You may have viewed Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) offering a mock apology for dismissing a constituent’s complaint that the Medicaid cuts she endorses will cause people to die with the flippant remark, “We are all going to die.” She tied her defense of her callousness to Christianity, inviting all who worried about death to convert so they could enjoy eternal life after death. J.D. Vance, too, has defended sharply limited empathy in Christian terms–a theological view for which Pope Francis admonished him. Part of this attack on empathy stems from the resentment of populist voters who feel that empathy is being extended to the wrong people, that they are the ones who deserve empathy, as opposed to various others they despise–immigrants, foreigners, Muslims, blacks, feminists, LGBT people, poor people, etc. Arlie Hochschild, Katherine Cramer, and Justin Gest [link corrected] have written compelling accounts of this. But what does this have to do with Christianity? What happened to “Jesus is love”?
Now, according to some Christian nationalist pastors such as Joe Rigney, empathy is a sin. It’s toxic. There is a gender angle to this view: women are purportedly more empathetic than men, which makes them unfit to lead men, a church, or anything else. On this view, Christians need a leader like Trump to deliver them from evil, and pastors who oppose this must be pushed out of the movement.
This wouldn’t be the first time a religious movement has taken a secular leader as their model of virtue. But when the secular leader is a malignant narcissist or sociopath–someone lacking empathy–its members are in trouble. I don’t mean to take away from the damage populist anti-empathetic politics does to marginalized people and to democracy. I do mean to reject the demonization of everyone who has embraced this politics as if they are all sociopaths themselves. This, I think, neglects a critical sociological factor in the interpersonal dynamics driving this politics, which inflicts great damage on its participants, very much including the men among them. Ideology can trap people in self- as well as other-destructive social norms. In short: when people are persuaded that they need to accept a bully as their leader, they have to submit to bullies’ rules. Such submission threatens humiliation, emotional stunting, and loss of intimate relationships.
Empathy is simply human. It’s not the special province of women. To bullies, however, it is a sign of weakness. Now join the leadership of bullies to Christian complementarian gender ideology, according to which empathy is effeminate and hence especially contemptible in men. Then boys and men who aren’t themselves malignant narcissists or sociopaths need to suppress their own empathy, lest they become the bullies’ next targets. Communities in thrall to this ideology will side with the bullies and pour their scorn on the bullies’ victims. Male victims then suffer humiliation and may try to vindicate themselves through gender violence. Empathetic boys and men not only become afraid to show empathy, but may even be bullied against their conscience to bully other boys and men perceived as effeminate, to ward off the charge of effeminacy themselves. They must reject anything deemed feminine in themselves, and hold anyone with those qualities in contempt. Under bullies’ rules, boys and men can’t reveal any vulnerabilities, which are also considered effeminate. This is a formula for a decline of social connection and intimacy, which damages straight men and hence straight women as well, especially those who lack the shields and attractions of wealth and power.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Jon Rudd 06.11.25 at 9:57 pm
Growing up with his kind of Daddy and with military school piled on top of that, it wouldn’t be surprising if Trump got caught up in that “I’d better be a shit otherwise guys will think I’m a fag” syndrome.
wetzel-rhymes-with 06.12.25 at 6:09 am
In Timothy Snyder’s account of the White Russian fascist Ivan Ilyin’s philosophy, Ilyin conceived of a kind of monarchist Christian fascism. Snyder calls Ilyin “Putin’s philosopher” and attempts to situate Putinism as a blend of Stalinism and Ilyinism. I believe the world view is similar in very conservative Catholicism and Seven Mountains Dominionism and other Christofascist movements in the United States. In Ilyin’s view, influenced by Hegel, the Christian monarchist state is the goal of history. The individual is hopelessly corrupt, so the state becomes a form of Inquisition. The state purifies itself through inflicting the sufferings of Christ on its citizens, through ‘purge’. I believe to say that “Empathy is a sin” is conditioning for the scapegoating rituals of fascism, which is actually an anti-Christian nihilism, I think, Camus would say, where scapegoating is the central ritual. A fundamentalist denomination can go off track, positively reinforcing each other’s bipolar manias, calling each other “Prophet Danny” and “Apostle Dillan”. It’s like an anti-Great Awakening, to this Methodist, but I shouldn’t say that about fellow believers because I’m taught to believe if there’s communion, there’s grace, but I can’t see how any of these philosophies are consistent with God’s love and grace.
JPL 06.12.25 at 7:02 am
Hate. That’s no way to live. (And BTW, WRT Joni Ernst, in some parts of the populace (I wouldn’t call them “populists”) what they call “Christianity” has become all about me, me, me and my salvation, and nothing about thy neighbour. Where does that sentiment come from? It can only end in sadness and despair.)
Tm 06.12.25 at 8:20 am
I’ll never forget this: when I lived in Arkansas, the local newspaper gave the episcopal priest a regular column. he was actually the most progressive voice in that generally very right wing newspaper. He got letters to the editor lecturing himn, and I quote, that “helping the poor is against the Bible”. No words. This was back in Obama times.
“I do mean to reject the demonization of everyone who has embraced this politics as if they are all sociopaths themselves. This, I think, neglects a critical sociological factor in the interpersonal dynamics driving this politics, which inflicts great damage on its participants, very much including the men among them.”
I don’t know what follows from this. Yes on some level the fascist henchmen suffer, killing people is hard work and damages the soul. But they are still the henchmen, not the victims. Not all MAGA voters are henchmen, of course, but many of them are in fact itching for blood and would gladly and on the spot sign up for the SS. Yes they are damaged men but we can’t help them, we need to defend against them.
Trader Joe 06.12.25 at 2:33 pm
The first mistake in this piece is to view Joe Rigney as in any way shape or form indicative of views average Christians, American or otherwise.
Take away that quote and the rest of your discussion is a strawman about strawmen.
Christians believe in empathy, its fundamental – full stop.
steven t johnson 06.12.25 at 5:26 pm
Trader Joe@5 is wrong. There are too many Rigneys to simply dismiss him as an outlier, especially on the basis of Trader Joe’s personal revelation from Jesus.
wetzel-rhymes-with@2 seems to forget that the pure Calvinist project seems to see the Christian state in very similar terms, much less the Catholic precedents. It’s not just the inquisition, but church courts etc. I suppose theologically you can say a Christian state is the Good News itself, evangelism in the world? At least, I would not consider Snyder a reliable historian.
praymont 06.12.25 at 5:40 pm
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I heard similar claims via the rhetoric about ‘bleeding hearts.’ This phrase was all over the editorial and letters pages of a local tabloid. The root idea was that bleeding hearts failed to discipline their empathy, making themselves naive targets for those whose suffering masked a cold-hearted predator. Often, this rhetoric was tribal: “we” shouldn’t trust/let in/help those outsiders (immigrants, refugees, poor people fundamentally unlike the presumed “us”). The letter writers typically feared that the stupid bleeding hearts in their midst were going to let the side down, admitting outsiders who would take over or trample “us.”
Even in its religious context, this spurning of empathy seems bound up with a kind of social Darwinism that sees “our” crowd always competing against those outsiders. The fear seems like the old fascist complaint that our tribe is being undermined from within by the bleeding hearts, whose empathy is cast as a disease sapping the Volk’s strength.
Peter Dorman 06.12.25 at 8:25 pm
It should be remembered that empathy was a particular target of Ayn Rand, even the leading edge of her appeal to (mostly) male libertarians. I remember as a child watching with grim fascination as Nathanial Brandon extolled egoism on his weekly Objectivist TV show. Well, it never went away, and Randism is arguably a major building block of the alt-right ideological convergence. It is certainly quite visible in the tech part of it. Perhaps the new part of it today is the connection to masculine assertion in a society still struggling to assimilate feminism, which is LA’s point.
PatinIowa 06.12.25 at 9:10 pm
What really galls me about it all, is that they haven’t read the classics they claim to adore. Augustine was a pretty severe guy, but he had core values:
“What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.”
? Augustine of Hippo, Confessions