Photo: @DeborahElizabeth.bsky.social
Empathy, in basic terms, is an active striving to understand the feelings, and the circumstances, of others. Based upon this effortful caring, the desire to improve the circumstances, and thus the feelings, of others arises.
What could possibly be wrong about empathy, then? According to some prominent fascist influencers, particularly among the Christian fundamentalist/nationalist/white supremacist/male supremacist trend (which is the hard-core backbone of fascism in the U.S.), empathy is toxic.
“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.1
Charlie Kirk, the fascist organizer who ran Turning Point USA, said that Stuckey has demolished “the No. 1 psychological trick of the left” with her observation that liberals wield empathy against conservatives “by employing our language, our Bible verses, our concepts” and then perverting them “to morally extort us into adopting their position.”2
The sinful and destructive policies and positions being referred to here are caring and certainly acting on that caring for oppressed nationalities and women, immigrants, and LGBTQ people, and any non- or anti-fascist policy or position.
A writer for the Associated Press noted:
Stuckey traces her own anti-empathy awakening to the summer of 2020, when racial justice protests roiled the nation. She saw other Christians posting about racism out of an empathy she found misguided.
“I reject the idea that America is a systemically racist country,” she said.
When she said as much in the months after George Floyd’s murder, her audience grew.
Joe Rigney the author of The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits echoes this critique of systemic racism but reserves most of his ire for feminism, which he blames for many of empathy’s ills. Because women are the more empathetic sex, he argues, they often take empathy too far.
He found an encapsulation of this theory at Trump’s inaugural prayer service, where a woman preached from the pulpit. During a sermon that went viral, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde pleaded with the Republican president to “have mercy” on immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, prompting a conservative backlash.
“Budde’s attempt to ‘speak truth to power’ is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation,” Rigney wrote for the evangelical World magazine.3
Other Christian fascist influencers are even more blunt: Pastor Josh McPherson said on his podcast, Stronger Men Nation: “Empathy almost needs to be struck from the Christian vocabulary… Empathy is dangerous. Empathy is toxic. Empathy will align you with hell.”4
It’s not hard to discern in the fallacy of “toxic empathy” a typical fascist inversion of an objectively true phenomenon—toxic masculinity. Violent, even genocidal racist, sadistic misogynist men are good, biblical. Caring men, and women, are bad, sinful.
This increasing attack on empathy is joined by nominally secular fascists. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” That's billionaire Elon Musk, speaking recently on the podcast "The Joe Rogan Experience." They were discussing the idea that unchecked immigration into Western countries is threatening Western political and cultural values. Musk agrees and warns that societies are at risk of self-destructing: “There's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself… So that—we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.”5
Progressive Christian leaders have responded. The AP article cited earlier reports:
“Empathy is not toxic. Nor is it a sin,” said the Rev. Canon Dana Colley Corsello in a sermon at Washington National Cathedral, two months after [Episcopal Bishop Mariann] Budde’s plea from that sanctuary.
“The arguments about toxic empathy are finding open ears because far-right-wing, white evangelicals are looking for a moral framework around which they can justify President Trump’s executive orders and policies,” Corsello preached.
“Empathy is at the heart of Jesus’ life and ministry,” She added, “It’s so troubling that this is even up for debate.”
. . .
In New York, the Rev. Micah Bucey first noticed Christian anti-empathy messages after Budde’s sermon. In response, he proposed changing the outdoor sign at Judson Memorial Church, the historic congregation he serves in Manhattan.
“If empathy is a sin, sin boldly,” he said. . . .
A photo of the resulting church sign was widely shared on social media.6
A point that revolutionary leader Bob Avakian made during his 2014 dialogue with Cornel West stands as a powerful response to the fascist morality that sees empathy as toxic: “It is not weak to love. It is not weak to treat other people as human beings. And we need a culture that grows together with the actual struggle and is a crucial part of the struggle, that promotes… looking out for each other, and being together, and seeing what we have in common, instead of trying to get over on each other.” (from REVOLUTION AND RELIGION: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion. A Dialogue Between Cornel West and Bob Avakian)
We need this more than ever now, at a time when the greatest expression of love for humanity at this existential moment in history is for the decent, caring and empathetic people to mobilize in our millions, uniting all who can be united, to defeat fascism in the United States and everywhere else. And move forward from there to fight for a much different, and much better world.