Elon Musk doesn’t like empathy, which he calls the “fundamental weakness of western civilization,” which people “exploit.” The late Charlie Kirk did not like empathy either, commenting that “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that—it does a lot of damage.” (He said he preferred “sympathy,” but did not explain what he meant, and elsewhere suggested that it was unimaginable for him to empathize with his own child.) Two conservative Christians have published books arguing that empathy can be corrosive, Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy and Joe Rigney’s The Sin of Empathy. Pastor Josh McPherson, on his “Stronger Man Nation” podcast, was emphatically anti-empathy: “Empathy almost needs to be struck from the Christian vocabulary… Empathy is dangerous. Empathy is toxic. Empathy will align you with hell.”
What’s their problem with empathy? Empathy just means trying to understand how other people feel, to use the power of our imaginations to see things from their perspective and try to grasp what they might be feeling and why. How could anyone possibly object to this?
Well, the problem is that when someone like Musk or Kirk does this—imagining how it feels to be poor, or transgender, or Black—there’s a risk that they’ll end up having a Scrooge-like epiphany and realize that perhaps the world that looks fair to them is, in fact, quite radically unfair to people different from them. If you empathize, you might change your mind, and find it hard to support the social policies of the Republican Party or the church. Rigney, for instance, says that the “empathetic sex” (women) are “ill-suited” to applying Christian doctrine because they are inclined to reject church teachings they see as lacking in compassion. (He also says that “When you reject the sin of empathy, you reject the manipulation of the media, the manipulation of family and friends, and most importantly, the manipulation of your own heart.”)
Allie Beth Stuckey, an anti-abortion advocate and Fox News regular, in Toxic Empathy, is clear on why she doesn’t want people imagining the experiences of others: they may end up supporting progressivism. Empathy is bad because empathy—for, say, trans people, or women who have abortions—could lead to the false conclusion that these people have valid perspectives, and could therefore lead a good Christian conservative to depart from the righteous Biblical truths which ought to govern us.
Stuckey is a fundamentalist Christian, who believes that there should be no deviation from the strict word of God. And “God is clear that homosexuality is a sin, and the only sexual relationship he calls holy is that between one man and one woman.” Therefore, she says, empathizing with gay people is satanic, because it is tempting us to ignore God’s law. I am serious. She says directly: “Toxic empathy is satanic. It is a tool of the Deceiver to convince women that biblical love means affirming someone’s sin.” She realizes people may find this harsh, but thinks this objection, too, is Satan talking:
“But, Satan may say: Isn’t that legalistic? Isn’t that pharisaical, overly religious, divisive, judgmental? Aren’t you called to tolerance, acceptance, and empathy? How do you think that person feels? They’re oppressed, marginalized, in pain. Wouldn’t you like someone to affirm you and celebrate your choices? Surely the empathetic approach will win them over. You can worry about the rest later.”
Stuckey is firm: No! She goes so far as to tell the story of Glennon Doyle, a Christian influencer who realized she was gay and later married a woman. Stuckey tells the story of Doyle empathetically, to show how we might be tempted to think Doyle’s perspective was valid, until we remember she is defying Biblical teaching, and is therefore being tempted by Satan. Throughout Stuckey’s book, she opens chapters by showing what seem like situations in which we should empathize with people—a woman forced by law to give birth to a child who will inevitably die of a horrible genetic condition, a transgender person who receives affirming treatment, George Floyd—before showing that if we take the side of this person, we are acting contrary to conservative principles and fundamentalist Christianity. For example, if we put ourselves in the shoes of the woman who has an abortion, we may forget that legalized abortion “leads to the murder of the smallest, weakest, and most vulnerable children in horrifically gruesome ways.” She is uncompromising. Stuckey says she used to think abortion was okay in cases of rape, but realized this was irrational: “What’s the difference between a child conceived in rape and a child not conceived in rape? In other words, why are diagnoses or the circumstances surrounding a person’s conception justification for killing them?”
Stuckey takes the Bible as seriously as you can take it. “I am opposed to practices like egg and sperm donation, IVF, and surrogacy in any circumstance,” she says, because these are all attempts to monkey with God’s best-laid plans. She dreams of a utopia in which:
“There will be no more abortion. Every murdered baby will be alive and whole. There will be no more gender confusion or perversion. Every spiritual body will be exactly as God intends it to be. There will be no more sexual immorality. Everyone will rejoice completely in God’s good design and purposes. The only marriage celebrated will be the one between Christ and his church. There will be no more migration, no asylum seeking or fleeing for refuge. There will be no more danger, or enemies, or economic needs. There will be one perfect city, the New Jerusalem, where all God’s children are citizens of our new eternal home. There will be no more injustice, murder, or oppression. There will only be peace, and perfect justice will rule once and for all….
All the wretched, bloody brokenness humanity has endured since Adam and Eve took that fateful bite of the forbidden fruit will come to an end. We will once again walk in unhindered communion with our Creator. Sorrow, sickness, and sin will be no more. Because Jesus wins. At the end of this mess, Jesus comes in on a white horse and avenges innocent blood. He destroys the Enemy once and for all. The serpent’s head will be crushed, and all God’s children, all those who have been made alive in Christ by grace through faith, will live with Him in perfect joy forever.”
Now, I don’t mean to sound like one of those obnoxious New Atheists, but all of this does sound like the sort of thing we would classify as delusion, bordering on mental illness, if it were held by someone privately—rather than with the endorsement of an institutional church. I personally find it rather unlikely that sorrow and sickness are ever going to be vanquished, or that Jesus is going to show up on his white horse. But if it comforts Stuckey to believe this, she’s welcome to her grandiose prophecy.
I realize that what I have presented so far may make Stuckey sound ridiculous to anyone who is not themselves a fundamentalist Christian. But I would note, in her defense, that she is only really giving a Jesus-inflected rearticulation of a critique of empathy that was made years ago by the Yale professor Paul Bloom, a self-declared atheist, in his book Against Empathy, which I took apart in an early issue of Current Affairs. (And at least Stuckey makes an actual detailed case for her position, which Kirk and Musk never did.)
Bloom’s argument in that book was that when we empathize with someone, which he defined as feeling what they are feeling, we are likely to make moral errors. If we empathize with the family of a murder victim, we may want revenge instead of justice, for instance. If we empathize with a single child, we may overlook the fate of many other children who need help. Empathy, Bloom argued, can bias us. Bloom’s moral framework was somewhat utilitarian, and adjacent to “effective altruism,” and he was essentially arguing that when individual stories tug on the heartstrings, we will make moral decisions based on emotions in situations that call for cool reason.
There is something to this, because selective empathy does bias us. For instance, Joe Biden was able to deeply empathize with the Israelis who died in the Oct. 7th attacks, but not with Palestinians who were killed in the course of Israel’s genocidal vengeance for those attacks. I argued in my critique of Bloom, however, that this was not really an indictment of empathy, but of insufficient empathy—Biden would have benefited from empathizing more. I also argued that “feeling what others are feeling” is not a good definition of empathy, that we can use our imaginations to appreciate others’ experiences without literally simulating their emotions within our own minds.
Interestingly, Stuckey and Bloom make the same kind of point but with very different moral frameworks. Both argue that morality is objective, and empathy takes us away from applying objective morality, because it leads us to be guided by emotion rather than reason. For Stuckey, “reason” demands that Biblical law must be applied, while for Bloom, it commands us to apply utilitarian welfare-maximization principles. But the mechanism by which empathy misleads us is the same.
Now, one reason I am unpersuaded by Stuckey’s analysis is that I am not myself a Christian, and so showing me that the Bible forbids something does not carry any persuasive force with me. If you do not share her religious beliefs, Stuckey’s book is mostly worthless, because most of its arguments are ultimately rooted in Scripture. But I also reject the claim that both she and Bloom make, that empathy leads us to ignore moral rules (whether those rules are biblical or secular). It doesn’t have to. In fact, I argued in my original response to Bloom that empathy can actually improve our moral decision-making, because it provides us with important data that we can use to work out what the moral stakes of a given situation are.
For instance, I think understanding how the family of a murder victim feels is important to understanding what justice requires, when we’re designing a process for dealing with offenders. Their opinion on what should happen to the perpetrator is not dispositive, but it’s relevant. Understanding how someone made someone else feel is useful when we are thinking through what to do about an offense. Empathizing with transgender people is relevant to thinking about what the right policy on transgender issues is, because if it were true that transgender people did not suffer in any way from anti-trans policies, those policies would be less objectionable.
Now, for someone like Stuckey, who does not believe morality needs “working out” in this way (for her, morality is whatever God says it is), this still isn’t persuasive. Anti-trans legislation might inflict endless horror and torment on trans people, and she would not care, because if it is unnatural to defy God’s chosen gender categories, then it is so no matter what. And someone who believes all human life is just a prelude to a special moment where Jesus shows up on a horse and wipes all suffering away is not going to be especially moved by welfare-maximization arguments in the same way that Paul Bloom would be.
But those of us who are not Biblical literalists should be empathetic, because empathy helps us understand what is actually going on in the world. Unless I know what other people experience, I don’t really know what I’m talking about when I talk about them. Of course, I can never have full insight into others’ inner lives—I cannot walk a mile, or even a few feet, in their shoes. But empathy is an imaginative exercise that makes us more intelligent and less arrogant, because we come to understand that the world does not look to everybody else the way it looks to us. Men who empathize with women, for instance, may not make the kind of dumb statements that Charlie Kirk did, telling women they’d be happier if they had kids. A man who thought about, and listened to, others, might come to understand that getting pregnant can be dangerous for women, or financially impossible, or he might discover a million other personal reasons why someone might not want a child. In turn, he might be more respectful of that choice, instead of confidently pronouncing what is best for other people. But it’s not only empathy these people lack—it’s the curiosity that precedes it. You’ll never learn the answer if you don’t care to ask the question.
I am not surprised that the right is starting to come out so openly against empathy. Empathy is indeed a threat to the right-wing worldview. You can’t be nearly as aggressively denunciatory of feminism, Black Lives Matter, the Palestinian solidarity movement, or LGBT people, if you actually grasp what it is like to be a member of one of these groups. Stuckey understands quite well that too much empathy is indeed “toxic” to her brand of literalist Christianity, because it makes it seem cruel and appalling. Elon Musk must keep empathy at bay, because the moment he allows himself to empathize with his trans daughter, he will be confronted with the realization that he is a horrible human being. Empathy is a powerful force indeed, which is why we must stick up for it when it is being attacked by those who seek justifications, whether divine or secular, for treating others abominably.