The far right’s and evangelical Christians’ war on empathy (1 Viewer)

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    Optimus Prime

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    Decided this should be its own thread

    Good (and long) read on the rights war on empathy and how it’s necessary to reconcile their support, love and slavish devotion to Trump
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    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.

    Musk learned about “suicidal empathy” through his “public bromance” with Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor whose casual application of evolutionary psychology to culture war politics has brought him a sizable social media following.

    By Saad’s accounting – and this is not dissimilar from the white nationalist “great replacement theory” – western societies are bringing about their own destruction by admitting immigrants from poorer, browner and more Muslim countries.

    “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. (Vance’s stance – that it’s righteous to privilege the needs of one’s family, community and nation over those of the rest of the world – earned a rebuke from the pope, but support from other influential Catholic thinkers.)

    It’s not every day that evolutionary psychologists and evangelical creationists end up on the same side of an issue, but it’s also not every day that empathy is treated as anything other than a broadly positive feature of human experience – your standard, golden rule-type stuff……..

    How we relate to the pain of others is a question that always lurks beneath our politics, but it’s one that is particularly relevant now.

    In its first months, the Trump administration has begun to implement a radical rightwing regime featuring mass deportations without due process, draconian cuts to domestic and foreign aid programs, and venally self-interested foreign policy – a set of policies that amount to a prescription for mass suffering and death.

    Whether Trump succeeds or fails in his quest to remake US society is very much a question of how much of the pain of others Americans are willing to abide in the pursuit of making America great again.

    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.……

    “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 (always provided that the criminal is a member of some aggrieved group), 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.”

    This is pure Maga red meat, largely untethered from any version of reality, secular or otherwise (the US criminal justice system is notoriously punitive compared with other western countries; crime rates in US cities are near historic lows; Jesus’s calls to “love thy neighbor” and “welcome the stranger” did not specify by age, gender or physical ability, etc).

    But it is useful for those devout Trump supporters who are looking for Christian-coded justifications of their political beliefs…..

    It also helps explain how Rigney, who may once have been too extreme for American Christians like Mohler, has found an audience among Christians seeking to reconcile Trump’s increasingly inhumane positions with their faith.

    “Everything about Trump flies in the face of orthodox Christianity,” Compton said. “His policy agenda is the opposite of traditional Christian compassion. So I think it’s not surprising that there’s a market for books, podcasts and other content that tells people who like Trump that there’s nothing wrong with liking Trump, and, in fact, that Trump’s doing exactly what the Bible or Christianity demands.”……..




     
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    In case you hadn’t noticed, things have not been going well for the west.

    In just three months, Donald Trump has started trade wars, crippled Nato, dismantled USAID and humiliated an invaded democracy while praising its aggressor, among other things. We still have 45 months to go.

    Through his antics, the US president is normalizing, even encouraging, intense selfishness and disregard for others.

    The clearest example is USAID: if the richest, most powerful country in the world thinks it’s a waste to give a tiny fraction of its income to the poorest, worst off people in the world, you must be a real sucker if you care for others.

    This comes on top of a longer trend of declining western happiness and disconnection. In 2012, the United States ranked 11th in the World Happiness Report.

    This year, it was 24th. In 2023, one in four Americans reported eating all their meals alone. That figure has risen 53% in just two decades.

    These short- and long-term trends are no coincidence. New research shows that unhappy people vote for populists, those who promise to rip the system apart.

    Importantly, it also finds that trust explains which type of populists unhappy people support: low-trust people vote for far-right parties, whereas high-trust people go far left.

    Therefore, we should see Trumpism as both a symptom of a lower-trust, lower-happiness society and a cause of further misery and mistrust.

    But what should you do if you don’t like the way the world is going? Is there anything you can do?

    The obvious answer is to rage, doomscroll and hope for the next election. But the obvious answer is no longer an option once we realize the antidote to Trump is to build a happier, higher trust society.

    Drawing on my dual experience as a moral philosopher and happiness researcher, I’d like to suggest some alternative ways you can fight back.

    Trumpism is built on pettiness and self-interest, so resisting means embodying the opposite virtues.

    To paraphrase a much better president: do not ask what the world can do for your happiness – ask what you can do for the happiness of the world.

    You commit yourself to making the biggest difference you can – even when others do not…….

    Fighting back doesn’t have to mean shouting louder. Another option is gracious, determined decency. Choose kindness over cruelty, generosity over selfishness, and evidence over bluster.

    Today, these quiet choices are acts of radical courage – ones that help build a better tomorrow. They might even make you happier, too.…….

     
    I saw a book on display in a store the other day - according to its cover it was about how “the left” uses empathy to take advantage of Christians. It had some sort of “the myth of Christian empathy” verbiage on it. I was just amazed that anyone would be that dense.
     
    I don't know when or why kindness, empathy and compassion became considered moral failings especially by the religious right

    I'm pretty sure all of them are pretty important foundations of Christianity
     
    I’ve posted this in another thread



    The pain in this guys voice is real

    This is absolutely tragic

    And the worse part?

    Maybe, or even probably, perpetuated by people who don’t even really believe it

    Just a way to either win elections and gain power or make money through ratings, clicks and likes

    And if it means laying waste to millions of people like this father and their families?

    Oh well
     
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    We have destroyed America. Trump is symptomatic. The people bear responsibility for the actions of their politicians because they elected them. Perhaps that is being too hard on the people. Perhaps complexity of society is causing the disintegration.

    Or perhaps something else is at work.

    There are and have been several narratives at work in the country, some relatively old, some very new. From exceptionalism to rugged individualism to the myth of decentralized government to government is the problem the populace has been fed theomythology for 249 years. It has been used to hide a multitude of sins as well as cause a multitude of sins.

    It would take months to years to lay out the various threads that have resulted in the flying cloth that is this country.

    But some small questions can be asked…

    Why are some other nations seemingly dealing with problems far better than we do? Are they intellectually superior? Or is it that they are “mature” and the U.S. is a permanently whining adolescent?
     

    In a more pointed example, the account in February posted an opinion piece from the National Catholic Reporter, a liberal-leaning Catholic newspaper, titled: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

    “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed?” the op-ed that Prevost reposted reads.

    Spoken like a true Christian and not a pseudo one like Trump and Vance. I'm not Catholic,but I like what I'm hearing
    so far from Pope Leo
     
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    Welp, they abandoned the Christ for the Pharisees.

    My father worked for the lutheran Church for 30 years and he hates everything about the fake christians who tries to convince people that the old testament is more important than the actual teachings of Christ. We have a few (luckily very few) here too but they are not the ones actually going to church but only using their "christianity" in their "victimization" because other religions are being more visible in society than previously. Fact is however that the religions co-exists very nicely 99% of the time, with only a few "troublemakers" on all sides. The lutheran church is the official state religion in Denmark and has been so since the reformation, but all religions are represented in the religious council which mostly deals with practical issues and ministers from different faiths often participate in public events together.

    We do teach religion in schools but not one specific but more from a historic point of view in how the different religions developed and interacted through the ages.
     
    The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner is famous in people-who-read circles for his ability to get maloevent and/or stupid people in leadership to humiliate themselves in his interviews. Lucky for him, the right provides an endless supply of people who are egotistic as they are ignorant, meaning he will never go without subjects who don't bother to learn this history before agreeing to go on the record with him.

    The latest deserving victim is Albert Mohler, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who went from denouncing Donald Trump as a "predator" in 2016 to being one of Trump's loudest Christian right defenders. Chotiner drew Mohler, a supposed follower of Jesus Christ, to admit he now condemns empathy. Mohler sneered that empathy is "an artificial virtue," calling empathy "destructive and manipulative."

    "Empathy means never having to say no," Mohler insisted, attacking the straw-iest of strawmen.

    Much was made in the media, for good reason, of billionaire Elon Musk's crusade against empathy, an emotion he describes as "suicidal" and the "fundamental weakness of Western civilization." Musk is an atheist, but in this attitude, he is increasingly joined by the Christian right, as Julia Carrie Wong documented at the Guardian this week.

    A growing chorus of evangelical leaders has taken to calling empathy "sinful," "toxic," and "satanic." Right-wing Catholics are going there, too, with Vice President JD Vance rejecting Jesus's exhortations to love your neighbor and welcome the stranger, drawing a rebuke from the Pope.

    The political impetus behind this overt assault on what was once considered a baseline virtue is obvious enough. All these people follow Trump, a man who is incapable of empathy, so much so that many high-profile psychologists have argued that he should be considered a sociopath, despite not consenting to a formal diagnosis.

    Trump has eclipsed Jesus himself as the object of worship on the Christian right, as evidenced by the hosts of "Girls Gone Bible" invoking Trump's name as if he were God in their rewrite of the Lord's Prayer. At his inauguration ball, a "worship painter" even replicated Trump's image while the crowd sang "amen" over and over, underscoring this shift in the de facto theology of these "Christians."

    So yeah, Trump's sociopathy now outranks the empathy of Jesus in MAGA eyes. But there's another angle to this, as well: This is about the MAGA right's unhinged obsession with gender and escalating hatred of women. Empathy is seen as a "feminine" emotion by both the atheistic techbro right and the Christian nationalist right.

    Both firmly agree that femininity is the root of all evil. One doesn't have to speculate, either, to see this aspect of the war on empathy. Plenty of MAGA leaders will say the misogynist part out loud.

    When the Episcopalian Rev. Mariann Budde spoke out about Trump's cruelty during an inauguration service, Blaze Media's Allie Beth Stuckey tweeted that this is "to be expected from a female Episcopalian priest: toxic empathy." Stuckey has repeatedly argued that women cannot be pastors and that it's "arrogance" for women to believe otherwise. She also wrote "Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion."

    Pastor Joe Rigney, author of "The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits," also lambasted Budde for daring to speak back to Trump. He wrote that she displayed "the man-eating weed of Humanistic Mercy" that was "enabled by the feminist denial of the complementary design and callings of men and women."

    He's fine with women having empathy inside the home, for family members. But, in leadership roles, "empathy is a liability, not an asset." He's also called it "pathological feminine empathy" to defend LGBTQ people and immigrants................


     
    Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, certainly has absorbed the first rule of MAGA: You're never in the wrong as long as you're "triggering" the liberals. On Friday, she drew outrage from her constituents at a town hall in Butler County, Iowa, with her bizarre defense of taking away people's medical care to pay for tax cuts for billionaires: "Well, we’re all going to die." The crowd, furious about her plans to vote for drastic cuts to Medicaid that will deprive millions of health care, booed her. Ernst, having absorbed Donald Trump's philosophy of always doubling down, responded on Saturday with a favorite lady MAGA trick: pretending to be stupid.

    "I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth," she sneered while walking in a cemetery. "So I apologize, and I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well."

    Ernst may play the mean bimbo for the camera, but she is aware that people aren't asking to live forever. They just don't want to die decades before their time, due to a lack of basic health care. But while most of the media focused on her act, her follow-up spin was, if anything, even more callous. She invoked Jesus Christ as the reason it's okay to let people die from easily preventable causes. "But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ," she smugly declared.

    To those whose understanding of Christianity is based on compassion and love, this comment was jarring. But Ernst understands the second rule of MAGA: their version of Christian "love" is cruelty. When Ernst was asked again about her comments by a CBS News reporter on Monday, she snapped. "I'm very compassionate," she barked while running for an elevator...........

    These Christians claim that true compassion comes from rejecting empathy, arguing that empathy gets in the way of speaking what they believe are "hard truths" they need to browbeat alleged sinners with.

    This is how the conservative Christian convinces himself it's love to deny LGBTQ people their freedom, because compelling heterosexuality will get them into heaven. Or to believe it's compassion to scream invective at a woman entering an abortion clinic, which gets reimagined as "counseling" the women to stop sinning.

    These are the rationalizations of people who want to hate while denying they are hateful. Ernst's behavior also shows how it can be used to justify opposition to Republican hostility towards Jesus' call to care for the poor and the disabled, especially if doing so means a slightly higher tax rate for the wealthy. Holly Berkley Fletcher, the author of the upcoming book "The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism," explained this in her Monday newsletter.

    Evangelicals tell themselves they "prioritize saving souls for eternity over helping bodies in the here and now," she wrote. In reality, of course, it's a way "to avoid responsibility and reform and to serve their own interests."

    Ernst's implication that people should welcome suffering and death has a long and ignoble history. Fletcher notes slave owners used this message to bully enslaved people in the 19th century.

    In recent years, the idea was revived due to the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to justify Republican opposition to life-saving measures like social distancing, masks, and eventually, vaccination.

    By October 2020, Tucker Carlson of Fox News was sounding this message, declaring, "At some point we are all going to die. Dying is the central fact of life," and suggesting that was reason enough to pull back all public health measures.

    It was a message that got a huge boost from evangelicals, especially pastors at megachurches who didn't want to put church services online, depriving them of the adulation of the adoring crowd. Rev. Tony Spell of Louisiana drew headlines in early 2020 by declaring, "True Christians do not mind dying." Caleb Mathis, pastor at the enormous Crossroads Church of Ohio, wrote at the time, "I hope it's the end of the world," because he believes heaven "sounds pretty freakin’ amazing."

    Even after the vaccine, Joy Pullman of The Federalist wrote an article titled, "For Christians, Dying From COVID (Or Anything Else) Is A Good Thing." In it, she argued, "There is nothing we can do to make our days on earth one second longer or shorter," and also "death is good."

    None of these folks live by their own pro-death rules, of course. They see a doctor or take other measures to protect their health. It's only when they're asked to help others, whether through vaccination or paying slightly more in taxes, that they find this duty in others to welcome death with a smile. But this is worse than the usual Republican hypocrisy.

    It also reflects the increasingly Christian nationalist bent of the GOP. They are explicitly arguing that everyone else has to live by their fundamentalist religious belief that death is good. You may be an atheist, a non-Christian, or a more liberal Christian who believes in healing the sick. Too bad for you. In the MAGA view, we're all members of their fanatical death cult, whether we like it or not...........

     
    Trump and his so-called Christian followers increasingly resemble the very thing the Bible warns against — not merely unbelievers, but deceivers who twist the message of Christ into something unrecognizable. They don’t reject Christianity outright; they hollow it out, draping hatred, greed, and fear in the language of faith.

    They’ve turned the gospel upside down:
    • Compassion is weakness — ego and cruelty are strength.
    • "Love thy neighbor" is forgotten — replaced by xenophobia and tribalism.
    • "Blessed are the poor" becomes "blame the poor."
    • Welcoming the stranger becomes building walls.
    • Turning the other cheek becomes "stand your ground."
    • Humility is mocked, while arrogance is celebrated.
    • The peacemakers are scorned — the warmongers praised.
    • Truth is inconvenient — lies are weaponized.
    • Idols are worshipped — especially golden ones.
    • Jesus said, “You cannot serve both God and money.” They try to serve both — and end up serving only money.
    This is not Christianity. It is a counterfeit faith — a gospel of fear, greed, and power, disguised in crosses and flags. If the Antichrist were to come preaching in Jesus' name but living in opposition to everything He stood for, would it look much different?
     

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