09/15/2026
Another religious leader has jumped onto the anti-empathy bandwagon.
Catholic Bishop Robert Barron recently joined the movement of Christian fundamentalists blaming empathy – our sacred experience of connection to others -- for the wrongs in the world.
You heard that right.
For more than a decade, some white fundamentalist Christians have been selling the idea that empathy is a sin. They dislike empathy because it gets in the way of their culture wars, political wars, religious wars, and actual wars.
Their message: Don’t feel another’s pain. Don't identify with another's plight. Don’t get uncomfortable if we choose to inflict pain and misery on others to gain power and dominance in society – their plight is not our problem.
Don't feel anything.
Be more like the priest and Levite who walk right past the bleeding man with no empathy whatsoever. Don’t be like the Samaritan who sees the stranger, has his heart moved – what would I hope for if this were me? – and stops to help.
Jesus made love, compassion, and empathy the sacred core of teachings, the venue through which we experience God present in the other.
Be compassionate like God. Love your neighbor as yourself. When you see someone in pain or in need, let their pain and need merge with yours, and let it lead you to offer healing and help.
That’s the role of empathy.
Empathy and compassion are the yeast that make love rise in the world. Without them, religion turns dry, bitter, ugly, nasty, indifferent, self-absorbed, disconnected, violent, and deadly.
Throughout human history, people have tried to strain out empathy and compassion in order to use religion as an instrument of cruelty and injustice.
Crusades. Holy wars. Inquisitions. Witch hunts. Holocausts. Slavery. All this and more arose from forms of religion that had been stripped of empathy, compassion, and love.
Which is why it’s important for us today to pay attention to this old trick of trying to replace love with fear, empathy with judgment, compassion with indifference, and goodness with cruelty.
And to stand for – and live within – empathy’s sacred connection.
We know from experience where the anti-empathy movement leads, how it births so many ugly things into our lives, our communities, and our world.
We’ve been reminded of how we know someone is following God’s way faithfully – by how much love is present. Such faith binds hearts and lives and communities together with the sacred threads of empathy and compassion.
Only when we see ourselves in others can we treat others as ourselves. Empathy is the precondition to love. The sin is not in having too much, but too little.
-- Joe
