WASHINGTON (AP) — Empathy is usually regarded as a virtue, a key to human decency and kindness. And yet, with increasing momentum, voices on the Christian right are preaching that it has become a vice.
For them, empathy is a cudgel for the left: It can manipulate caring people into accepting all manner of sins according to a conservative Christian perspective, including abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights, illegal immigration and certain views on social and racial justice.
“Empathy becomes toxic when it encourages you to affirm sin, validate lies or support destructive policies,” said Allie Beth Stuckey, author of “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.”
Stuckey, host of the popular podcast “Relatable,” is one of two evangelicals who published books within the past year making Christian arguments against some forms of empathy.
The other is Joe Rigney, a professor and pastor who wrote “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits.” It was published by Canon Press, an affiliate of Rigney’s conservative denomination, which counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth among its members.
These anti-empathy arguments gained traction in the early months of President Donald Trump’s second term, with his flurry of executive orders that critics denounced as lacking empathy.
As foreign aid stopped and more deportations began, Trump’s then-adviser Elon Musk told podcaster Joe Rogan: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
Even Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, framed the idea in his own religious terms, invoking the concept of ordo amoris, or order of love. Within concentric circles of importance, he argued the immediate family comes first and the wider world last — an interpretation that then-Pope Francis rejected.
While their anti-empathy arguments have differences, Stuckey and Rigney have audiences that are firmly among Trump’s Christian base.
“Could someone use my arguments to justify callous indifference to human suffering? Of course,” Rigney said, countering that he still supports measured Christ-like compassion. “I think I’ve put enough qualifications.”
Historian Susan Lanzoni traced a century of empathy’s uses and definitions in her 2018 book “Empathy: A History.” Though it’s had its critics, she has never seen the aspirational term so derided as it is now.
It’s been particularly jarring to watch Christians take down empathy, said Lanzoni, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School.
“That’s the whole message of Jesus, right?”
I had a really good preacher growing up. Probably a big part of why I don't hate all religion.
He spoke of compassion, of the teachings of the bible as he felt was to be a good person. Viewed being Christian as being like Christ as much as much as one was possible, but people fail to live up to it, that's our failings, but to believe is to still keep striving for that perfection.
2001 happened, and the hatred to Muslims came. Then one day, the preacher is talking about an extremist, one that is hated by the government, outspoken to the government, that people hated and reviled. A man from the middle east. "That is our lord and savior." You could have heard a pin drop in that room when everyone was figuring he was talking about a Muslim radical instead of Jesus. It was a call against the fear mongering, to love our neighbors even if we don't believe the same, to not assume the worst about people. He described how we usually get Jesus wrong in looks, that he'd be one of those we'd be persecuting post 9/11 America because of his looks, showing a magazine cover where a group of anthropologists reconstructed what Jesus likely looked like based on what they knew of the people of that region of that time, had the magazine on display in the hall where people gathered after worship.
It wasn't a year later that he was removed from being the preacher of that church. Probably a big part of why I'm not a believer anymore.
I think he won the best preacher's pulpit, one no corrupt church leadership can take away: Your heart. It will beat to his words, for many more decades to come.