When Did Caring Become Controversial?

In November, I wrote about how hot emotions—fear, anger, resentment—shaped the 2024 election. I argued that political campaigns increasingly rely on emotional triggers to move people into “hot states,” where empathy becomes harder to access, where logic and reason are crowded out by reaction. Fast forward to 2025 and empathy isn’t just hard to find, it has been recast as a weakness, as dangerous, as a sin.

​In a recent interview, Elon Musk claimed that empathy is “killing Western civilization.” He’s not alone. A growing number of pastors and pundits, especially in far-right Christian circles, are beginning to warn their flocks that empathy is a kind of moral corruption—a gateway to misplaced compassion and liberal decay. Empathy, they say, makes you soft.

But empathy isn’t softness, it’s strength, rooted in emotional intelligence. I teach it to my students not just because it leads to better relationships, but because it is what employers are looking for in new hires. Why? Because if you understand your employee, you build loyalty. If you understand your customer, you build trust. In sales, it closes deals. In diplomacy, it prevents war. In democracy, it allows us to coexist.

So why the backlash? To me, there is one commonality among the anti-empathy voices: they are all in positions of power. Empathy only feels dangerous if you’ve never needed it. If you’re comfortably seated atop the social or economic hierarchy, empathy is an inconvenience. It shatters the illusion that your opinion is the only one that matters.

When immigrants arrive at the border, empathy asks us to imagine the journey that brought them here—the violence they fled, the risks they took. When someone is wrongfully deported, empathy asks us to reconsider that decision (due process literally provides ‘the opportunity to be heard’). Without empathy, we stop seeing people. We start seeing problems. Albert Bandura calls this moral disengagement, a sort of psychological lubricant that makes it easier to ignore or justify harmful policies. Empathy introduces a friction that forces us to imagine how those policies affect everyone, not just ourselves or personal network.

Even something like tariffs reflects a lack of empathy. Critics point to poor economic strategy or shortsighted thinking, but they also reveal a complete disregard for the real people affected--farmers, manufacturers, small businesses, consumers—not to mention our global reputation.

When empathy is labeled a sin or weakness, what’s really at stake is our human decency. Empathy threatens systems of power and privilege because it implores us to care. If you can convince enough people that caring is wrong, that understanding is un-American and anti-Christian, then you can keep the power where it is—which is exactly the point. But, contrary to Musk’s opinion, empathy doesn’t destroy civilizations. It builds them. It has been a keystone of every civil justice movement we now celebrate—abolition, suffrage, civil rights. Contrary to some conservative Christians, empathy does not mean “never having to say no.” It is not pity or sympathy. It’s consideration in the literal sense, which I would argue, is the connective tissue of a functioning society.

As policies increasingly disregard those without influence, empathy should not just be defended, it should be championed. We should strive to practice it—and just as importantly, to notice when it’s missing, call out its absence, and choose leaders who reflect it. Because in the end, the fate of our shared future may come down to one simple question: Do we still want to understand one another—or not?