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Empathy is one of those things that really shouldn’t need defending.
Being aware of other people’s feelings, sensitive to them, and able to put yourself in another person’s shoes is pretty much essential for humans to function as a community. But the current conservative project has zero room for that sort of thing. And it’s not just that they don’t see the point of it. Rather, they see it as an active danger to civilization.
A new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute shows just how stark the divide between liberals and conservatives is on this:
While two-thirds of Americans — including 84 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of independents — agree that “empathy is a foundational moral value that helps build a healthy society” (68 percent), only 54 percent of Republicans and 48 percent of white evangelical Protestants agree. Notably, a majority of white evangelical Protestants (54 percent) believe the opposite: that “empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God’s truth.”
This is, to put it mildly, bleak as hell.
Like so many other bad things bedeviling us these days, Elon Musk bears significant responsibility for how we got here.
In late February 2025, Musk went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to explain how he was going to save us from “civilizational suicidal empathy.” If you’re wondering what on earth that means, it’s helpful to start with what Musk was obsessing about during the conversation:
If they had another four years, they would legalize enough illegals in the swing states to make the swing states not swing states. They would just, they would be blue states. Then they would … win the presidential; they’d win the House, the Senate and the presidency.
This is straight-up great replacement theory racist garbage — the conspiracy-addled idea that the Democrats are importing non-white undocumented immigrants who will replace white Americans. Musk shares this theory with Payton Gendron, who murdered 10 people, most of them Black, in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in 2022. He shares it with the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “you will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.” He shares it with Vice President JD Vance.
Musk went on to give Rogan his example of “civilizational suicidal empathy”: California deciding to expand its low-income medical insurance program to undocumented immigrants. And somehow, those sneaky immigrants know exactly how to manipulate the Good White People of the West: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
Musk’s antics here really do highlight how far the right has fallen morally. This isn’t some variation on the longtime conservative argument that people will become dependent on welfare or that the free market will provide or whatever. It’s just an unvarnished assertion that non-white people are taking advantage of the good graces of white people and that extending any aid to the former will destroy the latter.
During the same time period as this interview, Musk was putting his ideas into action, bragging about things like “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” Musk has continued to tell the laughable lie that destroying USAID caused zero deaths, when in reality it has already caused over 700,000 of them, and that number will continue to increase into the millions.
Musk didn’t invent the phrase “suicidal empathy.” You can thank Gad Saad for the idea that Western civilization is somehow overseeing its own demise by being too kind. Saad, a professor of marketing, even wrote a whole pseudoscientific book about it, and the worst people in the world seem to love it.
Saad believes the “progressive diversity cult” is killing the West and that progressives are “driven by misplaced and hyperactive faux empathy.” But the idea that the empathy progressives espouse is somehow fake or insincere actually says far more about the conservatives spewing this trash. People like Musk and Saad seem genuinely incapable of caring for people who aren’t just like them, and they assume that incapacity is universal. Therefore, liberals must just be lying when they express empathy.
Musk and Saad get to this conclusion in a secular way, but the loathing of empathy has champions in a particularly virulent version of evangelical Christianity. In the past two years, we’ve been treated to not one, but two, tomes from conservative evangelical writers on the sinfulness of empathy.
Yes, sinfulness.
In 2024, Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey gave us “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” and in 2025, pastor and professor Joe Rigney gave us “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits.”
OK, so it’s pretty obvious from both titles that Stuckey and Rigney share Musk’s view that somehow they are being taken advantage of. But where, exactly, does the sinfulness part come in?
For Stuckey, “empathy becomes toxic when it encourages you to affirm sin, validate lies or support destructive policies.” Of course, Stuckey and her ilk get to decide what counts as sin, a lie, or a destructive policy. Empathy can be good, she says, but evil liberals have co-opted the idea “to convince people that the progressive position is exclusively the one of kindness and morality.”
The notion that it’s progressives running around saying only their worldview is moral is rich coming from Stuckey. There are indeed people who believe that their worldview is the only morally proper one, but they are Stuckey’s fellow conservative evangelicals. But in Stuckey’s view, it seems, putting yourself in the shoes of someone whose circumstances, values, or lifestyle differ from yours will somehow lead you to affirm their sin and, if you’re not careful, be dragged right down into sinfulness with them.
As sad and cramped as Stuckey’s worldview is, Rigney’s is worse. According to him, empathy can somehow lead to “brazen malice and cruelty.” Rigney is a pastor at Doug Wilson’s Christian nationalist church in Idaho — the same denomination as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hegseth’s view of Christianity, of course, is actually one of brazen malice and cruelty, one that encompasses murdering fishermen by bombing them, one that calls Iranians “barbaric savages” and relishes the idea of restarting the Crusades.
To the extent that Stuckey and Rigney believe in the notion of empathy, it is only for people just like them.
See also JD Vance, America’s Bestest Catholic, who has managed to tangle with not one, but two, popes.
“Love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception”
Catholic theology has a concept of “ordo amoris,” Latin for “the order of love.” It comes from both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas and, broadly, means that the proper hierarchy of love, for Christians, is to love God first, then ourselves, then our neighbors.
In early 2025, as President Donald Trump’s brutal anti-immigration crusade was gearing up, Vance went on Fox to smugly explain how this works:
As an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. That doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders, but there’s this old-school [concept] — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.
You see? Jesus is totally cool if you’re a xenophobe! In fact, you have to be!
It’s sort of impressive that this was such a vast misstatement of theology that the actual literal pope decided to come forward and correct it immediately, albeit without naming Vance directly. Pope Francis wrote a letter to the American bishops addressing it:
Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups [...] The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.
Vance would go on, of course, to manage to get crosswise with Francis’s successor, Pope Leo XIV, over the war in Iran. Vance smugly told the pope to “be careful” when talking about theology said the pope was wrong to say that God is never on the side of the people who wield the sword because “there is more than a 1,000-year tradition of just-war theory.”
Ol’ JD is right about the 1,000-year tradition part, though wrong about pretty much everything else. This time, Bishop James Massa, chair of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, released a statement explaining that “a constant tenet of that thousand-year tradition is a nation can only legitimately take up the sword ‘in self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.’ That is, to be a just war it must be a defense against another who actively wages war.”
Vance’s worldview — like Musk, like Saad, like Stuckey, like Rigney — is that only people exactly like us are worthy of our compassion and that if we empathize with anyone different, it will destroy us. And, as the PRRI poll showed, it’s a worldview that has taken root with half of the white Protestant evangelicals in the country.
In contrast, Pope Leo, at an interfaith gathering earlier this year, said, “Human compassion and empathy are not something additional or optional but are a call from God to reflect his goodness in our daily lives.” He went on to say that both Christians and Muslims are called to “give voice to those who suffer and to transform indifference into solidarity.”
Right now, we’re living in Trump’s world, in Vance’s world, in Hegseth’s world. It’s the world of Metro Surge, of kidnapped five-year-olds and murdered mothers. It’s the world of 120 dead children, some of the earliest victims of Trump’s misbegotten, unnecessary war in Iran. It’s the world of the gleeful, remorseless murders of over 200 people in boat strikes.
This is what a world without empathy looks like. It’s a world of constant othering, of constant rage, of a constant belief that life is a zero-sum game. But nothing flourishes in that world.
It doesn’t really matter whether someone arrives at the notion that empathy is necessary via secular or religious means, as long as one gets there somehow. The alternative is to dwell in a small, vicious world without kindness or grace or fellow-feeling. And to do that really is a sin.
That’s it for now
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Thanks for reading.
Calling emathy a bad thing is serious moral treason. End of story.
Lisa Needham, what wonderful commentary. It could be retold at any interfaith gathering.
Your use of the word "misbegotten" could also apply to those who would cast out their brothers and sisters in service to their real god and master, cruelty.