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?”
Whatever you have to come up with to feel ok about condoning slavery.
I don’t, but the various books in the Bible were written in specific times and contexts, often times when slavery was common. The bible puts limits on slavery, says at various places to release slaves after 7 years, to pay them, to treat them well.
One place in the NT that deals with slavery (and is pretty controversial because of that), is when Paul sends an escaped slave back to his master, with a letter to the master telling him to treat the slave as a brother, because they’re brothers in Christ, both children of God.
Paul was trying to spread Christianity in Greece, where slavery was very common, and outright condemning it would probably make a lot of Greeks reject it. There are a lot of places where you can see Paul being very pragmatic about stuff as long as it helps spread the Word. So I guess “here’s you’re slave, but remember he’s your brother” is his compromise with slavery.
I don’t, I’m an atheist. I also recognize that if you throw out univocality, then you can happily throw out the slavery bits.
And you should throw out univocality to make any sense of the Bible at all.