Why do so many on the Christian, cultural, and political right receive such obvious pleasure in enacting policies and legislation that harm others? Don’t they care about the harm they’re doing? And if not, why not? Dan tackles this issue in this week’s episode, taking a look empathy, and its lack, as key concept for answering these questions.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Glad as always to be with you.
As always, thank you to those of you who support us in your different ways, whether it's just by listening to this.
And sitting through all the ads, whether you are a patron who contributes financially, whether you are somebody who just sends me emails at Daniel Miller Swaj, Daniel Miller S-W-A-J, with thoughts, points of interest, feedback for this series.
I am always looking for both feedback and ideas for the series.
Please keep the ideas coming.
We're an indie show.
We have no exterior funding.
Our institutions don't pay for this.
You are the ones who keep this going three times a week, different kinds of content.
So we always, always are so thankful to you and thank you for that.
Finally, my caveat that I am, as always, never get a chance to respond to all the emails that I need to.
I'm responding to them as I can, but please know I value those and appreciate those and I'm really moved by the responses and the stories I hear from so many of you.
Speaking of being moved emotionally or psychologically, if we like, or for some of us maybe even spiritually, Well, look at this week.
I'm calling this episode, Don't They Care?
And I'm talking about an issue that's been on my mind, and I know it's been on the minds of many of you for a long time.
And what sort of stirs this in me, what stirs it in you, what I hear about from people are the events of, I mean, they really feel pronounced in the last few years.
Maybe they've just become more visible.
I think they have become more intense.
I think they have become more programmatic.
But movements and events where religious and political conservatives increasingly and brazenly expand their attacks on minorities of various kinds, whether we're talking about ethnic minorities, gender minorities, sexual minorities, and many of the most vulnerable people in our society, children, as well as people from other countries, undocumented workers, and people like that.
And it has to do with the wanton cruelty And the palpable desire to harm and to essentially punish those who don't fit into their vision of what America should be and of who or what real Americans are.
And I struggled with what to call this episode.
As I say, I went with, don't they care?
But it could have been why don't they care or how can they do that?
And these are the questions.
That I hear from listeners.
I hear from my clients.
Again, I'm a practitioner with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, working as a coach with people who are processing religious trauma.
I hear from those clients all the time, like, why don't they care or don't they care about the damage they're doing and the harm that they're causing?
How can they target people like this, these different groups?
The way that they do when it's so evident that they're hurting people.
And people really struggle with this.
And I continue to struggle with this.
And on one hand, the answer is obvious.
They want to inflict pain.
They want, again, to sort of punish people for not being the right kind of people.
Whether it's believing the right things, whether it's expressing gender and sexuality in quote unquote, the right way, whether it's being the right kind of American and so forth.
They desire the harm that they inflict on others.
I mean, that's the obvious answer.
Okay.
But if you're listening to this, you're like, come on, Dan, you do better than that.
Like, yes, they do it because they want to do it.
But really, it just moves the question back a step, which is, you know, how can they feel this about other people?
How can they take such obvious pleasure in the pain of others?
And if we spend our time in this series, you know, decoding — it's in the code, that's the name of the series — decoding elements of popular religious and political culture, I think this question lies at the basis of a lot of that code.
We talk a lot about terms that are used, like justice or safety or protection or rights or whatever, and sort of decoding what that means.
And we often find that for those who use some of this language, like say religious freedom or something, it often means kind of the opposite of what, for a lot of us, our intuitive sense of the meaning of the word would be.
And we talk about this, and I think that this issue Often lies at the root of that.
And so what I want to talk about today, digging into this, you know, how can they do that?
Why can they do that?
I think it has to do with an idea that we're all familiar with, and it's a basic concept.
It's a basic concept of empathy.
And more specifically, to flip it around and state it in the negative, it's about a lack of empathy.
It is about the inability And I think the unwillingness to enter into a space of understanding where we can experience or at least view the world from another person's perspective.
Notice, that doesn't always mean accepting that perspective, doesn't mean necessarily becoming whatever that other person is, it doesn't mean sort of signing off on everything they might think about reality or something like that or the way that they experience it, but the ability to at least understand it from their perspective.
And that's what I want to talk about today.
I want to talk about this non-empathy because I think it's at the heart of, again, what I view as this wanton cruelty, the desire, the pleasure in, frankly, harming others.
Okay?
So let's start with this idea of empathy.
Probably most of us know that word.
It's kind of a fancy word, but it's an idea that we all understand to some extent.
Any of us with kids, or if you have other littles in your life, younger siblings, nephews, nieces, the neighbor's kid who likes to come and hang out with you, or you know, the children of friends, whatever they are, or you can remember your own childhood, We are familiar with the experience of trying to get kids to understand the perspective of others.
It's a really fundamental thing.
I remember, you know, things like in preschool and stuff, when some kid bites another kid or hits another kid or gets really angry or says something mean or whatever.
You start at a young age working to try to get them to understand, well, how would you feel if somebody said this to you and so forth?
How do you think they feel?
We understand that idea.
Another simple example, anyone who's ever been in a serious long-term relationship with somebody else, and whatever the nature of that relationship, this is true of friendships, I think this could be true of, you know, co-workers that you're on friendly terms with, certainly true of romantic or intimate partners, right?
Anybody who's ever been in that kind of relationship knows that you have to be able to take up another person's perspective.
A relationship of any kind isn't going to last well If you can't enter into the space of experience in a world the way that other people experience it, okay?
But when we see the cruelty and the anger and the joy and suffering that comes in, say, targeting trans and other queer folk, in targeting BIPOC communities and banning DEI initiatives and prohibiting local municipalities from having non-discrimination rules or laws and so forth, in targeting undocumented immigrants, and sort of on and on.
We could come up with a laundry list of these things.
We run up against the hard wall where empathy ends.
It's like running along and crashing into the wall where that ability or willingness to enter into another person's perspective just stops.
And it's the point where antipathy begins, right?
If you have empathy, the opposite is antipathy, negative feeling toward others.
And I was thinking about this, and I remember really poignantly a time when I hit that wall.
And it's not the only time.
It's not the first time.
Most of you know, I grew up in a conservative religious subculture.
I know all about that lack of empathy.
But one of them that really struck me and really set me on the path that I'm on now, you know, got me started with the podcast and everything else, was somewhere in the run-up to the 2016 election.
It was before we had started Straight White American Jesus.
But it was the issue of so-called unaccompanied minors and their treatment when they crossed the American border.
And some of you will remember, you would get these stories of unaccompanied minors, some of them very, very young, who were coming across the border with people who were not their parents, were not part of their family.
And the thing that really struck this is when they were staying in these centers that, you know, they looked like they were, you know, in sort of wire mesh cages, laying on concrete, under mylar blankets, things like this.
And me, as a parent, and I don't think you have to be a parent to feel this, but I was, and I was a parent of young kids, and I couldn't imagine how bad a situation would have to be to be willing to hand your children off to oftentimes strangers
Promising to get them across the border, knowing you may never see them again, knowing that there's a risk or a threat to them in doing this, but knowing that whatever that risk is, it's better than whatever it is that you're trying to get them away from.
And it just used to blow my mind.
I had such, I guess, empathy, even sympathy.
We get into the difference between sympathy and empathy.
I don't want to take us down that path right now.
But I was really moved by this.
And I had interactions with conservatives, political and religious conservatives, and it was shocking to me.
Because they would just simply condemn these parents.
They obviously don't love their children.
They obviously don't care about their children.
Why aren't they fixing their country if things are so bad?
Why aren't they coming?
They should just work harder so they can live somewhere else.
Just sort of on and on and on.
But I was struck with like this palpable disconnect between my reaction, the way that these events hit me, and their reaction.
And that was the wall.
They had no ability or willingness to empathize with that.
And I would try this, folks.
I would say, you know, person X, Y, or Z, maybe this is somebody that I knew from college, this is somebody I knew from some other realm of life, whatever.
And I would say, you've got kids, like, you care about their kid.
Like, can you imagine that most of these people, these parents, care about their kids?
This is why they're sending their kids, which tells us something about how bad the situation is.
And they just absolutely were not willing and or able to enter into that.
And I knew the differences between my religious and political views and theirs.
But at the same time, the vehemence of this directed at children, of being OK with kids in cages, of thinking that that was something that somehow Made America safer or whatever.
It really threw me, and I've been reflecting on it ever since.
It's part of, as I say, what set me on the trajectory of doing a Straight White American Jesus with Brad and all the things that we've done, okay?
And here's why I think people like me, or those of us who do empathize widely, right?
Those of us who, whether we're part of those communities or not, we empathize with the queer community.
We empathize with BIPOC communities.
We empathize with gender minorities.
We empathize with all of these folks.
Is that for us, a lack of empathy is a shortcoming.
It's a deficiency.
It represents a kind of moral failing.
It's something we ought to do.
We ought to empathize with others.
It's part of what makes us a good person, at least a better person.
But for those people, like the ones who celebrated the treatment of those kids, Or who oppose teaching about diversity and the legacy of slavery.
Or who target trans communities.
It's the opposite.
And this is the key.
This is what I think, if I have a takeaway that I want people to hear in this, this is it.
For them, empathy is a shortcoming.
Empathy is a moral failing.
To identify with in some way or enter too much into understanding the perspective of those who are not like you is a moral failing.
It is not something one ought to try to do.
It is not a virtue.
It is a vice.
It's a moral failing.
And that's the key.
For those people, those people that I was talking to, the people that we, you know, celebrate all of the things that go on in places like Florida and Texas that just further and further and further discriminate against and target different kinds of people, understanding or entering into the experience of those who are different from us, maybe radically different from us, it's not desirable.
It's a shortcoming on our part.
Being able to hold our beliefs and our values and our privileges, even if it comes at the expense of others, that is what is morally praiseworthy.
In other words, to be a good person is to hold on to those things, even at the expense of others, maybe even as a reason for targeting others.
Empathy, for those people, is a sign of spiritual or moral or personal weakness.
Not strength.
It's not desirable.
It's something negative.
But why?
Why is that?
I want to flip this around and ask it this way and say, okay, so what does the lack of empathy give us?
If we're those folks, right?
What do they gain from that?
Or what does the presence of antipathy give?
What does it do?
That's the question I'm always interested in.
And those of you who listen know this.
Here's what I think it can do is it produces and maintains a strong sense of identity.
And one way, not the only way, right?
We all, I quote, identify as different kinds of things.
We all have social identities that we hold and we occupy, and there are different ways of doing that.
There are different kinds of identity.
But one way to maintain a strong sense of identity is to focus on non-identity.
In other words, it is to develop our sense of we, of who we are, Less by anything inherent in us, anything that we can say about ourselves, and more by simply differentiating ourselves from others.
I know who I am because I know who people are who are different from me.
I know who makes, you know, we.
I know who we are because I know who isn't part of our group.
And this is how the complex identity of, say, those we call Christian Nationalists works.
And we talk about this all the time.
It's a sense of identity that is built around the exclusion of others.
And the more we can accentuate or exacerbate that difference, the more secure we supposedly are in our own identity.
And that's why if you ask Uncle Ron, or some other Christian nationalist, or some of the evangelicals you know on Facebook, or whomever, right?
If you ask them what it is that they're really about, You're going to get general vague statements about like, I'm about America, I'm about freedom.
But if you say, okay, but what does that mean?
What does that look like for you?
Typically, what's going to happen is you're not going to get a positive statement of that.
You're not going to get an affirmative picture that says, here's what I want, here's the policy I propose, so forth.
Instead, you're going to get some sort of statement about who and what they oppose, about who and what they are not.
It's an identity that is structured around antipathy, that opposite of empathy, around ill feeling toward others with nothing positive at its core.
That's what it is.
It's an identity that is built.
By drawing that wall, building that wall between who they are and who everybody else is.
And that wall is threatened by empathy.
Empathy threatens that identity.
And I think this is true of all negatively focused identities.
Everybody knows this.
Maybe not everybody, but lots of people know this and people have thought about this in other ways.
Whether it's political theorists looking at fascism and totalitarianism, whether it's people who look at generational trauma and how it carries down to different generations and so forth, and this dimension of drawing boundaries between oneself and others and so forth, right?
It's true of all negatively focused identities.
Empathy is their undoing because it breaks down that hardening of differences, and that's all the identity is.
It's built only on difference.
And when this is underwritten by religion, it's even more pronounced.
This is where purity comes into it, the purity of the identity in question.
Empathy threatens purity.
If my identity is given only by my purity, whether it's political purity, ideological purity, theological purity, sexual purity, whatever, if I start empathizing with others who aren't like me, there's a risk that I become impure.
There's a risk I will be drawn to whatever it is that they're drawn to.
And so that threatened purity is what leads us to reject empathy.
To threaten purity is to call into question a divinely sanctioned order and divinely sanctioned identities.
Empathy is a threat.
And I think another thing to say about this, then, is that, you know, we have this lack of empathy.
We have this antipathy.
Well, what does it do?
It informs actions.
We support certain policies or laws or remove certain protections because we have antipathy to those who are not like us.
We feel threatened by their very existence.
Well, what happens?
You get those structures in place, the legislation in place, you start hearing about this on the Fox News broadcasts of the world, you start hearing about this from maybe family members, maybe clergy members, and it reinforces the feelings of antipathy, our experience of the world as being a world in which we are threatened by those who are not like us, which then leads to what?
To more policies, more practices, potentially violence, And so you get this kind of circle of reinforcement.
So the more a group or an individual puts that antipathy into action and attitudes or policies or legislation or whatever, the more the identity behind those actions is reinforced and the more central that antipathy becomes and so on.
So I think it's also worth noting in this regard what I would call the sort of ravenous nature of antipathy.
Because there's nothing substantive about the identities it serves, because the identity behind antipathy is largely vacuous, it is nothing without its opposition to others.
You constantly have to generate new oppositions.
And I think this is what you see when there's this sort of ever-expanding list of people who are targeted by, say, Christian nationalists, by religious and political conservatives.
It's the ever-expanding nature of the culture war so that there's always a new front opening up.
Why?
Because to maintain that identity, one has to have enemies.
They have to have people that are different from us.
They have to be threatened by those people.
We have to generate this.
And this is why those so-called culture wars are constantly evolving, constantly expanding.
It's also why, in my view, religious fundamentalism is constantly eating itself alive because it has to generate new enemies all the time.
It's a common structure.
Okay?
We've got to wind this down.
What do we do with all of this?
This is what I would say.
So the next time you find yourself asking or you hear somebody else asking, don't they care?
That they're hurting others?
Next time somebody says the kinds of things I say about the damage, for example, that anti-trans legislation does to trans youth and others in the trans community, and you say, God, don't they know that?
Don't they care?
Yeah, they know that.
And no, they don't care.
Or, worse yet, they do it and they support it because it harms others.
Empathy is a threat to them.
The exclusion of empathy is intentional.
The development of antipathy is on purpose.
And it's hard to overcome, folks, because here's the thing.
When you have one of those identities that is built only on your distinction from others, You cannot empathize with those others without calling your own identity into question.
You have to become something and somebody new to be able to empathize with others.
And likewise, to the degree that you do empathize, you will become something or someone new and different.
I say this all the time to my students.
When that happens, we use the language of saying, well, I'm not the same person I used to be.
I believe that that's literal.
I believe that that's a description of our actual experience in life.
Oftentimes, when we enter empathetically into the lives of others, we will be changed, and that's a threat if one's identity is based on not changing, not empathizing, not coming into identity with others.
All right.
Final point I want to make here is I said before that the lack of empathy is the support of the supposed security of those identities.
And here's what I mean by this.
I think it should be obvious, but it's not to lots of people.
Those identities that can only be maintained by attacking others, through antipathy to others, by drawing distinctions from others, if that's all that one's identity is, it's a highly insecure identity.
And the more that those who undertake all of these efforts to attack others insist that they're doing so because they're secure in who they are, the more pronounced that insecurity is.
I think that's a key point to recognize because it's also what makes these identities so dangerous.
It's like the proverbial animal backed into a corner that will lash out.
When there's nothing fundamentally solid at the core of an identity except antipathy and hatred to others, there's not really an upper limit on where it will go as we seek to exercise that.
So that's my take on why it is that people don't feel what we feel when we enter into these discussions.
This is, I think, the driving force.
But I think we really have to understand this fundamental distinction that for some of us, empathy is a virtue.
It's the kind of person we ought to be.
We ought to be somebody who can empathize.
For others, empathy is a weakness.
That's a moral failing.
We are only the people we ought to be when we don't enter into and identify with others.
I think that's a really key distinction.
As I said, we've got to wind this down.
I want to thank you all, as always, for listening, again, for supporting us.
Please keep the ideas, the feedback, the thoughts coming to danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj, at gmail.com.
