Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy.
Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy.
Trump’s actions are irreconcilable with Christian compassion. But an unholy alliance seeks to cast empathy as a parasitic plague
Julia Carrie Wong/The Guardian
Tue 8 Apr 2025 07.00 EDT
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 (pseudo)scientific 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.
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 herself into a piece of artwork or nature. It is now understood to mean both the effortful, cognitive process by which a person projects herself 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?
"The disparagement of empathy is … a deliberate effort to set up a permission structure to dehumanize others."
Susan Lanzoni
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.”
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”.
"Everything about Trump flies in the face of orthodox Christianity."
John W Compton
“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.
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”
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.”
Trump’s actions are irreconcilable with Christian compassion. But an unholy alliance seeks to cast empathy as a parasitic plague
Julia Carrie Wong/The Guardian
Tue 8 Apr 2025 07.00 EDT
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 (pseudo)scientific 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.
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 herself into a piece of artwork or nature. It is now understood to mean both the effortful, cognitive process by which a person projects herself 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?
"The disparagement of empathy is … a deliberate effort to set up a permission structure to dehumanize others."
Susan Lanzoni
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.”
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”.
"Everything about Trump flies in the face of orthodox Christianity."
John W Compton
“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.
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”
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.”
