Is Empathy Evil?
Earlier this week I walked into a hotel lobby where a mother was in a heated phone conversation with what I found out later was her daughter. The mother was cussing into the phone, calling her daughter, among other things, rude and lazy and irresponsible. It was hard to listen to. What kind of a mother talks that way to her daughter?
When it is time to rush to judgment, I am a world-class sprinter (Image generated by deepai.org)
Then she hung up… and started telling me the story. Her daughter is 20 – she has a car; the mother doesn’t. The mother had been counting on the daughter to pick her up for an appointment the mother had with her oncologist. The daughter didn’t show; Mom wasn’t sure when she could reschedule; she was scared and disappointed and pissed: this wasn’t the first time, she said, that the daughter had let her down.
Would I have handled it differently? Probably. Did I understand where Mom was coming from better after she explained it? Absolutely.
Here are a couple of things I have been learning again and again over the past few years.
1. I really enjoy making snap judgments about people based on limited information.
2. I am regularly wrong in those judgments.
That’s where empathy helps.
· The guy who cuts me off in traffic? He’s a jerk. But… what if he’s taking his pregnant wife to the hospital?
· That colleague at work who grunts at my morning greeting? She’s just rude. Or… maybe the baby kept her up all night. Or her father is dying. Or she can’t make the rent this month.
· The friend that isn’t responding to the email? Maybe he thinks he’s more important than I am or doesn’t like me anymore. Or… maybe his job or health or marriage is falling apart.
There’s no chance of my going through the world as anything other than a sullen slouch if I never entertain those alternate possibilities.
This hasn’t just been a series of one-off epiphanies for me. I’ve been reading David Brooks’ book How to Know a Person. He’s been on a ten-year journey to become a more patient human being and his book is all about how we can move beyond surface-level judgments to try to see everyone as a whole, complex, interesting person. To do that, we have to be able to try to put ourselves in the mind of the other person. We have to learn how to show empathy.
But just when I’m getting religion on empathy, a growing group of religious people and other leaders are trying to turn empathy into a bad word.
Josh McPherson, a conservative pastor and host of “Stronger Man Nation,” says flatly: “Empathy is dangerous. Empathy is toxic. Empathy will align you with hell.”
Pastor Joe Rigney has written a book called The Sin of Empathy, arguing that empathy is spiritually dangerous. Conservative author Allie Beth Stuckey has her own book: Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. “Empathy,” she says, “As hoisted up as the highest virtue – or even a virtue at all – gets us into a really big mess.” Elon Musk took the empathy trashing to another level during his February 28, 2025 appearance on the “Joe Rogan Show,” claiming that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” God forbid anyone, anywhere would ever think any of us would be “weak.” Empathy is for suckers, losers and weaklings.
What the heckles?
The argument, as near as I can figure it, is that empathy is dangerous because it distracts us from making rational decisions. “Irrational” decisions, like providing health care for undocumented immigrants (Musk’s example on the Rogan show), are the direct result of politicians making decisions based on what Musk called “suicidal empathy,” which leads us to make decisions based on stories instead of data. Yale professor Paul Bloom makes this point: “I think we should make our moral decisions without empathy, through rational deliberation.”
Not every moral decision lends itself to mathematical calculation. (image generated by deep.org)
OK sorta; I can empathize with that argument. Of course empathy is not the only tool we should have in our belt as we try to make moral decisions or counsel friends and loved ones or have a conversation with Uncle Sal at the holiday table.
But just because empathy doesn’t work for every situation doesn’t justify their conclusion: empathy is weak/toxic/sacrilegious/evil, and, for the good of the world, we need to get rid of it. You don’t throw away the bottle opener on a Swiss army knife because your beer has a screwtop.
Empathy isn’t our only tool for making our way through the world, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need it (image generated by deepai.org).
It’s a tribute to our internal bs detectors that we aren’t buying the clickbait/straw horse argument. An October survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 80% of US adults believe empathy is an important moral value for a healthy society and just 16% believe it “limits our ability to set up a society that is guided by God’s truth.”
A pastor friend, Rev. Dr. Mac Schafer, notes that there can be extremes of empathy that are dangerous. We can “take on too much of other people’s pain, in an unhealthy way, sometimes as a distraction from their own pain,” he told me. He prefers the word “compassion,” which has a “built in boundary, to feel for people’s situations, but not make them yours…walking alongside, but not making someone else’s issues yours.”
But calling empathy “evil”? Father Brendan Busse, pastor of Dolores Mission Catholic Church in LA, summarized my feeling pretty well. He told Axios that “In the Christian tradition, to have anybody argue that a spirit of empathy is somehow a vulnerability… is insane.”
Nuff said. Amen.
Notes:
Elon Musk on Joe Rogan February 28: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/2281-elon-musk/id360084272?i=1000696846801
Musk was quoting Professor Gad Saad of Northwood University with his “suicidal empathy” phrase: https://www.northwood.edu/news/parasitic-ideas-and-suicidal-empathy-are-killing-the-west/
Axios article on empathy: https://www.axios.com/2025/11/30/christians-empathy-jesus-immigration-politics