What Is the Meaning of Empathy in Our Lives Today?

Have you heard the recent discrediting of ‘empathy’ among political leaders and the far-right Christian churches? It’s been all over the various news outlets, both one side and the other in political persuasion and especially embraced by our Evangelical Christian brothers and sisters. The debate (if you can call it that) has galvanized opposing interpretations of the Gospel and the Hebrew Scriptures about this word long taken for granted in our sermons and interpretation of what we believe in faith.

Last week Elon Musk reported on Steve Bannon’s podcast that ‘empathy’ is responsible for a “national suicide.”  If you hear the podcast, you will hear his uninformed and bilious, pompous description of why we don’t need such a ‘feminine’ guide to thinking about and supposedly helping immigrants. The current administration agrees. And so do certain Christian organizations and faith leaders which is, to say the least, scandalous in the interpretation of the Gospel. I found myself angry and insulted that the world’s richest man should be defining a word from a lexicon of virtues strictly from the point of view of profit, greed, and selfishness.  “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and loses his soul in the quest?” Certainly, Musk is entitled to his opinion and beliefs but putting his finger into the simmering diet of faith, is sure to contaminate the kettle.

Empathy is defined as “sharing the feelings of another person. It is our ability to understand how someone feels; it is the vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another.” Sympathy is different. “It is feeling sorry for someone without necessarily sharing their feelings.” In sympathy “we are relieved in not having the same problem as the person who is suffering.” Simply stated, empathy is putting oneself in another’s shoes, seeing the world from their perspective. You know when someone is not empathic especially if you are the one suffering. The non-empathic person might offer help, will look for solutions, will treat you more like a legal brief than a suffering human but he or she will do the job and solve the issue. It’s just a cold experience for you. You are not comforted. 

Thus, when a leading evangelical pastor started a movement to eradicate empathy from the teaching and doctrine of his faith, I went into action. (I admit I had no empathy for this movement!) I took to the writings of a longtime authority on empathy, Edith Stein, a convert from Judaism to Catholicism who became a Carmelite nun and was murdered at Auschwitz in1942. She is now Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. I have a published copy of Stein’s doctoral dissertation titled, On the Problem of Empathy. The work is rigidly academic and based on Stein’s familiarity with Edward Husserl’s philosophical theories and others in philosophy and psychology, but it is, for me, a review of what I had read 30 years ago, and it has been serving as excellent reading for my Lenten reflections. Here are some thoughts from the book: “It takes a spiritual awakening to touch the experience of another which we do not have physically.”  “Only he who experiences himself as a person, as a meaningful whole, can understand other persons.”  “If we take the self as the standard, we lock ourselves into the person of our individuality. Others become riddles for us, or still worse, we remodel them into our image and so falsify historical truth.” (All above quotes from p. 116.) There is a lot to think about in these brief quotes, especially in the context of a government moving precariously toward embracing nativism and isolationism. Stein’s niece, Waltraut Stein, Ph.D., translated the work from its original German. She wrote in her introduction, “(Stein) has shown what empathy is and how it is important in understanding our own nature as well as that of others.” (p. xxiii) Take heed, Mr. Musk.

The Holy Spirit must have thought I needed more dousing of empathy, and I was led to an article by Nicholas Kristof, Meet the Opposite of Elon Musk, in The New York Times, March 22, 2025. Kristof writes about Valentino Achak Deng, formerly a “lost boy of Sudan,” who made it to a Kenyan refugee camp as a child and eventually to America where he was educated and then returned to Sudan as that country’s civil war began its savage decimation of the entire infrastructure. Later, after Valentino founded a school for poor students, the war destroyed Valentino’s nascent school. For the safety of his students, he moved the school and began a process of attracting students through competitive exams. Cornerstone Academy, as it is called, now has a teeming enrollment of 2,200 students who learn in classrooms without desks, on dirt floors with 100 kids in a class. There is actually a computer class but no internet. Kristof met a twenty-year old student who was raised by an aunt who beat her if she attended school. She gave herself a rudimentary education by reading children’s books secretly. She now walks 80 minutes to and from school with no breakfast or lunch, “sometimes aching from malaria or beatings.” But she is top of her class of 500 and wants desperately to become a doctor. Kristof suggests that the two native Africans, Musk and Valentino Deng, are opposites of the same coin. Both are talented sons of Africa but one “recognizes he won the lottery of life and is determined to help those who didn’t.” The other is “destroying the very lives of children on the continent where he grew up, (by demolishing the United States Agency for International Development) and claiming that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”  Kristof concludes, “Elon take note.”

Reflection

I hope you will spend time this week contemplating on what you can do to be empathetic toward others. The Scriptures abound with examples. Here are a few: “The Good Samaritan,” Luke 10:25-37; Galatians 6:2; Ephesians 4:32; Hebrews 4:15; and 1Peter 3:8. Certainly, Jesus weeping at the tomb of Lazarus and Ruth’s commitment to Naomi in the Book of Ruth. There are many more examples of empathy. As you read these examples may your heart be enlarged to feel with others and may you be fulfilled in the journey of doing so.