Evangelical Christians have never been especially kind people — going around telling people, sometimes their own children, that they’re going to burn in hell, protesting against people having rights and then protesting to take those rights away, trying to force everyone to obey the rules of their religion whether they believe it or not, messing their kids up with purity culture and even unnaturally extending the acting career of child star Kirk Cameron. But for a long time, they liked to pretend that they were kind. That they “hated the sin and loved the sinner,” and that’s why they wanted gay people to pretend to be straight. They wanted to pretend that they were telling their daughters that having sex before they’re married would make them hellbound whores in order to save both their souls and their hearts and not because they were judgmental freaks who didn’t care if they gave their kid a complex.
But lately, several of them have really been glomming onto the newfangled idea that maybe, just maybe, not giving a flying shit about other people is fine, actually. The Public Religion Research Institute’s (PRRI) annual American Values Survey has found that white Evangelicals are the religious group most likely to believe that “empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God’s truth.”
Indeed, they are the only group in which a majority — 54 percent — believe this to be true.
Admittedly, I don’t love the way this question was phrased. I think that, had the part about “God’s truth” been left out, the survey would have captured a clearer picture of where people are actually at. I could certainly see how someone who was super religious would say anything on earth is “dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God’s truth.” Other religious groups have people who don’t necessarily believe everything, but stick with it anyway for whatever reason. I would say that probably describes most Catholic and Jewish people I know, and probably also mainline Protestants, although I honestly don’t feel like I know enough of them to say. You can’t really be like, a casual Evangelical. Or a “cafeteria Evangelical.” Or an Evangelical that just goes to church on the big holidays. Or even an Evangelical who does go to church every Sunday and believes what they believe but minds their own business otherwise. You have to be in it all the time and you have to annoy other people about it. That’s just how it goes.
You will notice that both Republicans and Christian Nationalists have similarly high rates of “thinking empathy is a bad thing,” which tracks.
The study also suggests that the people who value empathy the most are “unaffiliated” Democrats who reject Christian Nationalism, which tracks, although I’d say the phrasing of the question probably affected some of the outcome for at least two of those categories. Generally speaking, you’re not going to find too many atheists or agnostics out there who are all that het up about people not being guided by God’s truth. (Maybe Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, and Sam Harris and others driven mad by Islamophobia, but not too many others.)
Over the last few years, the idea that empathy — the human instinct to understand and care about other human beings, the one that keeps us from, say, being sociopaths or psychopaths — is a bad and dangerous thing has become increasingly popular on the Right. Canadian marketing professor and well-known internet loon Gad Saad first put forth this idea as the pseudo-scientific concept of “suicidal empathy,” in order to explain why people had empathy for people he didn’t like — specifically immigrants. He really, really, hates immigrants.
I would like to point out that Saad, himself, is currently an immigrant, as he moved to the United States from Canada due to his distaste for the Canadian government’s immigration policies. Yep. Just breathe that one in.
The concept has also been popularized by Elon Musk, who was, unsurprisingly, very intrigued by the idea that caring about other human beings is bad, actually.
Now, neither of these people is an Evangelical Christian. Saad is Jewish and Musk claims to be merely “culturally Christian.” But the idea has become most popular in Evangelical circles, especially since Allie Beth Stuckey’s book Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion hit the shelves.
I’ll give you a moment to do some cry-laughing about that title if necessary, before I drop some choice quotes from the Amazon reviews of said book.
“If you're anything like me, if you've felt cold and callous just for being who you are and wondered how you're going to keep going, this book is for you.”
“I have been one that has not been very outspoken in my political/cultural beliefs for fear of being perceived as ‘unloving,’ ‘unkind,’ or ‘too intense’ but that has changed the last couple of years (this year especially).”
“How to stand up for your ‘toxic and mean’ biblically based beliefs.”
“I don't feel guilty for anything. I feel sorry for people who feel guilt.”
Wait, sorry. That last one was actually just Ted Bundy.
The gist of this is that evil progressives are out to exploit your kind and loving Christian nature by getting you to feel empathy for LGBTQ+ people, for women with dangerous pregnancies who might die without an abortion, for immigrants, etc. — that one was pretty emphatically ordered by Jesus! — but actually being terrible to these people is great, because it is Biblical, and you should do more of it. This, of course, presumes that we have some kind of strange, evil motivation for wanting to manipulate these God-fearing Christians and that we don’t just, you know, give a shit about other people.
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Of course, it’s possible that this idea isn’t that newfangled. When I met my first Born Again Christian at the age of 16 (having previously believed the term to be a slur, not something people call themselves), she informed me that the reason Catholics were bad was because “they believe good works can get you into heaven.” This was pretty confusing to me, as personally I believed that “helping the poor” was something in the plus column for Christians. But no, she told me that this didn’t matter and all that mattered was accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior. She was also, unsurprisingly, a pretty big asshole who regularly talked about how gay people were going to hell right in front of her very obviously closeted-at-the-time “best friend” (who did go on to be a pretty fabulous drag queen).
I admittedly do not understand a whole lot about religion from the perspective of a believer, but the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around is there being some all-powerful, eternal entity whose biggest hang-ups are things as petty and small as LGBTQ+ people existing, premarital sex and women (and girls) who don’t want to ruin their lives by having a child they don’t want (or for any child to be unwanted, actually). Also that this same entity would, on the other hand, be totally cool with war, with xenophobia, with bigotry, with letting poor people starve and go without health care and with people generally just being incredibly selfish assholes who don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves. To me, that seems like someone who really has their priorities mixed up. And what’s the point of having or inventing a whole ass religion in the first place if it doesn’t make you a better person?
But hey! Whatever gets you through the day, right? I guess it’s just sad that what gets these people through the day is sociopathy.
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https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-367377789?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
"Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ."
-- Will Durant