(Image source: Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty)

“For the Christian, empathy should never compel us to affirm that which God calls sinful or to advocate for policies that are ineffective at best and deadly at worst,” writes conservative media figure, Fox News guest, and Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey in her 2024 book Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. Stuckey goes on to explain how feeling empathy for women forced to carry their unviable fetus to term, or for a mother deported and separated from her child, is “satanic” and a “tool of the deceiver.” Empathy is a false God that leads people astray. A true disciple of Christ must be prepared to let others suffer.

Yet, if you read Stuckey’s book closely, you’ll see that she doesn’t really forswear empathy. She urges Christians to feel empathy for a range of people, as well as cell clusters in utero.  “Toxic empathy,” for Stuckey, is essentially empathy for the wrong people—not least empathy for those who don’t share Stuckey’s political and religious beliefs, or skin color.

For many proponents of empathy (like Edwin Rutsch at the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy), Stuckey’s deliberately selective, virulently reactionary empathy may seem like a perverse distortion. But other progressive and academic analysts of empathy have argued that selective empathy—and specifically selective empathy for the powerful rather than the powerless—is more a norm than an outlier.

Stuckey’s approach, and the approach of others on what has become a broader anti-empathy right, is disingenuous. But their blatant manipulation can tell us something about how empathy works, and how it doesn’t work. Stuckey insists that empathy is not a shortcut to virtue—and her own calculated use of selective empathy in the name of hateful causes suggests that she is on to something. When Trump, for example, encourages his followers to feel sorry for him, or insists that the real victims in America are those who live next to immigrants, he’s wielding empathy—but not in a good way. We, therefore, need to pay attention to the right’s use of empathy even as they disparage it.

Against Empathy for Those We Dislike

Stuckey is not alone in her right-wing war on empathy. In a lengthy piece in The Guardian in April, Julia Carrie Wong explained that Christian nationalists, tech billionaires, and evolutionary psychology proponents have joined together to encourage their conservative followers to reject empathy, or what Tesla CEO and wrecker of U.S. global aid Elon Musk has referred to as “civilizational suicidal empathy.” Musk explained that “…you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.”

Pastor Joe Rigney, former president of Bethlehem College and Seminary and associate of right-wing Christian nationalist leader Doug Wilson, has also been a leading empathy basher. In his book The Sin of Empathy, released in February, he follows Stuckey in insisting that empathy can lead to a dangerous “excess of compassion, when our identification with and sharing of the emotions of others overwhelms our minds and sweeps us off our feet.” Rigney argues that women are more empathetic than men, which is why he believes women cannot and should not be ordained as clergy.

Stuckey spends less time attacking empathy as womanly (for perhaps obvious reasons) and instead does her best to show that women can withhold compassion as easily as men—at least from some people.

Stuckey’s tactic is to introduce a story about someone for whom progressives suggest you should feel empathy and then argue that someone else (anyone else?) should be the real focus of compassion. For instance, early in the book she writes about George Floyd, the Black man horrifically choked to death in 2020 by white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Stuckey notes that when people were posting black squares on social media in June 2020 to express support for Floyd and opposition to police violence, she at first was tempted to join in solidarity.

“I thought some more about posting. It would’ve been easy to do. It would’ve been a way to demonstrate my empathy toward Floyd and victims of racism. A way to signal that I, too, denounce racism and was troubled by the now-viral clip of Officer Derek Chauvin pinning Floyd down with his knee. Both of these things were true, so why shouldn’t I communicate that along with everyone else?”

But as Stuckey thinks more about it, she is worried that if she posts the black square she will be approving of “calls for revolution” and will be participating in “an indictment of America itself and police as a whole.” In short, empathy for George Floyd would lead her to a political position she found uncomfortable. So, she rejects that empathy—and instead urges empathy for someone else:

“How could I know Derek Chauvin’s heart? How could I know his motivations, whether or not he pinned Floyd down because of racial animus? That’s essentially what these people were saying—that we can safely assume that because Chauvin was a white police officer and Floyd was black that Chauvin was a racist.”

Of course, you don’t really need to know what was in Chauvin’s heart. You could look at what he did, which is to strangle George Floyd to death while Floyd was saying over and over that he was dying and could not breathe. But by trying to get inside Chauvin’s head and heart, by insisting that he should be the focal point of identification, Stuckey can move away from what actually happened, and can instead present herself as the truly thoughtful and empathetic voice, feeling along with the right, white, and supposedly Godly person.

Stuckey insists that she’s eschewing empathy in order to follow the word of God, and as you’d expect she includes numerous Biblical citations (skipping hurriedly over controversial passages like Numbers 5:11 in which it sounds like God orders an abortion as punishment.) But the Bible does not in fact talk at length about contemporary racism, contemporary abortion debates, or contemporary trans health care. And so, Stuckey has to buttress her discussion with stories, examples, and narratives.

Those narratives rely on the substitution of the right (Godly) empathy for the wrong (progressive) empathy. Empathize with the fetus, not the mother. Empathize with women who are afraid of trans people (even if those fears are misplaced), not with trans people seeking healthcare. Empathize with people harmed by immigrant criminals (even if we know immigrants commit crimes at low rates), not with immigrants deported and separated from their families. And so on.

Himpathy and Trumpathy

Stuckey generally encourages her readers to empathize with people who are seen as normal (white, cishet, Christian) and with those in positions of power. This is a common political tactic on the right—as well as in Hollywood movies, and even on the left, where the white working-class is sometimes deployed as a synonym for virtue or normality. In fact, scholar Fritz Breithaupt, in his 2019 monograph The Dark Sides of Empathy, argues that this manipulation of empathy for the powerful and privileged is a core of Donald Trump’s political skillset. Trump, Breithaupt says, is “a master of empathy who effectively presents himself as powerful underdog and thereby continually reinforces and reinvigorates side-taking in his favor.” Trump presents himself as a “victim-hero”—and encourages his followers to see themselves as victim-heroes as well.

You can see this strategy at work during the 2024 campaign when Trump demonized Haitian immigrants, lying that they were eating their neighbor’s pets—thus encouraging white people to see themselves as besieged and to empathize with innocent cats and dogs. You can see the strategy too when Trump suggests reporters aren’t treating him fairly—as when he told ABC’s Terry Moran in the middle of an interview, “You’re not being very nice,” because Moran dared to ask him a somewhat hard-hitting question. Trump and his voters are always embattled, always persecuted, always aggrieved, always empathetic.

Trump takes advantage of what feminist philosopher Kate Manne calls “himpathy.” In her 2017 book Down Girl, Manne defines himpathy as “the flow of sympathy away from female victims towards their male abusers.” It points to a general dynamic in which empathy tends to move, not towards the weak, but towards the privileged—towards cishet, white, able-bodied men who we are used to seeing as the stars of movies, TV shows, politics, and life.

Progressives often try to divert empathy from its well-grooved channel, and try to get people to think about those whose stories are less told. Trump and Stuckey, on the other hand, urge their listeners to go with the familiar flow and identify with the usual suspects.

Empowerment and Disempowerment

Stuckey places a dramatic example of himpathy/Trumpathy at the climax of her book. She declares, rapturously, “One day toxic empathy won’t exist.” Why not? Because the Millenium will occur, and all the evil toxic empathizers will be thrown into the Pit of Hell. And believing that day will come, she encourages readers to imagine themselves as Jesus—not Jesus the healer, but Jesus with the sword:

“Because Jesus wins. At the end of this mess, Jesus comes in on a white horse and avenges innocent blood. He destroys the Enemy once and for all. The serpent’s head will be crushed, and all God’s children, all those who have been made alive in Christ by grace through faith, will live with Him in perfect joy forever.”

Empathy is used here not to sympathize with the weak and downtrodden, but to fuel a vindictive power fantasy. You (and you!) can put yourself into the place of God himself, crushing every foe, winning every argument, and laughing at all those evil empathizers who dared to disagree with you.

The flip side of this empowerment fantasy is not necessarily solidarity with the dispossessed. Instead, it can be a kind of emphatic disgust or refusal. Canadian marketing professor and evolutionary psychology enthusiast Gad Saad, for example, will often illustrate the evils of progressive empathy by telling a story about a Norwegian man who was raped by a Somali immigrant. The immigrant was deported, and the man expressed guilt about the deportation. On the far right, this has become a cautionary tale about the effeminacy and weakness of the (European) left. “This is what happens when you have suicidal empathy,” Saad concludes.

Saad, like Stuckey, is forswearing empathy. But in doing so, he distracts you from the fact that his story depends on empathy. He asks you to put yourself in the place of the Norwegian man who is raped, and to feel the shame and pain he experiences. And then after you feel that shame and pain, he encourages you to reject those feelings. You become the victim not to feel with him, but in order to feel how much you do not want to be him, rejecting his guilt and weakness in order to assure yourself you will never be in his position.

This may seem like a perversion of empathy. But it’s a fairly common perversion. Saidiya Hartman in her classic 1997 book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America analyzes a passage by John Rankin, a white antislavery proponent:

“My flighty imagination added much to the tumult of passion by persuading me, for the moment, that I myself was a slave, and with my wife and children placed under the reign of terror. I began in reality to feel for myself, my wife, and my children—the thoughts of being whipped at the pleasure of a morose and capricious master, aroused the strongest feelings of resentment; but when I fancied the cruel lash was approaching my wife and children, and my imagination depicted in lively colors, their tears, their shrieks, and bloody stripes, every indignant principle of my bloody nature was excited to the highest degree.”

Hartman points out that the white man, in imagining slavery, starts to talk about how awful it is, not for the enslaved people, but for his own wife and children, who he imagines in the position of the enslaved. Hartman argues there is an “obliteration of otherness,” as “the attention of the self occurs at the expense of the slave’s suffering.”

While this may seem forgivable when talking about an abolitionist engaged in antislavery work, the dynamic has serious downsides in other contexts. For example, antivax skeptics frequently compare themselves to enslaved people, claiming that being asked to get vaccinated is equivalent to the loss of bodily autonomy. Empathy—putting themselves in the place of an enslaved person—doesn’t lead to opposition to enslaving other people; instead, it leads to a panicked paranoia that public health requirements are the equivalent of chattel slavery.

Empathy on the right often functions not as a way to build solidarity with the marginalized, but as a kind of propulsive tool of psychodrama. One fantasizes that one has been placed in the position of the most oppressed in order to excuse extremes of megalomaniac assertion and/or violence.

Is This Empathy Done Wrong?

Many people, on all parts of the political spectrum, have a good deal invested in empathy. They believe that putting themselves in the place of others is a powerful moral and spiritual experience. They argue that empathy, done right, leads to good. Rejecting empathy, as Stuckey does, seems from this perspective to be bizarre and willfully sadistic. And when people use empathy for ill—as Stuckey also does—the response is generally that the bad empathy isn’t real empathy. Empathy cannot fail; it can only be failed.

The problem is that treating empathy as an untrammeled good makes it difficult to see how mercurial and various a tool empathy actually is. If we take Stuckey and Saad at their word and accept that they are empathy haters, we’ll miss the very sophisticated ways in which they are using empathy to sell their hateful ideas. If we insist that more and better empathy is the solution to Trumpism, we will have trouble seeing that his appeal is based in large part on the ways in which he builds coalitions through using in-group empathy to create a consensus for violence. If we assume that empathy is innately good, we fail to take account of the way that empathy often flows, through cultural default, to those in power—especially to wealthy white men.

This isn’t to say, like Stuckey, that empathy is innately toxic. Rather, it’s to argue that empathy, like most human tools, emotions, and narrative techniques, is neither good nor bad in itself. Empathy can be a tool to build solidarity for justice, freedom and equality for all, as when we recognize immigrants as our neighbors or think about how we would feel if we were forced to live as a gender other than our own. But empathy can also be an excuse to hoard power and demonize others. Stuckey wants to disavow it altogether while using it to maintain power for people like her. If we hope to create a better world than the Christofascist one the right imagines, we need to understand not just their rejection of empathy, but their use of it.

Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. He writes on politics and culture at his newsletter, Everything Is Horrible.