On Feb. 28, 2025, Elon Musk took aim at empathy on a Joe Rogan podcast. He said that empathy was “the fundamental weakness of western civilization.”
Barely one month later, April 1, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary/Louisville President Al Mohler climbed on board, declaring that empathy is “destructive” when being used in politics and means “never having to say no.”
MAGA declares war on empathy? Really?
In the version of Christianity I was raised in, empathy was the cornerstone of the faith, which is love. God’s love. Love, as in the Greek word, agape, self-giving love, self-sacrificial love.
Think of a husband taking care of his wife with Alzheimer’s 24/7; think of a single mother caring for her children while working two jobs; think of the first responders combing the banks of the Guadalupe River for survivors and bodies. Agape. Love. You probably had someone (or many people) in your own life who gladly gave their time, attention and money to better your life—a parent, a grandparent, a teacher, a neighbor, a friend. That took empathy!
Some of you can recite the outlines of Jesus’s parable, The Good Samaritan. That Samaritan (who was a social outcast in the Jews’ view in Jesus’s day) would not have stopped and helped the Jewish person left injured in the ditch had it not been for his empathy, his capacity to feel the pain of the victim.
Some of you can quote at least a portion of I Corinthians 13. For example, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude … it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth” (NRSV).
The passage is a suggested reading on p. 426 of The Book of Common Prayer (The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage), which I assume Elon would have encountered as a youth in his Anglican church in South Africa.
Some may know the first sermon Jesus preached. He read scripture in the synagogue in Nazareth that sabbath (see Luke 4:16-18). It was the first two verses of Isaiah 61: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.” And a few minutes later, he said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Empathy is what would enable many of Jesus’s followers, down through the centuries, to feel the poorness of the poor, the captivity of the captives, the blindness of the blind and the oppression of the oppressed. Empathy.
To shift gears—to anthropologist Margaret Mead of all people—there is a story, probably apocryphal, that a student once asked her what was the earliest sign of human civilization. Mead answered, “a healed human femur.”
Said femur was allegedly found at an archeological dig and was some 15,000 years old. At that time, a broken leg would have been a death sentence. For the bone to heal would mean someone had cared for the injured person: providing protection from the elements and from predators; providing food and water. A civilized society, she seemed to be saying, is one that cares for its vulnerable members.
Shifting gears again. You no doubt have seen footage of ICE agents chasing down presumed illegal immigrants (their term) in Home Depot parking lots, in fields of lettuce in California’s Central Valley and in McArthur Park, Louisiana. Masked. No identifying badges. No due process. No 14th Amendment. They have become Trump’s private police force: the essential tool wielded by every dictator, emperor or king who ever lived.
This is not the America I know and love. The Land of the Free and The Home of the Brave does not put on “a show of force” in a Los Angeles city park. The America I know, with its Statue of Liberty bearing the inscription, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” doesn’t put on a Putin-style military parade in its capital.
The nation whose Declaration of Independence opens with the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” doesn’t try to rule by ridicule, threats and cheap adolescent name calling.
Stand up. Speak out. Make Good Trouble, as the Honorable John Lewis taught us!
This column also appears in The Pine Belt News, Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
