Five years ago, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan during a podcast taping that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.” By that time, the idea that people in the West are too concerned with the pain of others to adequately advocate for their own best interests was already a well-established conservative idea. Instead of thinking and acting rationally, the theory goes, they’re moved to make emotional decisions that compromise their well-being and that of their home country. In this line of thought, empathetic approaches to politics favor liberal beliefs. An apparent opposition between thought and feeling has long vexed conservatives, leading the right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro to famously declare that “facts don’t care about your feelings.”
But the current ascendancy of this anti-empathy worldview, now a regular topic in right-wing social-media posts, articles, and books, might be less a reasonable point of argumentation and more a sort of coping mechanism for conservatives confronted with the outcomes of certain Trump-administration policies—such as the nightmarish tale of a 4-year-old American child battling cancer being deported to Honduras without any medication, or a woman in ICE custody losing her mid-term pregnancy after being denied medical treatment for days. That a conservative presented with these cases might feel betrayed by their own treacherous empathy makes sense; this degree of human suffering certainly ought to prompt an empathetic response, welcome or not. Even so, it also stands to reason that rather than shifting their opinions when confronted with the realities of their party’s positions, some conservatives might instead decide that distressing emotions provoked by such cases must be a kind of mirage or trick. This is both absurd—things that make us feel bad typically do so because they are bad—and spiritually hazardous.
This is certainly true for Christians, whose faith generally counsels taking others’ suffering seriously. That’s why the New York Times best seller published late last year by the conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, is so troubling. In her treatise packaging right-wing anti-empathy ideas for Christians, Stuckey, a Fox News veteran who recently spoke at a conference hosted by the right-wing nonprofit Turning Point USA, contends that left wingers often manipulate well-meaning believers into adopting sinful argumentative and political positions by exploiting their natural religious tendency to care for others. Charlie Kirk, the Republican activist who runs Turning Point USA, said that Stuckey has demolished “the No. 1 psychological trick of the left” with her observation that liberals wield empathy against conservatives “by employing our language, our Bible verses, our concepts” and then perverting them “to morally extort us into adopting their position.” Taken at face value, the idea that Christians are sometimes persuaded into un-Christian behavior by strong emotions is fair, and nothing new: Suspicion of human passions is ancient, and a great deal of Christian preaching deals with the subject of subduing them. But Toxic Empathy is not a sermon. It is a political pamphlet advising Christians on how to argue better in political debates—a primer on being better conservatives, not better Christians.
Empathy is an ambiguous concept. When it was imported into English from German a little more than a century ago, empathy referred to one’s capacity to merge experiences with objects in the world, a definition that current usage bears little resemblance to: The Atlantic reported in 2015 that “the social psychologist C. Daniel Batson, who has researched empathy for decades, argues that the term can now refer to eight different concepts,” such as “knowing another’s thoughts and feelings,” “actually feeling as another does,” and “feeling distress at another’s suffering,” a kind of catchall term for having a moral imagination. Stuckey’s definition doesn’t distinguish among these different elements; she instead frames empathy itself as a specific emotion rather than a psychological capacity for understanding the emotions of others, which makes her usage especially confusing. Whatever it is, empathy isn’t something Stuckey wants to reject altogether: Jesus embodied a kind of empathy, and it can be, she says, “a powerful motivation to love those around you.”
The toxic kind of empathy, she contends, is the kind that makes you double-check your specifically conservative political priors. Some examples: “If you’re really compassionate, you’ll welcome the immigrant” and “If you’re really a Christian, you’ll fight for social justice.” This argumentative technique, in which Christians are asked to consider their political positions in light of the logic of their own faith, can hardly be described as empathy in any common sense of the term. This linguistic confusion between rational arguments about whether a person’s political positions are adequately Christian, on one hand, and arguments that people should reason from emotion, on the other, runs through the entire debate about empathy. What Stuckey seems to be saying is merely that progressive assertions summon certain emotions inside their conservative debate partners—such as pity and compassion—that make them unwilling to defend their premises, regardless of whether said conservatives are actually inhabiting the emotional states of other people. Labeling those emotions as fruits of toxic empathy is a strategy for dealing with them: It resolves the tension between what one feels and what one thinks by dismissing one’s feelings as misguided. This approach glibly ignores the possibility that such emotions are in fact the voice of one’s conscience, and takes for granted that ignoring one’s sympathies for other people is a good Christian habit of mind.
In that sense, the toxic-empathy rhetorical framework, built for producing peace of mind for conservative debaters, threatens to render Christians insensitive to moral demands of Christianity that run contrary to conservative preferences. “Toxic empathy claims the only way to love racial minorities is to advance social justice,” Stuckey writes at one point, “but ‘justice’ that shows partiality to the poor or to those perceived as oppressed only leads to societal chaos.” It’s true that every person should be judged equally in the administration of the law, but it’s also the case that Christianity actually does dictate that the needs of the poor and powerless should be prioritized in society. Far from being a misleading interpretation adduced by bad-faith actors in political debates, it is rather the plain meaning of the Gospels, attested to by thousands of years’ worth of Christian saints and thinkers who have declared that God especially loves the poor and the oppressed. That fact remains as radical today as it was when Jesus was preaching, and now, just as then, there are people who can’t stand to recognize it.
