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As Christians, caring for the individual is ‘the heartbeat of our faith,’ one pastor said.
Posted on Oct 31, 2026 UTC
The right has a growing empathy problem.
Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, a new survey from Washington, DC-based Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that Democrats (84%) and Independents (70%) are more likely than Republicans (53%) to see empathy as a net positive to society.
The finding is not entirely surprising. As immigration and LGBTQ+ rights continue to be at the forefront, debates over empathy ― if we’re overextending it in Western countries, who deserves our empathy ― have gained traction among evangelicals.
As PRRI notes, in 2019, conservative theologian Joe Rigney wrote a blog post about the “enticing sin of empathy,” arguing that “Satan corrupts through compassion.” Conservative influencer Allie Beth Stuckey took up a similar theme in her 2024 book, Toxic Empathy.
The debate gained even more attention in January 2025, after Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde emphasized the need for empathy during an interfaith prayer service at Washington National Cathedral on Inauguration Day.
With President Trump and Vice President JD Vance sitting in the front row, Budde asked them to show “mercy” to vulnerable and fearful communities, specifically highlighting LGBTQ+ children and undocumented immigrants.
Not long after, Ben Garrett, a Utah church deacon, went viral for posting a picture of Budde on X, alongside an angry caption: “Do not commit the sin of empathy. This snake is God’s enemy and yours too. She hates God and His people. You need to properly hate in response. She is not merely deceived but a deceiver. Your eye shall not pity.”
Garrett’s tweet was fiery, but arguably no one has been more influential in spreading the “anti-empathy” gospel as Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a close Trump adviser.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said on The Joe Rogan Experience last year. “They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
Many of Musk’s talking points are borrowed from Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor and frequent critic of liberalism. His book Suicidal Empathy: Dying To Be Kind argues that Western liberal ideologies prioritize kindness toward foreigners over the well-being of their own citizens.
Saad has made it clear that he is not against empathy wholesale. “I’m not saying that empathy is bad. Empathy is actually a very important virtue to have,” Saad said on an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. “The problem with empathy, like most things in life, is if there’s too little or too much of it.”
Still, he has gone as far as to call caring for others “infantile.” “People tend to become more conservative as they get older because many of the progressive tenets are rooted in an infantile ethos of empathy,” he writes in his book. “What sounds nice to a young and naive mind is autocorrected by life’s experiences.”
@GadSaad / Via x.com
Christian leaders have strong thoughts on ‘suicidal empathy.’
Such extreme rhetoric to discourage empathy doesn’t sit right with many Christians, including the Rev. Brandan Robertson, the pastor of Sunnyside Reformed Church in New York City and author of Queer and Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table. Suicidal empathy, he told HuffPost, is a “concept borne out of power and privilege and designed to preserve them at all costs.”
“The idea that caring for the marginalized or those in need would somehow threaten or undermine the dominant society has no evidence to support it, and it is fundamentally antithetical to the teachings of Jesus, who made it clear that he would always leave the 99 sheep of his flock to go find the one that wandered away,” Robertson said. Robertson said that, as Christians, caring for the individual is “the heartbeat of our faith.”
While that ethos may not fit neatly within a capitalist system — or with the worldview of Elon Musk and others who see empathy as a “bug” in Western civilization’s operating system — Robertson said there’s “no way a Christian could ever embrace the philosophy behind ’suicidal empathy.’”
The Bible places a burden on those with the most power, wealth, and status in our society to practice charity, Robertson said, so it’s not hard to see why the world’s richest man might feel unsettled by some of Christ’s more benevolent teachings. (Not to mention the criticism of the rich in Scripture: As Matthew 19:24 says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”)
Malynda Hale, executive director of the Christian nonprofit The New Evangelicals, is also bothered by evangelicals’ rebranding of empathy. “I think a lot of MAGA Christians aren’t warning us about caring too much, but they are actually telling us to care about fewer people, and that is inherently anti-Christian,” she said. “That demographic is unfortunately fine with empathy as long as it’s only extended to people who look like them.”
Hale is particularly troubled by the disdain Musk and many in the Trump administration have expressed toward specific groups of immigrants. She believes Christ’s views on immigration are clear as day. Hale pointed to Leviticus 19:33–34, which commands believers not to mistreat foreigners living in their land. (“Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”)
In Matthew 25:35–40, Jesus teaches that how people treat the vulnerable, the needy and the stranger reflects how they treat him. “I was a stranger and you invited me in,” he says.
“It seems pretty clear to me where Christ stood on this issue,” Hale told HuffPost. “Jesus himself was a refugee. So when someone singles out immigrants as the example of empathy gone too far, the Bible doesn’t back up their bigotry. It actually says the opposite.”
Some of the harshest punishments in the Bible fall on communities that mistreated foreigners, Robertson noted. “Look at Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said. “No follower of Jesus can look at people of different beliefs and cultures and see them as enemies when the entire trajectory of Scripture points toward God’s inclusion of the full diversity of humanity in God’s reign.”
Christians are doing the work to reclaim empathy.
Though few Christians have access to a platform as prominent as Bishop Budde’s at the interfaith prayer service, others in Christian circles are finding ways to make the case for empathy.
To push back against what he describes as the Trump administration’s authoritarian and cruel immigration enforcement, the Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush launched the “Choose Love, Not ICE” campaign to urge faith communities to reject the immigration raids happening in cities across the US.
“At its root, the anti-empathy movement represents a turning away from the teaching of Jesus,” said Raushenbush, president and CEO of Interfaith Alliance and former editor of HuffPost’s religion page.
The organization Hale leads, the New Evangelicals, is building a coalition of people who want to model a better path forward and rebrand empathy. “We’re using digital media, free courses and resources, and community gatherings to counter these harmful narratives and show what it truly means to love your neighbor as you love yourself,” she said.
Hale said her challenge to Christians is to examine their faith more closely. “If your faith is making you care about fewer people and vote against them, you have to start questioning the people who taught you that version of faith,” she said.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
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