Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy
Just over an hour into Elon Musk’s last appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the billionaire brought up the latest existential threat to trouble him.
“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 idea that caring about others could end civilization may seem extreme, but it comes amid a growing wave of opposition to empathy from across the American right.
“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” Musk continued to Rogan, 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.”
The idea that empathy is actually bad has also been gaining traction among white evangelical Christians in the US, some of whom 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.
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.
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.”
“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.”
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.”
Rigney’s book The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits was released in February by Canon Press, a publishing house best known for releasing apologia book for the antebellum south that characterized slavery as “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence”.
Women are more empathetic than men, which is why God does not allow them to be ordained, Rigney argues. Quoting extensively from Calvin Robinson, the rightwing British cleric who was recently mimicking Musk’s Nazi salute at an anti-abortion rally, Rigney connects progressive political values to “a culture of victimhood flowing from toxic female empathy”.
“Empathy feeds the competitive victimhood mentality that is rampant in our society,” he writes. “The same empathetic logic lies beneath the societal indulgence of criminality that particularly plagues progressive cities, as well as the empathetic paralysis that prevents western nations from wisely and justly addressing the challenges of both legal and illegal immigration. Compassion for refugees and ‘kids in cages’ is used to open the border to millions of able-bodied young men. But nowhere is this pathological feminine empathy more evident than in the various controversies surrounding transgenderism.”
Justification is also at the heart of Stuckey’s book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. “Empathy 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.
Rigney’s views are increasingly appealing to evangelical Christians. In February he was invited to promote his book on the podcast of Albert Mohler, an influential leader in the Southern Baptist Convention.
For them, empathy assumes the power of a phantasmagoric threat – it can subvert God’s will, corrupt the church, and end western civilization as we know it. The Christian and patriotic public must harden their hearts to any empathy that might prevent them from supporting the actions needed to “save” America – whether they be cutting off millions of people from live-saving medication, firing tens of thousands of public servants, threatening to invade sovereign countries, or rounding up and deporting the millions of workers on whose backs the entire economy rests. The fabrication of an existential threat in order to motivate popular support for otherwise unsupportable actions is a classic tactic of fascist regimes. Where Hitler focused on the supposedly all-powerful Jews, Trump has presented his supporters with a rotating cast of bogeymen, including Muslims, immigrants, transgender people, critical race theorists, federal employees and feminists. Conveniently, empathy manages to unite them all.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...musk-trump
Just over an hour into Elon Musk’s last appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the billionaire brought up the latest existential threat to trouble him.
“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 idea that caring about others could end civilization may seem extreme, but it comes amid a growing wave of opposition to empathy from across the American right.
“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” Musk continued to Rogan, 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.”
The idea that empathy is actually bad has also been gaining traction among white evangelical Christians in the US, some of whom 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.
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.
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.”
“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.”
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.”
Rigney’s book The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits was released in February by Canon Press, a publishing house best known for releasing apologia book for the antebellum south that characterized slavery as “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence”.
Women are more empathetic than men, which is why God does not allow them to be ordained, Rigney argues. Quoting extensively from Calvin Robinson, the rightwing British cleric who was recently mimicking Musk’s Nazi salute at an anti-abortion rally, Rigney connects progressive political values to “a culture of victimhood flowing from toxic female empathy”.
“Empathy feeds the competitive victimhood mentality that is rampant in our society,” he writes. “The same empathetic logic lies beneath the societal indulgence of criminality that particularly plagues progressive cities, as well as the empathetic paralysis that prevents western nations from wisely and justly addressing the challenges of both legal and illegal immigration. Compassion for refugees and ‘kids in cages’ is used to open the border to millions of able-bodied young men. But nowhere is this pathological feminine empathy more evident than in the various controversies surrounding transgenderism.”
Justification is also at the heart of Stuckey’s book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. “Empathy 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.
Rigney’s views are increasingly appealing to evangelical Christians. In February he was invited to promote his book on the podcast of Albert Mohler, an influential leader in the Southern Baptist Convention.
For them, empathy assumes the power of a phantasmagoric threat – it can subvert God’s will, corrupt the church, and end western civilization as we know it. The Christian and patriotic public must harden their hearts to any empathy that might prevent them from supporting the actions needed to “save” America – whether they be cutting off millions of people from live-saving medication, firing tens of thousands of public servants, threatening to invade sovereign countries, or rounding up and deporting the millions of workers on whose backs the entire economy rests. The fabrication of an existential threat in order to motivate popular support for otherwise unsupportable actions is a classic tactic of fascist regimes. Where Hitler focused on the supposedly all-powerful Jews, Trump has presented his supporters with a rotating cast of bogeymen, including Muslims, immigrants, transgender people, critical race theorists, federal employees and feminists. Conveniently, empathy manages to unite them all.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...musk-trump
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
