In third volume of Charles Hodge’s 1871 systematic theology the Princeton Seminary professor offered a formula for how Protestants should understand moral responsibility in the context of what is generally  known as Ordo Amoris, or ordered love. Protestants, like Roman Catholics, generally affirmed hierarchies of affections, but likewise Protestants distinguished between that which is natural and spiritual.

 Hodge drew on what he believed was a necessary distinction between “morality and religion.” Quoting Friedrich Stahl, Hodge wrote that morality was the “perfection of man in himself (so far as the will is concerned); or the revelation of the divine being in man.” Man was “the image of God, and therefore in his nature is like God, perfect or complete in himself; and conformity to the divine image is for him the goal and command. (Matt. v. 45).” Religion, on the other hand, was “the bond between man and God, or what binds men to God, so that we should know and will only in Hun, refer everything to Him, entire consecration, the personal union with God.” For Hodge, this meant that fundamentally “love of our neighbor, courage, spirituality (the opposite of sensuality), may be simply moral virtues; whereas faith and the love of God are purely religious.” Hodge, via Stahl, could thus render the courage of a Napoleonic soldier “as a moral virtue (a state of the will); the courage of Luther was religious (a power derived from his relation to God).”

            Evangelicals in the 20^th and 21^st centuries often seized on a perceived division between that which is natural and spiritual, and between that which is moral and religious. This seems particularly pertinent in light of Vice President Vance’s invocation of Ordo Amoris to justify Trump’s immigration policies. While there are certainly important criticisms to make of Trump’s policies—Ross Douthat at the New York Times offered an even-handed engagement with Vance—Evangelicals intellectuals went so far as to reject not only Vance’s policies, but the idea that there were distinctions between affections and responsibilities to be had at all. Tyler Lee Conway, a chaplain at Baylor University, posted on X that it was “not a Christian virtue or even praiseworthy thing to love your family. Those are just basic human decencies that, in reality, should be a given. Jesus calls us to a higher concept of love.” In Conway’s reading familial love, what Hodge identifies as moral love of family, love of neighbor, etc, is separate from and subordinated to religious loves, what Conway calls “a higher concept” of love. Hodge, however, doesn’t let this modern Evangelical distinction off so lightly. “Religion and morality, although thus different, are not independent. They are but different phases of our relation to God.”

            Evangelicals lack of natural theology leads them to obliterate the Christian necessity, priority, and responsibility to prioritize family and neighbor. David Platt’s Radical is a book that suffers from Evangelicalism’s fundamentalist intellectual reductionism. Americans living naturally ordered lives were told they had missed something essential about the Gospel. At its worst, Platt sees the call of the Gospel not so much to redeem humanity, but to make humans in to angels. This has led to a situation where Evangelicals really do believe that someone is holier if they’re a missionary, than if they’re an unremarkable layperson. But that’s entirely different than the classical Christian and Protestant understanding of human vocation. If anything, modern Evangelicals invert Christian distinctions and priorities. They see their love for families as prudential and almost accidental instead of being Christian, while simultaneously, they see intervention in Ukraine or being a missionary as a profoundly Christian act. In fact it’s the opposite. There are prudential political reasons to support Ukraine, and there are particular people called to what we moderns call the mission field, but neither are explicit Christian duties. There is however an explicit Christian duty to love your family. The reality of ordered love and distinctions in the affections does not annihilate potential affections for immigrants or calls to the mission field, etc, but it does mean that God is not burning with anger at Christians living their day to day lives, providing for their families, and making their communities more prosperous and virtuous places.