Christians against empathy

A few years ago, my therapist declared me an “empath.” It was not a term I’d heard before. She explained it as someone who feels deeply, especially when it comes to other people’s experiences and feelings.

Yeah, that checks out. I’ve always been very sensitive, even as a kid. In fact, my very first girlfriend once said, “You’re so sensitive,” as a complaint, and I have never gotten over it.
Suffice to say, being an empath in today’s hellscape of a world is not easy. In fact, it’s exhausting. The other day I texted a friend, “Empathy is a prison.”

Except, of course, I can’t imagine my life without it. How do you not care about other people?

How do you ignore suffering? I mean, people who don’t have empathy are psychopaths.

Or Christians, apparently.

According to the Associated Press, there’s a movement of Christians who believe that empathy “can manipulate caring people into accepting all manner of sins according to a conservative Christian perspective, including abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights, illegal immigration and certain views on social and racial justice.”

In other words, these Christians believe that empathy is bad.

The article goes on to explain that Allie Beth Stuckey, author of Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, believes that empathy has been co-opted “to convince people that the progressive position is exclusively the one of kindness and morality.”

That’s right. Progressives are using empathy as a weapon against poor, defenseless Christians, tricking them into not hating trans people or deporting babies with cancer or putting immigrants into concentration camps or arresting women for having miscarriages.
You know, ALL THINGS CHRISTIANS ARE LITERALLY DOING BECAUSE THEY ARE IN POWER AND WANT TO DO THEM.

Granted, such things are difficult to justify if you let empathy get in the way. So instead of saying, “Wow, we are doing and supporting some sick shit. We’d better stop,” they’re saying empathy is the sick shit.

Also, in a time of acute Christofascism, the idea of Christian compassion, let alone the claim that it’s being exploited, is laughable. I’m supposed to believe that while Christians are using dehumanization and wielding their outsized power to literally ruin the lives of LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, the poor and others that we are exploiting Christian compassion?
Stuckey gives examples of how empathy is used against Christians: “If you really care about women, you’ll support their right to choose,” the AP quotes Stuckey as saying. “If you really respect people, you’ll use preferred pronouns. … If you’re really compassionate, you’ll welcome the immigrant.”

Uh, YES!

If you had empathy you would not deny care to a woman who has miscarried until she bleeds out and dies. You would not use the cudgel of the United States government to single out and attack a specific young transgender athlete. You would not deport a toddler with cancer.

All of these things are happening right now as a direct result of policy crafted and supported by Christians.

The AP article also mentions the Rev. Albert Mohler, leader of the anti-LGBTQ+ Southern Baptist Convention, saying he prefers the word sympathy over empathy.

“There’s no market so far as I know for empathy cards,” he said. “There is a long-standing market for sympathy cards.”

Market? We aren’t talking about a fucking Hallmark franchise. We’re talking about human beings. People’s lives — something Christians talk an awful lot about valuing but spend a hell of a lot of time denigrating.

They’ve made it their job to choose whose lives matter and whose lives don’t.

Stuckey and Mohler aren’t the only anti-empathy Christians. Joe Rigney, a professor and pastor who wrote The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits, has found the root of the empathy problem: “Feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation.”

You know, because women be shopping! And feeling!

To all Christians who believe this shit: You don’t get to support the abject cruelty of the Trump administration and Republicans across the country and claim to be in the right.

You don’t get to say, “I don’t care if people suffer and die” and then claim the moral high ground.

I may not believe in any kind of god, but I know enough about Jesus to know that if your dream of him coming back comes true (it won’t because it’s fiction), he would see what you’re doing in his name, puke and then tell you to go to hell (even though hell isn’t real, but you understand the sentiment).

In the name of god, the spirit and the holy ghost: Fuck off with your sadistic bullshit.

D’Anne Witkowski is a writer living in Michigan with her wife and son. She has been writing about LGBTQ+ politics for nearly two decades. Follow her on Twitter @MamaDWitkowski.