If empathy were a person, she would be in therapy for abuse.
After a life of virtue, empathy has been cast into the street by an array of detractors as varied as billionaires, psychologists and evangelicals.
The wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, has joined the assault against empathy: “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. … The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, … a bug in Western civilization which is the empathy response.”
So says the man who without an ounce of empathy fires thousands of civil service workers as a camouflaged attempt to uncover fraud in the federal government while actually increasing his own fortunes.
Rodney Kennedy
I have a hard time even reading attacks on empathy. Wheaton University Associate Professor of Theology Emily Hunter McCown sums up my own incredulity: “Empathy isn’t sin. Empathy is a crucial aspect of what it means to be human. You are made in God’s image for the purpose of union with God and others. Empathy is part of that. Those who say otherwise are dehumanizing you and others. Please don’t fall for it.”
Today there are even celebrations over legislation that ignores empathy.
MAGA evangelical celebrations over President Donald Trump shutting down foreign aid and the House of Representatives passing a budget that cuts Medicaid raise questions about how much empathy these Christians have. Members of Congress who come to budget meetings with Viking battle axes don’t have backpacks filled with empathy. They are there to cut billions of dollars from the social safety net and not show empathy for the poor.
Books are published screaming of the evils of empathy: Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy, Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy, Joe Rigney’s The Sin of Empathy.
Conservatives are turning against empathy itself. David French calls it “the strange spectacle of Christians against empathy.”
Evangelicals are attacking empathy because liberal empathy has shamed them for being uncaring toward so many others. We are surrounded by progressive voices proclaiming empathy for the poor, women, minorities, LGBTQ, migrants and a host of others. This orientation to empathy is one of the cardinal principles of Christian liberalism. Empathy is promiscuous — shared with everyone. Empathy on the move is open to breaking barriers once thought unassailable. Empathy is how progressive politics feels.
“Empathy has gained momentum over the last two decades as she challenges the politics of the right.”
Empathy has gained momentum over the last two decades as she challenges the politics of the right. With a newfound aggressiveness, empathy has challenged the comfort zones of evangelicals in a relentless attack demanding evangelicals become more sensitive, more thoughtful, more moral.
That has now produced a terrible backlash.
The force of empathy produces a counter emotion among evangelicals: shame. Progressives, without apology, have used shame as a technique to discipline evangelicals. A confrontational empathy has claimed the public spaces once dominated by evangelicals.
As affect theorist and rhetorical scholar Paul Schaefer puts it: “We live in an increasingly saturated shame panopticon. This has led some of the former masters to a state of shame-exhaustion, in which it becomes easier to repudiate shame altogether than respond to the moral demands placed on them.”
Can anyone suppose we’ll ever figure out why people are so outraged over political correctness, wokeness, CRT and DEI if we don’t see it as a refusal to be shamed?
Evangelicals, emboldened by Trump, have driven a stake in the ground and launched a counterattack. They are determined to undo the positive gains of empathy.
In a meticulous assault on every item that causes evangelicals to feel shame, both in the federal government and the states, MAGA is tearing away any program, project or language that has previously shamed evangelicals and conservatives. In his joint address to Congress, Trump declared: “Wokeness is bad. It’s gone.”
“What MAGA seeks is a return to its traditional comfort zone.”
What MAGA seeks is a return to its traditional comfort zone. They want freedom to be anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-science, anti-history, anti-vaccinations, anti-diversity.
But the empathy army keeps going and going. Peace activists, environmentalists, racial justice community organizers, religious leaders, educators, historians keep working to promote human rights, dignity and the common good.
One of empathy’s defenders is Indiana University professor Carolyn Calloway-Thomas. She serves as professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and director of graduate studies, African American and African diaspora studies.
Carolyn Calloway-Thomas
Her book, Empathy in the Global World, offers a multifaceted conception of empathy. Her goal is to engage people in a better, more humane treatment of others. She argues empathy presents us with “infinite possibilities for shaping a better world.”
In an email response to me Calloway-Thomas said: “My notion of empathy as an explanatory concept for understanding why people behave as they do, with certain consequences, is motivated by Italian philosopher Giambista Vico. He called attention to the notion of ‘imaginative placement,’ the idea that what other people have made and done other people can understand, with a sufficient effort of imagination. This constitutes the core of what I mean by empathy.
“It is learning what it is like to live by someone else’s light, with a sufficient effort of imagination — cognitively, affectively and behaviorally. We simply cannot encounter all people directly — and in all places — and yet a sufficient effort of imagination can take us ‘there.’”
Imagination creates empathy as a wide-open possibility. Theologian Garrett Green notes the biblical term “heart” refers to what we call imagination. This notion wonderfully illuminates the use of that word in the eucharistic liturgy: “Lift up your hearts” — lift up your imaginations, open them toward God. Yet an aroused imagination is not in itself a holy state, for the “heart” can be healthy or perverted.
The same is true of empathy; it can be healthy or perverted. But it becomes real in the act of imagination.
Calloway-Thomas encourages us to develop empathy. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Assume goodwill. Work to offer human dignity to all humans of all kinds. The Bible has a word for this kind of action-filled empathy: hospitality.
In the words of Elie Wiesel, “Stop hating the otherness of the other” and “respect it.” If we don’t follow the way of empathy, then what and who will save us?
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
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