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.

In the 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 the order of loves. 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 20th and 21st 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.

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