When I was younger, I loved church. I loved learning about God and reading the Bible, as well as connecting with fellow Christians. One of the most important moral lessons I’ve learned comes from Luke 6:31: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” This verse has been a guiding principle in many of my moral decisions as I’ve grown older.
I noticed a shift in my beliefs in the year 2020, when I realized that my church and the Christians I was surrounded by were not examples of the Christianity I had deeply cherished as a child. Still eager to maintain my connection to church, I attended a weekend-long event with guest speakers.
The event started with worship music, and the church had hired a band instead of the usual worship group. Everyone was enjoying themselves until the lead singer paused before the last song, which she had written. She began alluding to abortion, implying that she believed it was a sin. As the song began, I paid close attention to the lyrics that followed. Sure enough, it was about abortion and what God commanded of us regarding it. Hearing this song, not only was I disappointed, but also confused. Where in the Bible does God talk about abortion?
After the band had finished praying over us, the guest speaker began to walk onto the stage. This event was held during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement and amid Supreme Court decisions affecting the LGBTQ+ community. I remember having to pick my jaw up from off the floor when I heard the speaker label the Black Lives Matter movement an “idol,” attempting to distract society from God, and when she referred to the LGBTQ+ community as the “ABC community,” mocking them with a laugh.
Disappointment overcame me. Although I was aware that my church – mostly white and deeply conservative – didn’t perfectly reflect my moral or religious values, the insensitivity of this entire event took me by surprise. It fundamentally changed how I viewed Christianity and how I felt about my church.
Growing up, I became very familiar with the idea of empathy as a core Christian value, and have viewed it as a standard of human morality. Empathy, defined as “the action of understanding, being aware of, and experiencing the feelings of another,” by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is now being labeled as “toxic” and “sinful”; the very basis of human decency and the core of my Christian values is somehow being refuted online by conservatives.
You cannot try to debunk Christian values like empathy in the same breath that you call yourself a Christian. Anti-empathy arguments did not come from Christian beliefs, nor are they proven true in the Bible. Instead, these arguments stem from conservative Christians trying to justify harmful executive actions by Trump and hostile feelings toward minorities.
Allie Beth Stuckey, the author of Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, believes that empathy is harmful when it encourages you to endorse sin and validate lies. Others like Stuckey have argued that, since the word is not found in the Bible, it’s a harmful concept. Stuckey’s disagreement with the principle of empathy, however, is flawed. If empathy can become toxic when it encourages you to affirm sin, can compassion not become toxic as well? Using this rhetoric, can’t anything become toxic when it encourages you to “affirm sin”?
Another prominent anti-empathy advocate, Joe Rigney, author of The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits, is a prime example of yet another anti-empathy approach. In an interview with Albert Mohler, Rigney discusses his disapproval of the concept of empathy, using an analogy of a person drowning. “Empathy wants to jump in with both feet and get swept away,” said Rigney. “Whereas compassion says, I’m going to throw you a life preserver. I’m going to even step in with it and grab you with one arm, but I’m remaining tethered to the shore. I’m not letting go of what’s true, what’s good.”
This hypothetical demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of empathy. Empathy is not putting yourself in danger because another person is in danger, like Rigney’s extreme example. Empathy is also not a toxic manipulation tool like Stuckey said; it is recognizing the emotions of another person and sharing a connection with them.
“While empathy refers to an active sharing in the emotional experience of the other person, compassion adds to that emotional experience a desire to alleviate the person’s distress,” states the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Had Rigney’s analogy been a true description of empathy, I would argue that the Bible would not condemn it. In fact, a similar scenario to Rigney’s hypothetical situation was captured in the Bible. 2 Corinthians 8:9 ESV states, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.”
The Bible urges Christians to follow the example set by Jesus not only by empathizing with others, but also by placing their needs above our own. “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers,” states 1 John 3:16 ESV.
I use these verses not to say that Christians should take these situations to the extreme, but as evidence that Rigney’s main source of morality – the Bible – cannot be used as justification for his argument.
The Bible also says, in Romans 12:15 NIV, “rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” Is this not the very embodiment of empathy? The Bible urges Christians to connect to the emotions of others as though they are their own. For years, conservative Christians have condemned other Christians that are part of the LGBTQ+ community for “picking and choosing” which parts of the Bible they decide to follow, only to do the very thing that they advocate so heavily against.
So why are these Christians so heavily motivated against empathy? When examining this pattern of thought, it’s not just conservatism – it’s also pro-Trump ideas that are a recurring theme.
In March of this year, Stuckey posted on X her support for Trump’s reelection. “He’s here to put American interests first, no matter what his enemies think,” wrote Stuckey. “That’s exactly what I voted for.”
Upon reading this, I was curious to see what “American interests” Stuckey could be referring to. I was led to her podcast Relatable (which I find pretty ironic, considering the messages she shares with her audience). In a January 2025 episode, when discussing immigration, Stuckey claims that most people agree with her standpoint: that immigration is the “top priority.” But she doesn’t stop there.
“The punishment needs to be brutal if we are talking about people who have no right to be here and they are committing additional crimes in addition to being here illegally,” said Stuckey. “The punishment needs to be brutal and they need to be deported immediately, and thankfully, we’ve got borders,” she added.
Another Christian conservative, Charlie Kirk, a right-wing political activist and a close friend of Trump, shared a similar stance to Stuckey and Rigney regarding empathy. “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually,” said Kirk on The Charlie Kirk Show, in October of 2022. “I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that – it does a lot of damage.”
Anti-empathy arguments made by conservative Christians have increasingly misrepresented true Christianity and brought about negative implications of what it means to follow God. True Christian values are not rooted in the harmful agenda of anti-empathy conservatives, but rather in God’s word. And if we are serious about honoring those values, then empathy can’t be dismissed.