MAGA’s Attempted Murder of Empathy; Victim Escapes

Christian Nationalists Side with Judas Iscariot

Most of what follows is not original with me. Most of it comes from the article in The Guardian of April 8,2025 by Julia Carrie Wong, entitled, “Loathe Thy Neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian Right Are Waging War on Empathy.” ( https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/08/empathy-sin-christian-right-musk-trump) I insert a comment here and there.

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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.” She was expressing strongly the biblical words encouraging us to love all, to serve all. She was and is well aware that the strength of a nation is how it cares for the hungry, naked, unhooked, and orphaned (see Matthew 25).

But Trump and MAGA believers fought back immediately. Trump said that Budde needed to apologize to him—something her faithfulness to the gospel and ordination vows would never do.

But right-wing influencers did not let it rest.

“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 fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” Musk continued [in his conversation with Joe Rogan on the podcast The Rogan Experience], couching his argument in the type of pseudoscientific 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.”

And how might the Christian Right, I wondered, contort biblical teaching to fit their political commitments—politics continually take precedence over the Bible for the Right? Political commitments are their number one god, a god who comes before YHWH. When I went back to read the summary statement that headed The Guardian article, I had my answer: “Trump’s actions are irreconcilable with Christian compassion. But an unholy alliance seeks to cast empathy as a parasitic plague.”

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.”

My goodness! Rigney manages to fuel the war on women, call empathy manipulative, equate empathy with victimhood, and call it all woeness. It’s quite a feat. But connecting all of these shows so much about his anti-Christian worldview.

The “sin” of 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.”

Some [white evangelicals] … 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.)

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.

Justification is also at the heart of Allie Beth Stuckey’s book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. 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.

Susan Lanzoni, a historian of psychology and author of Empathy: A History, said by email that through all her research into the intellectual history of empathy, she had “never seen empathy vilified in the way it has been in these current sources”.

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Disbelief. Chills up and down my spine as I read this article. Before reading it, I hadcompletely missed the attempted murder of empathy. It proceeds with reckless ruthlessness. Trump, Musk, and millions believe it’s masculine. A show of strength. A sign of intimidating power.

This attempted murder will fail

But this attempted murder of empathy will fail. My certainty about this matter rests not only in my confidence about what Jesus said but in the sure discoveries of neuroscience that we are hard-wired for empathy. A study at the University of Virginia says this:

Perhaps one of the most defining features of humanity is our capacity for empathy -- the ability to put ourselves in others' shoes. A new study strongly suggests that we are hardwired to empathize because we closely associate people who are close to us -- friends, spouses, lovers -- with our very selves.

"With familiarity, other people become part of ourselves," said James Coan, a psychology professor in U.Va.'s College of Arts & Sciences who used functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans to find that people closely correlate people to whom they are attached to themselves.

The study appears in the August issue of the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

"Our self comes to include the people we feel close to," Coan said.

In other words, our self-identity is largely based on whom we know and empathize with.

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When science and faith come together, each confirms the other. Murdering what science and religion converge on isn’t finally possible. Humans are created for interdependence, connection, cooperation, and relationship. Tree roots and many species show empathy and cooperation. The target of this attempted murder will escape and continue nurturing life!!