The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner is famous in people-who-read circles for his ability to get maloevent and/or stupid people in leadership to humiliate themselves in his interviews. Lucky for him, the right provides an endless supply of people who are egotistic as they are ignorant, meaning he will never go without subjects who don’t bother to learn this history before agreeing to go on the record with him. The latest deserving victim is Albert Mohler, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who went from denouncing Donald Trump as a “predator” in 2016 to being one of Trump’s loudest Christian right defenders. Chotiner drew Mohler, a supposed follower of Jesus Christ, to admit he now condemns empathy. Mohler sneered that empathy is “an artificial virtue,” calling empathy “destructive and manipulative.”
“Empathy means never having to say no,” Mohler insisted, attacking the straw-iest of strawmen.
Much was made in the media, for good reason, of billionaire Elon Musk’s crusade against empathy, an emotion he describes as “suicidal” and the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” Musk is an atheist, but in this attitude, he is increasingly joined by the Christian right, as Julia Carrie Wong documented at the Guardian this week. A growing chorus of evangelical leaders has taken to calling empathy “sinful,” “toxic,” and “satanic.” Right-wing Catholics are going there, too, with Vice President JD Vance rejecting Jesus’s exhortations to love your neighbor and welcome the stranger, drawing a rebuke from the Pope.
The political impetus behind this overt assault on what was once considered a baseline virtue is obvious enough. All these people follow Trump, a man who is incapable of empathy, so much so that many high-profile psychologists have argued that he should be considered a sociopath, despite not consenting to a formal diagnosis. Trump has eclipsed Jesus himself as the object of worship on the Christian right, as evidenced by the hosts of “Girls Gone Bible” invoking Trump’s name as if he were God in their rewrite of the Lord’s Prayer. At his inauguration ball, a “worship painter” even replicated Trump’s image while the crowd sang “amen” over and over, underscoring this shift in the de facto theology of these “Christians.”
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So yeah, Trump’s sociopathy now outranks the empathy of Jesus in MAGA eyes. But there’s another angle to this, as well: This is about the MAGA right’s unhinged obsession with gender and escalating hatred of women. Empathy is seen as a “feminine” emotion by both the atheistic techbro right and the Christian nationalist right. Both firmly agree that femininity is the root of all evil. One doesn’t have to speculate, either, to see this aspect of the war on empathy. Plenty of MAGA leaders will say the misogynist part out loud.
Empathy is seen as a “feminine” emotion by both the atheistic techbro right and the Christian nationalist right. Both firmly agree that femininity is the root of all evil.
When the Episcopalian Rev. Mariann Budde spoke out about Trump’s cruelty during an inauguration service, Blaze Media’s Allie Beth Stuckey tweeted that this is “to be expected from a female Episcopalian priest: toxic empathy.” Stuckey has repeatedly argued that women cannot be pastors and that it’s “arrogance” for women to believe otherwise. She also wrote “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.”
Pastor Joe Rigney, author of “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits,” also lambasted Budde for daring to speak back to Trump. He wrote that she displayed “the man-eating weed of Humanistic Mercy” that was “enabled by the feminist denial of the complementary design and callings of men and women.” He’s fine with women having empathy inside the home, for family members. But, in leadership roles, “empathy is a liability, not an asset.” He’s also called it “pathological feminine empathy” to defend LGBTQ people and immigrants.
The “sin of empathy” talk got even louder this week when Justice Amy Coney Barrett was the only conservative on the Supreme Court to agree with the three liberal justices that Trump has no right to send innocent Venezuelan immigrants to a torture prison in El Salvador. The four justices who dissented against Trump are women, so William Wolfe, former aide to Al Mohler, used it as evidence that women cannot be trusted with power. “Illegal alien criminals don’t need to be ‘mothered’ by the women on the Supreme Court,” he screeched on X. (Wolfe is lying, it must be said. Reports show many, probably most of the men who were disappeared had legal asylum status.) He then called them the “Four Horsewomen of Suicidal Empathy.”
As journalist and lawyer Jill Filipovic noted in her newsletter, “Coney Barrett signing onto part of the dissent in the Supreme Court decision at issue here had nothing to do with empathy,” but was based on a “cold, rational reading of the Constitution.” It’s the men who appear to have let their emotions — whether it’s unjustified fear of immigrants or an unwillingness to cross Trump — interfere with rational decision-making.
On the secular side of MAGA, the claims are just as unfounded, but possibly even grosser. As Wong notes, Musk gets his ideas about “suicidal empathy” from Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor who pretends to be an expert in biology as cover for his baseless gender essentialism and racism against immigrants. Saad likes to tell the story of Karsten Nordal Hauken, a Norwegian man who Saad mocks for calling himself “feminist and anti-racist.” Hauken was raped by a Somali immigrant a few years ago and went public about the complex emotions he felt when his rapist was deported. “I felt a relief and joy that he was going away forever,” Hauken wrote. “But I also got a strong sense of guilt and responsibility. I was the reason why he should not be left in Norway, but rather to face a very uncertain future in Somalia.”
Hauken has become a punching bag on the right, which has clung only to the word “guilt,” while ignoring that Hauken wasn’t opposed to punishing his rapist. He just had complex emotions about treating an immigrant more harshly than a native-born Norwegian. Saad excused making fun of a rape victim by saying it was necessary to prove his point about “suicidal empathy.” But really, what he’s doing is reiterating the misogynist fears driving the right-wing war on empathy. After all, the MAGA movement can hardly be considered anti-rape. They back Trump, who was found liable by a civil jury for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll. Saad is using Hauken’s experience to signal not disapproval of rape, but of empathy. It’s a fable about how empathy makes you a woman, which is what makes you eligible for rape in the grim Trumpian landscape.
For years, there have been endless rounds of media hand-wringing about the loneliness epidemic among men, which is unfairly implied to be the fault of women. Rhetoric like this, however, is far more to blame. Men who buy this message that empathy is stupid, suicidal, and effeminate — which is supposedly the worst thing you can be — are going to struggle to make friends and maintain romantic relationships. Empathy is a basic skill people need to get along with other people. Yes, most empathy-haters will offer some throat-clearing about how the feeling has its place, even for men. But that caveat is drowned out by the hyperbolic and highly gendered language that frames empathy as emasculating. And, of course, by the continued hero-worship of Trump, a man who has likely never felt a pang of feeling for a fellow human being in his life.
