New York Times Op-Ed:  Is ‘Toxic Empathy’ Pulling Christians to the Left?, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025)):

Ross Douthat: In the world of online influencers, one evangelical Christian writer and podcaster stands out, offering her audience a blend of politics, theology and lifestyle advice. Is Allie Beth Stuckey an example of what religious authority looks like in America today? What does she offer to her audience of younger religious women? And why does she think the biggest problem in American politics isn’t too much cruelty but the wrong kind of empathy?

Allie Beth Stuckey, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

Allie Beth Stuckey: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Douthat: We’re going to have a conversation that covers evangelical Christianity, some of the divides within it and its relationship to Donald Trump. … You wrote a book entitled Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. You can see just from the subtitle that it is effectively both a critique of secular progressivism and also a critique of your fellow Christians.

I think a lot of people hear a word like “empathy” and think that it is just something that Christians are automatically called to and that a critique of empathy is effectively a critique of Christianity itself.

What is toxic empathy? What is wrong with some forms of empathy, from your perspective?

Stuckey: That is correct: some forms of empathy. I argue — and this is not my original argument — I heard Abigail Shrier first say this, and I think she might have even got this from Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist who wrote a book called “Against Empathy.”

Douthat: An interesting side note is that in fact my own mother once wrote an essay critiquing empathy for First Things magazine some years ago. In it, she drew on Paul Bloom, who is a secular psychologist, criticizing from a secular perspective, an overidentification with other people’s feelings.

All of which is to say I am a somewhat sympathetic audience for this kind of argument.

Stuckey: I just wanted to give proper credit for this first line that I’m about to say: Empathy by itself is neutral. Empathy by itself, I believe, is neither good nor bad. That’s probably not an exact quote from Paul Bloom, but that’s where I got that line of reasoning.

Empathy is not in itself a virtue. It is not in itself something that we should aspire to. And that alone kind of knocks people off their skates when I say that. I say that it can be positive in what it can lead you to, or it can be negative in what it can lead you to.

An example I give in my book: I was traveling with my 3-year-old. We were going to Atlanta. My hands were full; she was in her runaway era. I was trying to get down the jet bridge. There was no way that I could control her and get all this stuff that I needed down. So I just literally sat down, and I didn’t know what to do, and I was almost on the verge of tears. I had all these people pass me by, and this woman came up to me, and she just looked at me, and she said, “It’s OK. I’m a mom. I get it.” And she got one of my bags, and we made it to our seats, and it was great.

Then, just a couple of weeks later, I was traveling by myself, and I saw this mom with her child, and she had her stroller, she had all of her stuff. I could see she was on the verge of tears. She was trying to get to her seat, and she didn’t know how she was going do it. Well, I had been there. I felt so deeply exactly how she felt, and because of that, because I just knew so personally the stress that she was feeling, I was able to meet her needs. I grabbed her bag. She made it to her seat, and she was good to go.

And so, having been there, being able to put yourself in someone’s shoes can lead you to do the right thing. It can lead you to sacrifice. It can lead you to selflessness. It can lead you to acts of love and kindness. But putting yourself in someone’s shoes, feeling what they feel can also lead you to do three things that I say makes empathy toxic: One, validate lies. Two, affirm sin. And three, support destructive policies.

Those are the three characteristics that I think can make empathy toxic.

Douthat: So in your definition, just so listeners are clear, empathy means the act of feeling or trying to feel what others are feeling, and it’s distinct, therefore, from compassion or sympathy, where you are trying to help someone. You might feel bad for them, but you aren’t trying to directly feel their set of emotions.

This is primarily, then, about empathizing with people who are either doing something that is wrong for understandable human reasons or who are supporting policies that are themselves going to lead to bad outcomes, even if they have charitable motives.

Stuckey: It’s not against even trying to feel how they feel. It is allowing feeling how they feel to lead you to justify what they are doing — which happens in abortion and the gender debate and the sexuality debate and the justice debate and the immigration debate.

Because we feel so deeply for this one purported victim, we say, well, maybe deportation is wrong, or maybe I should affirm this person’s stated gender, even though it mismatches their biology, or maybe I should affirm the right to have an abortion because I feel so deeply for this person’s plight.

That is when your empathy has led you in a bad direction and has turned toxic.

Douthat: This is somewhat distinct then from one of the arguments that Paul Bloom makes in his book, which is that one problem with empathy is that it can actually lead in the other direction toward helplessness: You feel everything that happens in the world in some way because you’re empathizing with other people so much and this can paralyze you.

The problems of the world are too large, and I can’t possibly solve them. Do you think that’s a problem with empathy as well?

Stuckey: Yes. That’s not a theme that I explore in my book, although I think it’s interesting. I also think it’s interesting that, especially with kids in the classroom, the more you emphasize empathy, the meaner those kids can get to those in the out-group. Abigail Shrier phrased it like this: full of empathy and mean as hell. …

Douthat: ,,, From the point of view of a lot of people who you have criticized or who have criticized you, the divide starts with Trump.

Where you see toxic empathy, they see a systematic delight in other people’s tears. I mean, cruelty is the one-word phrase. Trump himself is cruel. He mocks people. He’s savage to people and so on. But that’s also attached to this sense of: We love to hear the liberals cry. If we’re deporting people — you see this in Trump’s second term, making a YouTube video about deportation that’s reveling in rounding people up.

I think clearly if empathy can be toxic, cruelty can be even more toxic. Do you think that is a fair critique of Trump and Trumpism and its impact on American politics?

Stuckey: Maybe, but it’s not a fair critique of my argument. It’s not a fair critique of my book. My argument is that toxic empathy is cruel, that it ignores the people on the other side of the moral equation. For example, if you take the abortion issue, I start out by telling the story of a woman named Samantha.

Her story was first told by NPR. She found out that her baby had a fatal fetal anomaly at the 20-week mark, but in Texas she wasn’t allowed to abort her child. NPR tells the story as if this was horrible for Samantha, who had to go through the financial, physical, emotional burden of bearing this child, only to have this child to die.

By the end of the story, the reader feels exactly how it seems NPR wants them to feel, which is that this is a great injustice toward Samantha. How dare these draconian laws force her to do something so painful, so financially burdensome. We need to liberate women from these anti-abortion laws that are making them go through so much.

You have so much empathy for Samantha that you support the pro-abortion position by the end of this, through the mode of storytelling. What I try to do is tell the story from the other perspective: The actual victim in this story — that NPR and most mainstream media outlets do not want you to know about — is the baby.

They don’t want you to think about the actual victim of abortion. What would have been the fate of this baby, whose name is Halo? What would have been her fate if Texas had not had this — quote, unquote — pro-life law? She would’ve been poisoned. She would’ve been dismembered. She would’ve been discarded like toxic waste.

But instead, she was delivered and clothed and named and held and loved and buried like the full human being that she is. My argument is that toxic empathy — when it comes to any issue, not just abortion — is actually cruel and destructive and deadly, both for the individual and for society because it only focuses on one purported victim and ignores the actual victims on the other side of the equation.

We can agree that some of the things that Trump has said are much more brazen, and I would agree with you about what some people call cruelty, and we can get into that. But I’m not saying that compassion is bad. Actually, compassion and empathy aren’t even the same things.

I’m saying: No. What you progressives in many cases are calling empathetic or calling nice is actually really cruel. It’s actually really bad. I’m saying that the progressives use empathy as a vehicle to ultimate cruelty.

New York Times Op-Ed:  How Empathy Became a Threat, by Jennifer Szalai:

There’s an arresting quotation that resurfaces online now and again, usually accompanied by a photograph of a dark-haired woman with an intense gaze: “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs that a culture is about to fall into barbarism.” It’s followed by the name of the woman in the picture: the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who fled the barbarism of Nazi Germany.

Only there’s no record of Arendt ever saying that, or anything like it. The bogus quotation is the kind of artifact that flourishes on the internet in bewildering times — plausible-sounding and politically ominous. It happens to dovetail with a liberal argument that has flourished in the age of Trump: That the MAGA movement is actively promoting callousness and cruelty. Trump’s critics say supporting examples aren’t hard to come by: the gutting of lifesaving aid to the poor and the sick, the violent crackdown on immigrants, the gleefully sadistic memes. The implication is that one side is committed to empathy while the other side is not.

This would sound like a bit of self-serving liberal propaganda if it weren’t for the fact that a number of prominent figures on the right seem to agree. In February, when Elon Musk went on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Musk derided Democrats for succumbing to “suicidal empathy.” Caring about others, the men agreed, had gotten so out of control that it was becoming self-destructive. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” Musk said. “They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

Musk likes to refer to other humans as “NPCs,” or “non-player characters.” Such contempt for fellow feeling seems to be gaining ground. The Times Opinion columnist David French has noted how empathy for others — seemingly inextricable from loving thy neighbor as thyself — has come under direct attack by some right-wing Christians. Last year, the Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey published “Toxic Empathy,” which hit the best-seller list; more recently, the pastor Joe Rigney published “The Sin of Empathy.” Both books depict calls for empathy as the work of manipulative progressives trying to inveigle Christians into supporting progressive policies. …

Empathy has had a strange journey over the last decade. It has been variously assailed as too parochial, too indiscriminate, too feeble, too powerful. It has also been held out as the key to kindness and a bulwark against atrocity. How did empathy become so politically fraught? …

It’s one thing to think of empathy as a limited emotion. It’s quite another to suggest that it’s dangerous. In their books, Stuckey and Rigney start out insisting that they’re not trying to stamp out empathy per se — they oppose only “toxic” (Stuckey) or “untethered” (Rigney) versions, which trick Christians into tolerating abortion access and gay marriage. Giving the example of a 12-year-old raped by her stepfather, Rigney says that granting her request for an abortion is an example of the “empathetic myopia” that fuels “the culture of Death.” Stuckey says that as much as she feels sorry for the undocumented Mexican mother detained by ICE after 14 years in the United States, “Scripture depicts walls, both literally and metaphorically, as a defense against disorder and evil.”

Like you, I want to be kind,” Stuckey writes, “and any accusation that I may lack empathy hurts.” (Could this be a plea for … empathy?) But she says that being a loving Christian sometimes requires supporting policies that will cause others to suffer: “To love means to want what is best for a person, as God defines ‘best.’” Rigney, too, knows what God wants, even if progressives try to bully him with “emotional blackmail”: “Compassion is willing to be called ‘heartless’ in its pursuit of the true and lasting good of the afflicted.” By the end of their books, both authors suggest that empathy as it exists is the work of the Devil and his minions.

Editor's Note:  If you would like to receive a weekly email each Sunday with links to faith posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.