Proper 15, August 17, 2025
Empathy
Donald Seekins
Recently there has been a lot of discussion in the American media about empathy. President Trump and his supporters are criticized for their lack of empathy toward certain groups of people – especially immigrants, Palestinians enduring Israeli war crimes in Gaza and people who because of poverty need the healthcare provided by Medicaid, which was drastically cut in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” just passed by Congress. In order to fund major tax cuts for America’s richest people, social services overall will be drastically cut back. “Trump World” is a place where humanity is divided into two mutually exclusive groups: “winners” who are rich and successful and “losers” who are unable to support themselves and need the help of government. Outside of America, Trump has little fondness for people living in so-called “shithole” countries like Haiti or Sudan.
While Christian ethics demand that we help the “losers,” the poor, the sick, the victims of natural and manmade disasters, Trumpism sees government’s job as helping the “winners,” including himself, to keep on winning. Although he has the support of most evangelical Christians, Trump’s “ethics” resemble the paganism of the ancient Romans – a celebration of “might makes right” and the worship of raw power. Life as a battle to the death by gladiators. In his language, Trump is often very cruel, ridiculing people who are suffering hardship or ill-fortune. He loves to “punch down.” And his supporters love him when he does it.
There seems to be no room for empathy.
Empathy is often seen as a liberal, left-wing value. However, President Joe Biden showed absolutely no empathy toward the Palestinians after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. Biden and his secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, unquestioningly supported Prime Minister Netanyahu in his killing of tens of thousands of Gaza residents, including women, children and old people. Without the weapons and other aid supplied by the United States and its allies, Israel could not have possessed the firepower to turn Gaza into something resembling Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. In the American political world, Biden had been considered the very model of an empathic man: warmhearted, kind, looking out for the little guy. Loyal Democrats saw Joe as the very incarnation of the deep empathy which they claim is the moral foundation of their own policies. But toward the Palestinians and their American supporters, he and his loyal supporters like Blinken were stone cold.
A Christian conservative spokeswoman named Allie Beth Stuckey recently published a book titled Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. In an interview with a columnist for The New York Times, she said that “Empathy itself is not a virtue. It is not in itself something that we should aspire to . . . I say that it can be positive in what it can lead you to, or it can be negative in what it can lead you to . . . putting yourself in someone’s shoes, feeling what they feel can also lead you to do three things that I say make empathy toxic: One, validate lies, Two, affirm sin; and Three, support destructive policies.”
Stuckey gives an example of a woman having an abortion. Liberals are likely to feel empathy for the woman, especially if she is living in a place (like Texas) where abortions are prohibited. But Stuckey asserts that “real” Christians should feel empathy for the fetus, even if it (he, she) has a fatal genetic defect or was the result of rape or incest. Given the context, empathy for the fetus expressly excludes empathy for the mother who (sinfully) wishes an abortion.
I agree with Stuckey when she says that empathy is not a virtue – not good in itself. It is basically an emotion with little connection in many cases to reality, rationality or the welfare of others. Empathy can have bad consequences. I am not an absolutist on abortion, like Stuckey, but I believe that the emotion of empathy can be manipulated. It can legitimize feelings of non-empathy, of cold dismissal, of certain others.
After the October 7 Hamas attack, Biden flew to Israel and gave the war criminal Netanyahu a big, warm huggy. He likes to give hugs, and this was probably the biggest, warmest huggy he had ever given – at least to a foreign leader. Biden and most of his Democratic Party supporters genuinely love Israel, even if they are not Jewish. Indeed, Biden often pointed out that although he was Catholic, not Jewish, he was still an ardent Zionist.
Of course, the political elite in the United States and Europe love Israel because the Israel lobby gives them so much money, without which they couldn’t have lifetime employment in politics. But the intensity of their love shows that empathy plays a big role in America’s protection of the Jewish State.
One useful approach to understanding the pitfalls of empathy is to say that it is often, if not usually, selective. The fact that it is an emotion makes it something that acts outside a comprehensive, rational view of the world. Empathy makes it possible for supporters of the state of Israel to ignore or deny the behavior of Israeli soldiers which replicates the horrors of the Holocaust, including the Nazis’ purposeful starvation of civilian populations. It makes official and unofficial views of World War II in Japan strongly and repeatedly aware of the victimhood of Japanese killed by American aerial bombings, including the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, without acknowledging that the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy perpetrated war crimes with millions of non-Japanese victims in East and Southeast Asia. While it may be more “natural” to feel empathy for members of one’s own ethnic or racial group rather than outsiders, such selective empathy has been at the root of much of man’s inhumanity to man.
We generally feel the emotion of empathy for people who are part of our own In-group, whether that is a small community, an ethnic group or a nation-state. We also feel more empathy for people who in some way “look like us.” One reason for the great empathy expressed in western countries for Ukraine is that they are “more like us” than the black or brown peoples of countries like Palestine, Iran, Sudan or Myanmar. In the case of Myanmar, the fall from grace of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2017-2019 led to the country’s dropping into a media black hole – a radical revocation of empathy. With her fluent English and Oxford education, Suu Kyi seemed very much like an idealized version of our liberal selves – until she was accused of being anti-Muslim. Now, no one pays attention to Suu Kyi or Myanmar any more.
Empathy is fickle. From the perspective of middle class people in “developed” countries, most of the world’s population is invisible or anonymous. But thanks to geopolitical calculations, sometimes groups of previously invisible people become visible. For example, global attention was focused on Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the sufferings of the Afghans under Taliban rule became a target for empathy. For example, the western media showed Afghan people being executed in a Kabul football stadium for violating the strictest Islamic laws. But as the American war in Afghanistan dragged on without favorable outcomes, people lost interest and in 2021 Joe Biden shut down the whole show, withdrawing U.S. troops and aid agencies from the country and leaving behind a huge, shameful mess including a restoration of Taliban rule. Like Myanmar, Afghanistan was dropped into a media black hole.
The classical explanation of man’s inhumanity to man is that we as a species are often driven by negative, aggressive and destructive forces, especially during times of war or social breakdown. Behind the mask of civilization is the bloodthirsty hyena. But some observers have suggested that it is love, not hate or aggression, which propels war crimes and genocide. In his book Evil Men, an overlooked classic, James Dawes writes that:
Because we are sociable creatures that form communities and bond
intensely with each other, we are also vicious. Fierce xenophobia is a
by-product of our ardent in-group identification. We hate because we
love. We are aggressive because we have things we care about protecting
(p. 45).
In other words, the price of love for the people and things we belong to or possess is hate, hate for the Other. And empathy is a major instrument to make such hatred manifest.
