”
Jesus’ redefinition was nothing less than a radical political act then, and according to many scholars it still is today. In her work In Memory of Her theologian, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, highlights how Jesus’ inclusive vision of family challenged patriarchal structures and created a discipleship of equals. Fiorenza argues that early Christian communities sought to live out this radical vision, though patriarchal norms eventually reasserted themselves. Similarly, biblical scholar, John Dominic Crossan, in his book on the historical Jesus, argues that Jesus’ teachings on family were part of a broader critique of oppressive systems, including the Roman Empire.
Branson above is correct, we all require networks of mutual care in order to survive. Perhaps, if we recognize this, it might lead one to then ask the important question: Who among us needs the most care? It is the compassionate person who recognizes the most vulnerable. If we can do this, then, NOW we are on the path of Jesus, who follows up a debate about divorce in the Gospel of Mark with a vignette about caring for the “little ones” who are most often the victims of it. In the rigid social hierarchy of ancient times, children occupied the lowest rung—utterly devoid of status or rights, they were the “least of the least.” Even today, among the marginalized, children remain the most vulnerable, bearing the brunt of poverty, disease, conflict, displacement, and the collapse of social structures, including the family unit. It is precisely this profound vulnerability that compels Jesus to insist they be welcomed unconditionally, without reservation or exception.
May we all learn from this the Way of the cross and practice what Ched Myers calls “solidarity with ‘little ones’ in daily life. May we take on the Jubilary task in every social relationship in which power is unequally concentrated, and redistribute it—even in the context of traditional structures such as marriage and the family.” Amen.
0 Comments