APRIL 19th: THE NEXT WORLDWIDE DAY OF ACTION

April 5th across the country and world

was amazing! And now we need to keep the

momentum going and grow our movement

and deep solidarity stronger and stronger!

We’re all in this together! — Molly

Loathe Thy Neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian Right Are Waging War On Empathy

An excellent, illuminating, and very disturbing article. Here the dark forces of those in power are exposed which are attacking and dismantling not just democracy, but also our greatest strengths and gifts that we embody as human beings. What is most sacred and loving within us is being desecrated. Chilling. — Molly

Trump’s actions are irreconcilable with Christian compassion. But an unholy alliance seeks to cast empathy as a parasitic plague

By Julia Carrie Wong

Just over an hour into Elon Musk’s last appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the billionaire brought up the latest existential threat to trouble him.

“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said. “And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.”

The idea that caring about others could end civilization may seem extreme, but it comes amid a growing wave of opposition to empathy from across the American right. Musk learned about “suicidal empathy” through his “public bromance” with Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor whose casual application of evolutionary psychology to culture war politics has brought him a sizable social media following. By Saad’s accounting – and this is not dissimilar from the white nationalist “great replacement theory” – western societies are bringing about their own destruction by admitting immigrants from poorer, browner and more Muslim countries.

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” Musk continued to Rogan, couching his argument in the type of pseudoscientific language that’s catnip to both men’s followings on X. “The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

The idea that empathy is actually bad has also been gaining traction among white evangelical Christians in the US, some of whom have begun to recast the pangs of empathy that might complicate their support for Donald Trump and his agenda as a “sin” or “toxin”. The debate has emerged among Catholics too, with JD Vance recently using the medieval Catholic concept of “ordo amoris” to justify the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and foreign aid. (Vance’s stance – that it’s righteous to privilege the needs of one’s family, community and nation over those of the rest of the world – earned a rebuke from the pope, but support from other influential Catholic thinkers.)

It’s not every day that evolutionary psychologists and evangelical creationists end up on the same side of an issue, but it’s also not every day that empathy is treated as anything other than a broadly positive feature of human experience – your standard, golden rule-type stuff.

Donald Trump, center, prays during an ‘Evangelicals for Trump’ coalition launch event in Miami, Florida, in 2020. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Coined in 1908 as the English translation of the German “Einfühlung”, or “in-feeling”, empathy originally referred to the feelings a person might have when projecting themself into a piece of artwork or nature. It is now understood to mean both the effortful, cognitive process by which a person projects themself into another’s situation and point of view, and to the unconscious (and at times unwelcome) affective process by which another person’s emotions can influence or even take over one’s own. It is variously described as an innate characteristic and a skill that can be acquired and honed; some see in it the potential to learn, others to heal.

The study of empathy begins with a central mystery of subjective existence: what are the limits of the self? If I can be transported into a work of art or piece of music, can I also extend my consciousness into another person’s thoughts and feelings? It also speaks to one of the great quandaries of social life – that we can never really know what other people are thinking and feeling. Is your blue my blue? Is your pain my pain?

How we relate to the pain of others is a question that always lurks beneath our politics, but it’s one that is particularly relevant now. In its first months, the Trump administration has begun to implement a radical rightwing regime featuring mass deportations without due process, draconian cuts to domestic and foreign aid programs, and venally self-interested foreign policy – a set of policies that amount to a prescription for mass suffering and death. Whether Trump succeeds or fails in his quest to remake US society is very much a question of how much of the pain of others Americans are willing to abide in the pursuit of making America great again.

The rightwing movement against empathy seeks to dismantle and discredit one of the essential tools for any society – our capacity to recognize and respond to suffering. We should see the campaign against empathy by Trump supporters for what it is: a flashing red light warning of fascist intent.

How empathy became the enemy

On 21 January, the Right Rev Mariann Budde delivered a message from the pulpit of Washington National Cathedral to a newly inaugurated President Trump. Immigrants and LGBTQ+ children were living in fear, the Episcopal bishop of Washington said. “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”

Budde’s appeal was standard fare for a denomination that has been inclusive of LGBTQ+ people since 1976 and, like many churches, undertakes ministry work in support of immigrants and refugees. But it touched off a firestorm among some of Trump’s evangelical supporters, who saw in Budde three outrages – the ordination of women, tolerance of LGBTQ+ people and support for immigrants – with a common, rotten core: empathy.

“Do not commit the sin of empathy,” tweeted the Christian podcaster Ben Garrett with a photo of Budde in her religious garb. “This snake is God’s enemy and yours too.”

Another Christian podcaster, Allie Beth Stuckey, tweeted: “This is to be expected from a female Episcopalian priest: toxic empathy that is in complete opposition to God’s Word and in support of the most satanic, destructive ideas ever conjured up.”

Donald Trump stands near the Right Rev Mariann Budde (left) as he attends a service on 21 January. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

The pastor Joe Rigney drove the argument home in the evangelical publication World. “Budde’s attempt to ‘speak truth to power’ is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood that has plagued us in the era of wokeness,” Rigney wrote. “Bishop Budde’s exhortation was a clear example of the man-eating weed of Humanistic Mercy.”

Rigney has been the leading evangelizer against what he calls the “sin of empathy” since 2019, when he first aired his views on a video series hosted by the far-right Christian nationalist pastor Douglas Wilson. A professor of theology, Rigney looks the part of the mild-mannered, devout scholar – he’s a big fan of CS Lewis and gives interviews from a room lined with bookshelves – but his toothy grin betrays a trollish side: he admits the phrase “the sin of empathy” is a provocation and seems pleased with the resulting furore.

In 2023, Rigney stepped down as president of a seminary in Minneapolis, after years of conflict over issues including his close ties with Wilson, support for Christian nationalism and infant baptism, and his views on empathy. He now serves as a fellow at a Christian college in Moscow, Idaho, where Wilson is attempting to build a “theocracy”. Rigney’s book The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits was released in February by Canon Press, a publishing house founded by Wilson and best known for releasing – and then withdrawing over allegations of plagiarism – Wilson’s co-authored apologia for the antebellum south that characterized slavery as “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence”.

Rigney’s argument is that empathy can be sinful if it is “untethered” to biblical truth on issues such as homosexuality and gender. While he acknowledges that “the Scriptures command us to have sympathy and a tender heart”, he defines empathy as “an excess of compassion, when our identification with and sharing of the emotions of others overwhelms our minds and sweeps us off our feet”.

Women are more empathetic than men, which is why God does not allow them to be ordained, Rigney argues. Quoting extensively from Calvin Robinson, the rightwing British cleric who was recently defrocked by the Anglican Catholic church for mimicking Musk’s apparent Nazi salute at an anti-abortion rally, Rigney connects progressive political values to “a culture of victimhood flowing from toxic female empathy”.

“Empathy feeds the competitive victimhood mentality that is rampant in our society,” he writes. “The same empathetic logic lies beneath the societal indulgence of criminality that particularly plagues progressive cities (always provided that the criminal is a member of some aggrieved group), as well as the empathetic paralysis that prevents western nations from wisely and justly addressing the challenges of both legal and illegal immigration. Compassion for refugees and ‘kids in cages’ is used to open the border to millions of able-bodied young men. But nowhere is this pathological feminine empathy more evident than in the various controversies surrounding transgenderism.”

This is pure Maga red meat, largely untethered from any version of reality, secular or otherwise (the US criminal justice system is notoriously punitive compared with other western countries; crime rates in US cities are near historic lows; Jesus’s calls to “love thy neighbor” and “welcome the stranger” did not specify by age, gender or physical ability, etc). But it is useful for those devout Trump supporters who are looking for Christian-coded justifications of their political beliefs.

An ‘Evangelicals for Trump’ campaign event in Florida in 2020. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Justification is also at the heart of Stuckey’s book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. Stuckey takes as her starting point that great ethical quandary of early June 2020: whether or not to post a black square on Instagram in protest of the police murder of George Floyd. After five pages of deliberation – “I thought some more about posting. It would’ve been easy to do. It would’ve been a way to demonstrate my empathy toward Floyd and victims of racism” – Stuckey decided to post instead a video of an elderly Black woman lamenting the destruction of riots. Accused by some commenters of being disrespectful to Floyd’s loss of life, she concluded: “I was facing weaponized, toxic empathy.”

Like Rigney, Stuckey emphasizes the emotional nature of empathy, writing: “It may be part of what inspires us to do good, but it’s just an emotion and, like all emotions, highly susceptible to manipulation.” The book, published just ahead of the 2024 election, provides arguments for Christians to use in defense of five political positions (against abortion, against gay marriage, against trans people, against immigration and against social justice), no matter how many people on Instagram implore them to show a little empathy.

“For the Christian, empathy should never compel us to affirm that which God calls sinful or to advocate for policies that are ineffective at best and deadly at worst,” she writes. Not only are the liberal positions on these issues ungodly, she argues, they end up hurting “the very people empathy-mongers claim they’re trying to help: the truly marginalized and vulnerable”. (To make this claim, Stuckey engages in a bit of empathy-mongering of her own, on behalf of embryos and unborn fetuses.)

It should be noted that many Christian leaders and believers disagree with this interpretation of empathy. The message board at Judson Memorial church in Manhattan recently carried the message: “If empathy is a sin, sin boldly.” Michael C Rea, a professor of the philosophy of religion at the University of Notre Dame, compared Rigney’s logic to that of Adolf Eichmann in an op-ed for the Religious News Service. Stickers with logos like “brb committing the sin of empathy” are popping up on Etsy.

But Rigney’s views are increasingly appealing to evangelical Christians. In February he was invited to promote his book on the podcast of Albert Mohler, an influential leader in the Southern Baptist Convention. A one-time critic of Trump who came around to endorsing him by 2024, Mohler offered up some of his own arguments against empathy, saying: “It has always seemed to me to be a synthetic word, an artificial word.” Empathy was too closely tied to the “constant emoting” of the modern age, a sign of how leftist thought has replaced the concrete with the abstract, and an outgrowth of Marxism and identity politics, Mohler argued. In a recent interview with the New Yorker, he described empathy as “never having to say no”.

Albert Mohler and Joe Rigney. Photograph: YouTube via Albert Mohler

White Christians in the US once served as a pillar of the civil rights movement. The white evangelical embrace of Trump – 81% supported him in 2016 – represents the tail end of a broader shift, according to John W Compton, a professor of political science and author of the 2020 book The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors.

Compton connects the shift to expanded higher education and social mobility after the second world war, which made membership in mainline Protestant churches less important to those seeking middle-class respectability. “Focused on personal salvation and stripped of any concern with social justice, post 1970s evangelicalism struck a chord with white middle-class Protestants who now had little reason to concern themselves with the plight of the less fortunate,” Compton writes.

Crucially, leaders of the religious right rose to positions of prominence because they voiced the political views of their followers, not because they had formed them, Compton argues. In the early 2000s, when these leaders made concerted efforts to promote immigration reform and the fights against the climate crisis and HIV/Aids, they saw little success. Compton sees this dynamic at work again with the rise of explicitly anti-empathy messaging. “Increasingly politics drives religion instead of religion driving politics,” he said in an interview.

It also helps explain how Rigney, who may once have been too extreme for American Christians like Mohler, has found an audience among Christians seeking to reconcile Trump’s increasingly inhumane positions with their faith.

“Everything about Trump flies in the face of orthodox Christianity,” Compton said. “His policy agenda is the opposite of traditional Christian compassion. So I think it’s not surprising that there’s a market for books, podcasts and other content that tells people who like Trump that there’s nothing wrong with liking Trump, and, in fact, that Trump’s doing exactly what the Bible or Christianity demands.”

Wood crickets and parasitized minds

Gad Saad likes to tell a story about a rape. When he’s lecturing, he’ll tell it while standing next to a photograph of the rape victim’s face, as he did at a recent talk for students at the University of Austin, the unaccredited Texas college founded by the Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and the Free Press editor, Bari Weiss.

“This guy is super progressive and empathetic,” Saad begins in his jocular style. “He’s very touching. Let me tell you why. He’s a Norwegian guy who presents himself to the world as a male feminist and anti-racist ally.” Here Saad gestures to the headshot of the man and its caption: “Karsten Nordal Hauken, who describes himself as feminist and anti-racist …”

“He was raped and sodomized by a noble Somali immigrant,” Saad continues. “As it goes in Norway, you don’t get much of a sentence for rape. You know, very, very light sentence. I think maybe he got a year or something, whatever it was. When he came out of detention, [Hauken] was racked with existential guilt because his sodomizer was now going to be potentially deported to Somalia, where he wouldn’t be able to maximally flourish. And so he was guilty that his rapist was now going to have a bad life in Somalia.”

The story concludes with the moral, which is also the title of Saad’s forthcoming book: “That’s not an emotional system that we have evolved,” he says, clicking to the next slide. “This is what happens when you have suicidal empathy.”

Abortion rights demonstrators rally in front of the supreme court in April. Photograph: Anna Rose Layden/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock

Suicidal Empathy may still be in the process of being written, but its thesis has already been taken up by the world’s richest (and arguably most powerful) man, Elon Musk. It is, Saad has explained in various podcast interviews and public talks, the other half of the thesis from his previous book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, which became a bestseller in part thanks to Musk’s enthusiastic endorsement of Saad’s notion of a “woke mind virus”.

“Parasitic mind is what happens to human brains when their cognitive abilities are parasitized,” Saad explained in a recent talk. “We’re both a thinking and feeling animal. Suicidal empathy completes the story by now explaining what happens when [human emotions are] hijacked by parasitic nonsense, and hence suicidal empathy. It’s the misfiring of an otherwise noble emotion called empathy.”

Saad has a PhD in marketing, and his academic career saw him apply evolutionary thinking to consumer behavior through studies on the testosterone levels of men after they drive a Porsche or the amount women spend on food versus apparel over the course of their menstrual cycle. He views human behaviors and traits through the lens of natural and sexual selection, and speaks with disdain of scientists who limit themselves to considering the “proximate cause” of an event or phenomenon, arguing that evolutionary thinking allows him to extrapolate an “ultimate cause”. This certainty allows him to make claims that would not be out of place in Rigney’s church, albeit with slightly different vocabulary. It is an “unassailable” truth that “sex-specific biological forces” shape boys’ and girls’ different toy preferences, he argues. Another conviction is to dismiss out of hand transgender people’s account of their own identities.

Saad rose to prominence on social media when he began applying this kind of evolutionary thinking toward politics, often presenting his views (anti-immigration, anti-Islam, anti-feminist and anti-trans) as possessing the weight of scientific or biological truth. He uses examples of parasites to argue that certain “pathogenic” ideas – such as postmodernism, social constructivism and radical feminism – can take over a person’s brain and force them to act counter to their own survival. He frequently cites wood crickets, which can be infected by a hair worm that hijacks its brain and forces it to jump into water. Once in water, the hair worm completes its reproductive cycle while the host cricket drowns.

“When this guy who hates water is parasitized, it merrily and happily jumps to its suicide in the service of this hair worm,” he said in a recent lecture. “Queers for Palestine are wood crickets.”

Saad claims to support empathy “at the right place, to the right people, at the right amount”. But he also argues that evolution has resulted in him being “much more likely to jump to save my biological children if there’s a truck hurling at them than I am to save a random person. That doesn’t make me callous. I’d like to also save the random children, but that’s not how evolution works.”

Except, it doesn’t appear that he would like to save the random children, considering the fact that he accuses those people who do want to save random – or, perhaps, asylum-seeking – children of suffering from either a brain virus or a case of suicidal empathy. It’s an entirely circular logic that relies on appeals to “biology” or “common sense” in the same way that Rigney and Stuckey appeal to biblical truth. The only real difference is the audience.

There is precedent for expanding the logic of natural selection to social groups, and it’s not a pretty one. Social Darwinism rubs shoulders with eugenics and scientific racism, and Saad does himself no favors by so frequently referring to his ideological nemeses as “degenerate”, another pseudoscientific concept with an ugly history.

Because there should be no mistaking the real menace that lurks beneath Saad’s gregarious delivery of anecdotes. Take the rape story. The version Saad related at the University of Austin was designed to cast support for immigration from the global south to western countries as self-sabotaging lunacy; it is also highly inaccurate. Saad exaggerates the leniency of the sentence (the attacker served four and a half years), and the significance of Hauken’s sense of guilt (Hauken described a complex range of emotional reactions to his assault, which included but were very much not limited to feelings of guilt around his relative social position to his attacker). Hauken spoke out about his ordeal to encourage other young people to seek mental health support despite feelings of stigma and shame; Saad took the opportunity to pile more shame upon him.

There is no word for this but cruelty. Saad offers up the name and photograph of a rape victim as an object of derision. He hijacks a real person’s story of sexual violation in order to condemn that person for how he made peace with it, an act of profound violation in and of itself. There is perhaps a lesson to be learned about empathy in all this, but it is not the one Saad thinks.

Trump’s achilles heel

Since the civil rights movement brought the question of people’s ability to relate to one another as equals in a multiracial democracy to the forefront of American consciousness, empathy’s relevance to politics has only increased.

This liberal ideal of empathy’s political capacity may have reached its apotheosis with Barack Obama, who memorably declared in 2006 that America was suffering, not from a budget deficit, but from an “empathy deficit”. At the same moment the media was growing enamored with research on “mirror neurons” – a type of nerve cell that reacts both when a subject performs an action and when the subject sees that action performed by someone else. The prospect of a biological explanation for empathy proved irresistible to popular science book authors, Ted Talkers and management gurus alike, resulting in a mirror-neuron-empathy hype cycle that peaked around 2013 and began a precipitous falloff just as Obama was entering the lame duck era of his presidency and a new, reactionary political movement was preparing to be born.

Not all of the backlash to Obama’s version of empathy came from the far right.

In the 2016 book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, the Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom argued that allowing empathy to guide our actions – particularly around philanthropy or politics – opens us up for emotional manipulation, unconscious bias and chauvinism. Leftwing critics have also warned against the potential for a claim of empathy to bleed into colonizing others’ experiences. Empathy cannot replace mutual respect and recognition, as the bankers of Davos who cosplay as refugees as an “exercise in empathy” each year should surely know by now.

Demonstrators hold signs in New York during a rally for ‘Trans Day of Visibility’ in March. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

A recent exchange in the Journal of Genocide Research saw scholars debating the limits of empathy in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that for so long has been patronizingly presented as an issue that could be solved with just a bit more empathy on all sides. “Empathy can be ‘an extremely dangerous vision’ when the other is an invader,” wrote Zahi Zalloua, a professor of philosophy and ethnic studies. “In the colonial situation it can get you killed.”

There have also been signs of some empathy fatigue on the left, especially when it is demanded for people on the right. This was evident in the concentrated schadenfreude of the message board on which Reddit users gathered in 2021 to compile death notices of social media users who succumbed to Covid alongside their earlier posts declaring an intent not be vaccinated against the virus. Even more notable was the collective refusal of Americans to extend empathy toward the family of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare who was shot and killed in midtown Manhattan last December, with many declaring that their empathy was “out of network”. (This was an anti-empathetic act with an insistent core of empathy, however; the point of the refusal was not to deny Thompson’s humanity but to protest against how the health insurance industry systematically dehumanizes patients.)

But what is happening on the American right is on an entirely different scale. Susan Lanzoni, a historian of psychology and author of Empathy: A History, said by email that through all her research into the intellectual history of empathy, she had “never seen empathy vilified in the way it has been in these current sources”.

“The disparagement of empathy is the flip side, I believe, of a deliberate effort to set up a permission structure to dehumanize others, and to narrow the definition of who should be included in a democratic state, or in a Christian community,” she said. “To me, this disparagement marks a step in the destruction of our multicultural democracy, and provides a path from the verbal dehumanization of others to open discrimination and maltreatment.”

Indeed, the rightwing critique of empathy is not an attempt to find a better way to achieve altruistic ends; it’s an excuse to turn away from altruism entirely. We are witnessing the construction of the ideological architecture to excuse violence and suffering on a mass scale. While the religious right attends to a moral justification, the secular right is hard at work on a pseudoscientific one. Meanwhile, the Maga movement has created an online culture that is steeped in an aesthetic of anti-empathy, from dismissing fellow human beings as “NPCs” (or non-player characters) to joking about relaxing to the “ASMR” sounds of human bondage.

For them, empathy assumes the power of a phantasmagoric threat – it can subvert God’s will, corrupt the church, and end western civilization as we know it. The Christian and patriotic public must harden their hearts to any empathy that might prevent them from supporting the actions needed to “save” America – whether they be cutting off millions of people from live-saving medication, firing tens of thousands of public servants, threatening to invade sovereign countries, or rounding up and deporting the millions of workers on whose backs the entire economy rests. The fabrication of an existential threat in order to motivate popular support for otherwise unsupportable actions is a classic tactic of fascist regimes. Where Hitler focused on the supposedly all-powerful Jews, Trump has presented his supporters with a rotating cast of bogeymen, including Muslims, immigrants, transgender people, critical race theorists, federal employees and feminists. Conveniently, empathy manages to unite them all.

If there is any consolation, it is perhaps in the fact that such work is even necessary.

Take Jesse Watters, the shock jock of Fox News who built a career by ambushing people and filming their humiliation. As hard-hearted a Trump supporter as they come, Watters was nevertheless shaken in his enthusiasm for Musk’s federal job cuts when they hit first a veteran friend of his. “We just need to be a little bit less callous with the way … we talk about Doge-ing people,” he said on Fox News. “I finally found one person I knew that got Doged and it hit me in the heart.”

Watters’ fit of compassion for his personal acquaintances was short-lived, but impactful, according to the Atlantic, which reported that Watters’ viral plea for a bit more empathy bothered Trump so much that he took his “first steps to rein in Musk’s powers”. Trump’s 100 days of frantic democratic destruction continue apace, but it seems noteworthy that he sensed in Watters’ reluctant admission to caring about other people a vulnerability that could prove to be his achilles heel.

Empathy is not a sin, a toxin, or an evolutionary dead end. It is a tool, and like all tools it can be a weapon. We are going to need it.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/08/empathy-sin-christian-right-musk-trump