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?”
Arguing empathy can be good — and bad
The word empathy appeared in English for the first time in 1908, taken from a German word, meaning “in-feeling.”
Though the word is relatively new to English, the impulse behind it — to feel for or with another — is much older. It forms a core precept across many religions. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” reads a common version of the Golden Rule.
Stuckey admits Jesus is an empathetic figure. In her book, the Southern Baptist from Texas writes, “In a way, Jesus embodied empathy when he took on flesh, suffered the human experience, and bore the burden of our sins by enduring a gruesome death.”
She's clear that empathy can be good. But she writes it has been co-opted “to convince people that the progressive position is exclusively the one of kindness and morality.”
“If you really care about women, you’ll support their right to choose,” she writes of this progressive line of thinking. “If you really respect people, you’ll use preferred pronouns. … If you’re really compassionate, you’ll welcome the immigrant.”
Rigney doesn't think empathy is inherently wrong, either. He finds fault with excessive or “untethered empathy” that's not tied to conservative biblical interpretations.
He has been talking publicly about these ideas since at least 2018, when he discussed the sin of empathy on camera with conservative Pastor Doug Wilson. Since 2023, Rigney has worked at Wilson’s Idaho church and seminary, affiliated with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.
