Trump's Willing Executioners

Ordinary Evangelicals and the Sin of Empathy

My Master’s degree is in Holocaust Studies. Under the tutelage of German historian Dr. Steven Fritz, my classmates and I spent three years researching and interpreting the concentration, liquidation, deportation, and annihilation of European Jewry. According to Holocaust historian Daniel Goldhagen, “The Nazi Party was the most radical political party to gain control of a government in European history. Significantly, its openly murderous radicality notwithstanding, it did so through electoral means.”

From its earliest days, the Party devoted itself to destroying democracy and relentlessly embodying antisemitism at every level of society. Hitler was a savior, promising to make Germany great again. In the end, 11 million people died in the Holocaust (6 million Jewish victims and 5 million non-Jewish victims).

Holocaust historiography is complex and disturbing. It’s one of those subjects that shifts from the academic to the personal. I suffered with nightmares throughout my graduate studies from man’s inhumanity towards man. One of the most malevolent moments in my research was the realization the Nazi Party didn’t consist of monsters, but ordinary men and women willing to commit extraordinary crimes for God and country. “Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception,” writes Holocaust historian Christopher Browning.

Germany wasn’t a secular society. It was the largest Christian nation in Europe. In 1939, 54% of Germans identified as Protestant and 41% identified as Catholic. Historians now believe the Holocaust was not based on a systemic plan enforced from on high, but upon improvised and evolutionary actions escalated and improvised by Hitler’s henchmen. “The idea that Hitler set the genocide policy in motion by means of a direct instruction can be completely rejected,” writes historian Hans Mommsen. Without collaboration from the average German Christian citizen, Hitler would have stood alone.

After the war, the Allied powers held a series of military tribunals (The Nuremberg Trials) to prosecute prominent members of the Nazi Party for crimes against humanity. Captain G.M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to the defendants at the trials, made this statement from his direct experience with the twenty-four Nazi prisoners.

“In my work with the defendants I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

Queue the white evangelicals.

I doubt I’m the first person to tell you white, American evangelicals are waging a war on empathy. Sean Feucht, Mark Driscoll, The Gospel Coalition, John Piper, Allie Beth Stuckey, James Dobson, Del Tackett, and Doug Wilson have popularized the “sin of empathy.” Tackett, my former beloved boss at Focus on the Family, went on James Dobson’s radio show under the title, “The Rise of Malevolent Compassion.” I couldn’t bring myself to listen.

And Jesus weeps.

The same cast of characters and religious propaganda that created the Holocaust are alive and well in the United States. Sound hyperbolic? In your wildest nightmares, did you ever think you would see a Nazi salute at a presidential inauguration? Me either.

The evangelical church is almost universally marching in goose-step behind their dictatorial and sociopathic fuhrer; a man completely devoid of empathy. When asked if he would visit the recent aviation crash site in Washington D.C., Trump responded, “You want me to go swimming?” How disgusting.

Like Hitler, Trump encourages dehumanization, division, and blind obedience, undermining compassion. “Nazism was cruel because Nazis were cruel; and the Nazis were cruel because cruel people tended to become Nazis,” continues Christopher Browning. Is it too bold to say something similar about the white evangelical community in America?

Evangelicalism is cruel because white evangelicals are cruel; and evangelicals are cruel because cruel people tend to become evangelical Christians. For Trump evangelicals, empathy is a sin because cruelty is the point.

Before going any further, I want to be clear. None of this should surprise anyone. People of privilege, those whose wealth and favored position in society protect them from pain, are often the most merciless. They can be incapable of kindness. When you’ve spent the last forty years fighting a culture war of your own making, brutalizing the LGBTQIA community, cultivating a fear of “the other,” suppressing critical thinking skills, denying science, cultivating conspiracy theories, and segregating yourself from the wider world, you create malignant people.

If Empathy is a Sin, Sin Boldly!

Despite what the evangelical community tells you, feeling the pain of others is the highest expression of human consciousness. It is love incarnate.

In the Christian tradition, active love looks like compassion, or the sometimes agonizing ability to experience what it’s like to live in somebody else’s skin, to walk in their shoes, feel their pain, and understand their lived experience. In the words of Frederick Buechner, compassion “is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you, too.”

Jesus' entire life and message are summed up in one simple sentence: "Be compassionate as I am compassionate." Did his turn of phrase sound familiar? It should.

Notice how Jesus’ plea for compassion echoes and yet modifies the Old Testament command for purity, best seen in the oft quoted passage, “Be holy as God is holy.” Jesus is reinterpreting and evolving this verse into a higher stage of human consciousness. His parallel expression, “Be compassionate as I am compassionate,” is a deliberate attempt to replace purity culture with compassion. Purity separates. Compassion integrates. It is empathy, not holiness, that is the chief characteristic of God. Compassion refuses to allow what divides us to define us.

According to theologian Marcus Borg in his seminal work Meeting Jesus Again For the First Time:

“For Jesus, compassion was more than a quality of God and an individual virtue: it was a social paradigm, the core value for life in community. To put it boldly: compassion for Jesus was political. He directly and repeatedly challenged the dominant sociopolitical paradigm of his social world and advocated instead what might be called a politics of compassion.”

When reading the Gospels, notice how many times compassion moves Jesus to action. And by the way, he never puts qualifiers on who does and does not deserve compassion.

In Matthew, Jesus felt compassion for the people because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Later on, he calls his disciples together and says, “I have compassion on the multitude, because they continue with me now three days, and have nothing to eat.” In Mark, Jesus is “moved with compassion” for the leper. In each instance, Jesus responds viscerally to the needs of the poor, the hungry, and the hurting without first wondering if they deserve it. Compassion draws misery unto itself, sharing and often transforming pain through suffering love.

In contrast to white evangelicals like Stuckey, who recently posted, “Toxic Empathy urges us to feel the feelings of a particular ‘victim,’” Jesus is the eternal victim of cruelty. Jesus's radical solidarity with those Stuckey deems impure and unworthy of empathy caused people like Stuckey to kill him.

Authentic Christianity isn’t the only world religion with compassion at its core. We see something similar in Buddhism.

Buddhists describe compassion as the opening of the heart, or suffering kindness. The Sanskrit word for compassion is bodhichitta. Meaning “noble or awakened heart,” bodhichitta means to be awake and enlightened. In Buddhist terms, this state of being is often called the soft spot, or a place as tender and vulnerable as an open wound. In the process of discovering bodhichitta, we move toward suffering and pain, not away from it. And it all starts with having compassion for ourselves. If you hate yourself, you will hate other people. If you believe you are evil and born in sin, then it’s easy to scapegoat others who share your fate. Buddhist monk and teacher Pema Chodron puts it this way:

“What we hate in ourselves, we’ll hate in others. To the degree that we have compassion for ourselves, we will also have compassion for others. Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don’t even want to look at…What we reject in ourselves is what we are going to reject out there. As we learn to have compassion for ourselves, the circle of compassion for others becomes wider.

Bodhichitta first means loving ourselves, and then having the capacity to hold intimate space with those who are hurting, abandoned, neglected, and betrayed. Buddhists call the spiritual practice of receiving someone else’s agony and sending back love “tonglen.” This prayerful ritual creates the capacity to come close to pain, to feel what another is feeling, to embrace, acknowledge, and respond compassionately to heartache.

Tonglen is compassion in action. The Latin word for compassion, misericordia, directly translates as a heart full of misery, or simply stated, a heart that shares in the suffering of another. Sharing someone else’s pain destroys the cruelty of indifference, creating a wound in your heart bursting with love. “This kinship with the suffering of others, this inability to continue to regard it from afar, is the discovery of our soft spot,” continues Chodron.

White evangelicals are not unique to the callousness of indifference. I struggle to offer them any semblance of empathy. Their unmitigated cruelty has unleashed a level of hatred I’ve never experienced. But when I return evil for evil, I succumb to their level of apathy and I am no better. In fact, I’m worse because I know better! Can you relate?

Coming close to pain and sharing the suffering of others is the only way to soften your heart and ultimately end systemic cruelty. In the words of Gyalwa Karmapa, “You take it all in. You let the pain of the world touch your heart and you turn it into compassion.”

The next stage of my spiritual development is learning to have compassion for the evangelical community that is currently causing the world, and our nation, so much pain. I’m not there yet. I say none of this out of condemnation. Most of my family and friends are evangelical Christians. Sadly, almost all of them voted for Trump. I care for them, and hope that they cease causing harm. If I withhold empathy towards them, I am also part of the problem.

If you are like me, and find yourself responding to so much evil with malice towards your former faith community, I offer you this guided, tonglen meditation.

Find a quiet moment when your heart is still and open. Practice the guided meditation below to cultivate compassion. And remember, if empathy is a sin, sin boldly!

A Guided Meditation to Cultivate Empathy and Compassion

To help cultivate your soft spot, practice the art of taking in pain and sending out love with the Tonglen meditation below.

Begin by taking a few deep breaths in and out to center your mind and still your soul. Allow your natural breathing to create a sacred space for your heart to open in love. Envision your heart expanding, revealing the soft spot within you. As you sit in a state of openness and acceptance, bring to mind a friend, family member, or colleague who is suffering. Holding them close, breathe in all their pain, fear, trauma, and abuse.

As you repeat this process, notice how you are becoming intimate with their pain by allowing it to come into yourself, flowing all the way down through your body. Holding that pain, transform their misery with empathy by sitting in union with them. Feel their fear. Own their suffering. Now, gently and compassionately breathe out grace, peace, love, and blessing. Breathe in the darkness and transform it with your out breath. Feel the hotness coming in and the coolness going out.

Continue breathing in their misery and breathing out mercy. Slowly recognize your heart expanding and your soft spot opening. Continue breathing in and out for as long as you wish, using this simple practice to cultivate compassion in your daily life.

Gary Alan Taylor

Photo by DAVIDCOHEN on Unsplash