THE Trump administration this week closed down the world’s biggest aid operation — the American government’s Agency for International Development (USAID)— locked all its staff out of their offices, shut off their emails, and closed its website. It issued “stop work orders” to all aid contractors. HIV testing in Sierra Leone stopped immediately. Uncertainty descended on everything, from education for women in Afghanistan to food aid for Sudan, where 40 million people are on the edge of starvation.

The feisty new White House spokeswoman, the 27-year-old Karoline Leavitt, told reporters: “I don’t want my [tax] dollars going towards this crap and I know the American people don’t either.” The entire future of USAID — which last year gave out 42 per cent of the world’s humanitarian aid with a budget of $72 billion — is in doubt after President Trump accused it of being run by “radical lunatics” obsessed with “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering”.

Intriguingly, the Vice-President, J. D. Vance, has attempted a theological justification for this by quoting the ordo amoris, the hierarchy of love articulated by Sts Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas: “You love your family, then you love your neighbour, then you love your community, then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you could focus . . . [on] the rest of the world.”

Not everyone agrees. The Anglican former Cabinet minister Rory Stewart criticised it as “a bizarre take on John 15.12-13” to justify slashing aid to the world’s poorest 470 million people. Mr Vance has missed the fundamental point of the parable of the Good Samaritan: everyone is your neighbour. The American Jesuit Fr James Martin added that Jesus was often critical of those who would put family first: “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” Mr Vance’s order of love was “more pagan/tribal” than Christian, Mr Stewart concluded.

There is some truth in that. When I was writing my massive study of philanthropy (Books, 11 September 2020), I traced this idea of concentric circles of compassion back beyond Aristotle to Confucius, who (like Aquinas) thought that you should love your father more than your mother. Both, however, highlighted the imperative to care particularly for “widows, orphans, childless men, and those who were disabled by disease”. There is something similar in even older societies. In the eighth century BC, the Celtic King Leir (precursor of Shakespeare’s Lear) believed that the duty of the father to his offspring should be reciprocated by his children, unless they were unnatural.

Common sense says we must love our children better than other people’s. But Christianity is a corrective to common sense here: it offers the radical invitation to think also about people outside our circle.

Part of the problem is that we use one word, “love”, to mean many things. Love for your children speaks of something instinctual, unconditional, and deeply emotional. It doesn’t require effort. Love for your country is about culture and collective belonging. It inspires loyalty, and calls on duty. Love for your enemy, in contrast, requires adherence to the spiritual principle of willingness to treat an adversary with dignity and not seek revenge: it is about restraint, overcoming hatred, and forgiveness. There is something there for J. D. Vance to consider.