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Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
John MacArthur, firebrand preacher and culture warrior, dies at 86
Advertisement His church's growth defied conventional wisdom about 'seeker-sensitivity,' a model that emphasized appealing to non-churchgoers. Rev. MacArthur rejected a more accessible evangelical preaching style that favored ostensibly real-life anecdotes and practical applications. His dogged emphasis on expository preaching -- narrowly focused on the meaning and historical context of a particular piece of Scripture -- influenced thousands of conservative Protestant pastors who studied at the seminary he led, or simply listened to his sermons on the radio or online. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'Evangelicalism is a pulpit-driven movement, and John has driven the most influential pulpit in evangelical Christianity for more than a half a century,' R. Albert Mohler Jr., the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview this year. In recent years, Rev. MacArthur increasingly waded into political and cultural skirmishes. He denounced critical race theory and became a leading Christian critic of 'wokeness.' After his church closed for several months at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, it defied state public health orders and began holding indoor in-person services. The church later received an $800,000 settlement from the state and Los Angeles County, after suing on the grounds that the restrictions impinged on religious freedom. Advertisement In August 2020, Rev. MacArthur told an interviewer for a podcast associated with Liberty University that President Trump had called him to thank him for 'taking a stand' on church closures. The two men discussed why 'Christians could not vote Democratic,' MacArthur said. 'There's no way that a Christian could affirm the slaughter of babies, homosexual activity, homosexual marriage, or any kind of gross immorality.' Rev. MacArthur didn't just clash with secular authorities and liberal politicians. More often, he took on perceived enemies within Christianity. He preached on the errors of Roman Catholicism and published multiple books on the dangers of charismatic theology and the prosperity gospel -- strains of Protestantism that emphasize miraculous healing and promises of wealth, and that flourished over the course of his lifetime. He attacked popular evangelical figures including the Bible teacher Beth Moore and various pastors, including televangelists Robert Schuller and Joel Osteen, always citing specific Bible verses in his critiques. His interest in threats to Christianity from within was evident early on: He wrote his graduate thesis on Judas Iscariot, the apostle who betrayed Jesus in the Gospels' account. Rev. MacArthur's preaching style was deceptively simple. He would speak for about 45 minutes, walking his congregation line by line through a single Bible passage. He also produced a popular study Bible and a 33-volume set of New Testament commentaries, among many other books. Advertisement His critics said that he misled listeners by insisting that even the thorniest passages in the New Testament had a single clear, true meaning. To his supporters, this was exactly the point. Unlike liberal pastors and academics, Rev. MacArthur believed that 'there's a historical, grammatical, literal sense to the text that can be derived through study,' said Austin Duncan, the director of the MacArthur Center for Expository Preaching at the Master's Seminary in Sun Valley, Calif., which Rev. MacArthur had founded in 1986. 'It isn't a subjective thing, it's an objective reality.' In 1985, Rev. MacArthur became president of the former Los Angeles Baptist College, now known as the Master's University. He opened the Master's Seminary soon afterward to train men -- and only men -- to become pastors. Unlike many pastors who ascend to a national platform, Rev. MacArthur never gave up his local role: He was the head pastor at Grace Community Church for more than 56 years. An online archive of his sermons includes more than 3,000 recordings. Known in many evangelical circles as simply 'JMac,' he had a preaching approach that translated well overseas, where it required little cultural interpretation. His books have been translated into at least 40 languages. And even his older sermons have not aged as noticeably as more recent ones from other pastors, who make frequent reference to pop culture or newspaper headlines. Rev. MacArthur 'inspired thousands of pastors to believe that explaining what the Bible means honors God, saves people, and is just plain interesting,' John Piper, a retired pastor and popular theologian in Minnesota who was a longtime friend, said in an email. 'To this day, from Dallas to Dubai, young people (especially men) come up to me and say that they listen to John MacArthur.' Advertisement John Fullerton MacArthur Jr. was born June 19, 1939. He was the eldest child of Jack MacArthur, a Baptist pastor, and Irene (Dockendorf) MacArthur, who managed the home. The family lived briefly in Philadelphia and Chicago during his childhood, but he was raised primarily in Southern California, where he would spend the rest of his life. He spent a few years at the fundamentalist Bob Jones University, following his father's prodding, and then transferred to Los Angeles Pacific College to play football and other sports. Rev. MacArthur was a fifth-generation preacher. His grandfather, Harry MacArthur, had a live weekly radio and television program in the 1940s, 'The Voice of Calvary.' His father eventually took it over, and Rev. MacArthur began preaching occasionally on Sunday evenings. He married Patricia Sue Smith, whom he met at his father's church, in 1963. In addition to his wife, he leaves their four children, Matthew, Marcy Gwinn, Mark, and Melinda Welch; two sisters, Jeanette DeAngelis and Jane Walker; 15 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. He arrived at Grace Community Church in February of 1969. On his first Sunday, the 29-year-old preached to his new congregation on three verses from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. In the passage, Jesus says that not everyone who professes faith will enter the kingdom of heaven. Most American church members, Rev. MacArthur told his congregants, were likewise 'dead spiritually.' Advertisement He intended to nurture Grace as a living church, which to him meant one that boldly proclaimed the truth, no matter if it led to conflict. 'The church must be the conscience of the world,' he said. 'The church must be so well defined that it becomes the antagonist of the world.' This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Recovering ‘Aspirational' Conservatism
A Conservative Primerby John D. WilseyEerdmans, 288 pp., $28.99 FOR THE FIRST HALF OF THE SECOND CENTURY B.C., Rome's leading conservative politician was Cato the Elder. While perhaps best known for his energetic demands to destroy Carthage, Cato was also a prolific writer and an unabashed eccentric. One of his surviving works is a practical manual, On Agriculture, of which the most amusing portion is a long list of cabbage recipes. Some of the concoctions are intended to be administered internally, others externally, and all are offered as cures; cabbage, it turns out, can be used to treat every condition imaginable, from colic to ulcers to deafness. We must remember that Cato was an old-school Roman farmer, after all—a model of authentically Roman hardiness and Republican virtue whose example could serve to challenge the softer, mannered senators around him who were learning too much Greek for their own good. (That seems to be what he wanted us to remember about him, at least.) Proper Romans treat eye maladies at home by washing them out with the urine of habitual cabbage eaters. What, didn't they teach you that in your Hellenic finishing school? And then there is his pioneering history of Rome, The Origins. Only a few fragments from this work still exist, but they give us a good sense of Cato's approach and goals. The work's defining feature is the absence of names. Instead, every individual is referred to entirely by political or military title. The result? A highly moralistic history in which the heroes are not individuals per se, since their names remain unknown, but Roman virtues. You could argue that for Cato, the hero of Roman history is Rome—the great city-state, worth preserving and celebrating. Quirks and all, Cato can be taken for the quintessential conservative—focused on maintaining the values and principles he took to be at the heart of his society while rejecting innovations that threatened them. (The subsequent history of the Roman Republic proved that his fears were not ill founded.) But as John D. Wilsey, a conservative evangelical, historian, and professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, points out in his new book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, there is more than one way to be a conservative—especially in America. That point is particularly obvious right now. Take Elon Musk. He has been celebrated as a hero by conservatives, defended against his critics by conservatives, and warmly welcomed at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Meanwhile, the utilitarian pronatalist has fathered fourteen children (that we know of), mostly with women to whom he is not married, all while boasting that doing so was a public good; the world needs more babies, after all, so why not his? When Matt Gaetz openly applauded Musk's generosity in contributing to the gene pool, pro-family researcher Patrick Brown—a conservative of a markedly different kind—quipped, 'With friends like these, who needs enemies?' Reminiscent of Cato, Wilsey does not name any contemporary politicians in his book, and he stays far from the intramural fights happening among today's conservatives. That's because he is interested in advocating 'aspirational conservatism'—a 'prepolitical' vision that prioritizes establishing timeless principles over addressing woes specific to the American political situation at this very moment. This reticence about contemporary politics notwithstanding, Wilsey does offer what he sees as a major political failure as a reference point for his book's argument: Twenty-first century conservatism has been remarkably shallow, and he is convinced that the recent absence of truly laudable public role models for conservatives has made things worse. What kind of conservative ignores or perverts such key traditional conservative values as the respect of marriage and family? Someone who is not a true conservative, Wilsey might argue—or at least one who lacks the 'prepolitical,' 'aspirational,' 'dispositional' conservatism he advocates: 'The one possessing a conservative disposition aims for a higher moral destiny for persons and societies, guided by the light of permanent things, tradition, and just order.' But what exactly does this mean? And no less important: How do we get there? Wilsey's goal in this insightful and deeply personal book—part theological exploration of human nature, part treatise on the virtuous writing of history, and part memoir of a father determined to preserve something good for his daughters—is to recover a vision for the big-picture sort of conservatism that a pair of twentieth-century thinkers, Russell Kirk and Peter Viereck (a man with eccentricities of his own to rival Cato's), argued for and personally exemplified. The title of the book is slightly misleading: While it foregrounds 'religious freedom,' the book's concern with that topic is inextricable from Wilsey's interest in how virtuous conservative citizens may flourish in—while helping to build up—a democratic society. In the process he draws on the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, who found that the way Americans brought 'the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty' together is one of the unique things that helped make their country a success. And so, the book is, first and foremost, an impassioned manifesto written for conservatives—and specifically, for religious conservatives, and primarily conservative evangelicals like me—who worry that twenty-first-century American society, on both the left and the right, has grown unmoored, confused, overly secular, and generally symptomatic of the condition Alistair MacIntyre describes in After Virtue. Wilsey exhorts us to consider better alternatives. 'American conservatives are in the best position to articulate and defend the best of the American character by receiving, venerating, applying, and handing down the tradition of harmony between the spirits of liberty and religion,' he writes, summarizing the argument of his book. If we take up this challenge, we may continue a legacy of passing down a uniquely beautiful American societal inheritance that is at risk of being lost to the depredations of culture war. It is worth noting here that while Wilsey is a conservative evangelical, his inclusion of Viereck—an agnostic—as a model conservative intellectual indicates that many (although not all) of the principles he discusses might have some appeal or persuasive force for at least some secular conservatives as well. Support our independent political and cultural journalism—including our growing coverage of books, ideas, and the arts—by signing up for a free or paid Bulwark subscription. AS CHRISTIANS HAVE AFFIRMED for millennia, this world is not our home. But we have the responsibility of stewarding what is entrusted to us while we're here, and Wilsey is concerned with one 'here' in particular: the United States of America. While conservatives around the world could benefit from reflecting on the general principles proposed in this book, Wilsey is clear that there is something special about the American experiment of democracy—something he wants to save. But first, 'If we are going to be conservatives, and if we are going to conserve the American tradition of harmonizing religion and liberty through public spirit, then we must know what a conservative is and what conservatives value. In other words, we must know what conservatives are before we can know what conservatives do.' This is how he sets up the opening chapter on the thought of Kirk and Viereck, Wilsey's exemplars of true conservatism. The rest of the book offers, in their spirit, an exploration of five key subjects relevant to thoughtful and virtuous living: the imagination, nationality, well-ordered liberty, history, and religion. Why these five? Because they are the sites where we must ground the foundational principles that establish aspirational conservatism. Too often, we think of conservatism first in purely political terms: Conservatives are people who vote for right-wing candidates, and therefore, anyone who votes in this way is a conservative—by their fruits shall you know them, you might say. But that doesn't mean you'll know much, or even anything about them. Such a reductive logic confuses the shallow, self-centered, and secular right-wing views of folks like Elon Musk or Andrew Tate with a more principled conservatism in the eyes of the larger public. In lieu of a political and sociologically descriptive account of conservatism, which will always be shallow and time-bound, we need deep and long-lasting foundations for a normative, prepolitical conservatism, Wilsey argues. Such foundations allow us to form good habits of mind and soul that will, in turn, form us as virtuous members of our homes, churches, and communities. Christians will naturally see the value of this view for enabling our spiritual growth, but non-Christians should be able to appreciate the benefits of such ideals, too. It's no wonder both Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic were obsessed with formation of citizens in the virtues. After all, it is better for a state to have virtuous citizens than, well, ones who are not. With these premises in mind, Wilsey's five-part account of the principles that underwrite aspirational conservatism yields the following upshots. A healthy imagination allows conservatives to form a worldview that is anchored in God and in the good, the true, and the beautiful. A healthy view of nationality allows conservatives to foster a patriotism without idolatry—a love of country as something beautiful but not ultimate. A well-ordered view of liberty rejects libertinism and recognizes God-given limits as essential for virtuous living and for honoring our interactions with other people, whom we must recognize as fellow image bearers. Likewise, a thoughtful conservative approach to history—one that doesn't venerate or denigrate the past—requires us to be virtuous in our treatment not only of those around us in the present, but also of those who have gone before us. Finally, conservative view of religious liberty brings us to a well-ordered relationship with God, as well as with other people. The overall takeaway is: There is much that is worth conserving in the American tradition, but the task of doing so belongs to well-formed, virtuous people, such as we must become. It makes some sense, then, that the muse animating this project is ultimately not Tocqueville but St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine's presence throughout serves as a reminder that Christian spiritual formation and the formation of believers in the virtues have been predominant concerns among church leaders for thousands of years, and they are no less vital today. Further, Wilsey's project of growth in democratic and spiritual virtue is deeply personal, as Augustine's was to him. Spiritual formation, Wilsey shows us, is impossible to separate from our formation as virtuous members of our society, because we are both of these things in the same body and soul—believers and citizens. This is where the theological concept of lifelong sanctification—growing more like Christ in our character, love for others, and spirit of self-sacrifice—makes sense not only in a religious context, but as an idea that applies to how we view citizenship. Join now IT'S HARD NOT TO simply offer acclamations for Wilsey's beautiful vision for American religious conservatism. I would love to see it materialize and flourish. Religious Freedom is an encouraging and hopeful book written by someone who believes what he writes, who has the encourager's vocation, and whose character is consistent with his view of the world. If there is a flaw here, I would locate it in Wilsey's unwavering hope and trust in the likelihood that this vision of conservatism will come to fruition. To think more carefully about this, it behooves us to consider the topic that Wilsey pointedly sets aside at the outset: politics. Over the past few years, the threat of Christian nationalism has rapidly overtaken public discourse, and a book on conservatism and religion would seem a natural place to address the subject head on. But Wilsey's commitment to making this project 'prepolitical' is thoroughgoing, and he makes scant mention of the topic. The strongest direct criticism he offers in response to the work of other thinkers who claim the mantle of conservatism—for instance, the self-proclaimed Christian nationalist William Wolfe—is that they have embraced political thinking as being primary, and mixed a bit of religion into it as a secondary matter. This is a perennial temptation, Wilsey writes, but we should resist, because in any alliance of religion and politics, politics loses nothing and religion loses everything. That is, religion loses its credibility and influence in society because it becomes too closely associated with fleeting political trends of the day. Wilsey is right: The great risk to the integrity of American religion has always been its co-optation by American politics. (Some would argue the seeds of its current subversion were sown long ago.) But how do you convince a person who has little use for personal virtue to become virtuous? I worry that Wilsey's readers will primarily consist of people who already agree with him on the value of such things, and who will be content to rearrange deck chairs with him as the ship of American conservatism—sociologically construed—continues to sink into ignorance, race hatred, and reaction. Books take a long time to gestate and move through the publishing process. Wilsey's book likely reached its final state a year or more ago, long before anyone could have imagined the present state of our nation's political affairs. But maybe today's political turmoil is yet another reminder of the need to have at least some conversations that are more timeless than tied to the latest headlines. Wilsey is not the only one calling for prepolitical conversations about cultural transformation and renewal in Christ at these times of difficult politics—indeed, in many ways his book reads as an expanded version of the manifesto of Comment magazine (in whose recent pages readers will also encounter the term 'prepolitical'). For Christian conservatives like myself, there will always still be reasons for hope. Here is one: The most successful form of religious and spiritual appeal to nonbelievers, which has brought many secular children of late modernity into the church, has lately been cultural apologetics, broadly considered—that is, the work of forming the imagination and worldview of secular people to see their need for God's truth, goodness, and beauty. What is on offer could be described as a kind of aspirational conservatism in the Augustinian mode, too—living in the city of man, but with eyes fixed on the City of God. As our political moment becomes more fraught, the value of this worldview will only become more compelling. Share Nadya Williams is books editor at Mere Orthodoxy and the author of the books Cultural Christians in the Early Church (2023); Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic (2024); and Christians Reading Classics (forthcoming in 2025). Substack: @nadyawilliams.
New York Times
24-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
‘This Moment Is Critical.' Whither Progressive Christians After Pope Francis?
For 12 years, Pope Francis was the most powerful Christian on the world stage, using his voice to elevate the poor and the marginalized. Millions of progressive Christians in the United States, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, considered him to be a powerful counterweight to a rising conservative Christian power. He was the magnetic center for their values. His death on Monday leaves behind a question gnawing inside their minds. In a world without Pope Francis, where their values feel particularly vulnerable, where do they go from here? 'This moment is critical now,' Bishop Sean W. Rowe, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, said. 'For those of us who want to embody the Sermon on the Mount, and the Beatitudes, and the love that Jesus showed in the world, this is now more important than ever.' Pope Francis stood in contrast to a brand of Christianity that has increasing power in the United States. It is mixed with nationalism and, according to Bishop Rowe, is 'not only fundamentally not Christian' but 'also dangerous.' 'We have to begin to step up and communicate this message in ways that are winsome and compelling,' he added. 'Politics are certainly co-opting Christian language and the Christian story. It is now ours to take that back.' President Trump has embraced a strain of right-wing Christianity that questions the separation of church and state, and its adherents largely backed the president's agenda. His vice president, JD Vance, is a Catholic convert who has used his interpretation of Catholic theology to justify the president's crackdown on immigration. Many conservative Christians, including Protestants, viewed Pope Francis skeptically. To them, the pope was soft on doctrinal matters, and risked pushing all of Christendom to surrendering its core teachings. 'Francis will go down in history as the pope of liberal gesture — the vicar of equivocation,' R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote in the evangelical magazine World on Monday. 'Just when his church needed a firm hand and intellectual firepower, he responded with a shrug.' But other Christians across denominations, who saw Pope Francis as their moral compass, feel a new sense of urgency with his passing. Rev. William Barber II, a civil-rights leader and ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ denomination, said the loss of Pope Francis meant others must carry on his mission to the marginalized. 'We must now say, 'I am Pope Francis,'' he said. Pope Francis 'was an embodiment of who I see Jesus to be whenever I read the gospels,' said Rev. Donna Claycomb Sokol, pastor of Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church in Washington. 'I think about him kissing the feet of women in prison after washing them. I think about how he was consumed with visible joy whenever he was with a child.' As the cardinals prepare to gather in Rome for the conclave, she wondered whether any of them could stand with the voice Pope Francis did. 'Or is Pope Francis one of a kind?' she asked. 'What will they gravitate toward?' The question is particularly acute for progressive Catholics. Denise Murphy McGraw, who worked to mobilize fellow Catholic voters for Kamala Harris last year from her home in upstate New York, worries about a younger generation of Catholic priests who have become more conservative. 'We are not getting that same sort of adherence to the Beatitudes, and that social justice that many people grew up with,' she said. Sister Jeanne Hagelskamp joined the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods almost 50 years ago because she wanted to spend her life working with the poor. In response to Pope Francis' attention to climate issues and his call in 2015 for nuns and priests to 'wake up the world,' the women in her small community in Indiana began working in earnest on environmental policy, most recently supporting a bill that would preserve forests in the state. That local work will continue, Sister Hagelskamp said. But she struggled through tears as she described what it meant to lose Pope Francis. 'He was an international figure that could talk about the things that most need to be talked about,' she said. 'So we've lost our voice, we've lost that public voice.' Now, she said, people like her must step into the gap, at the precise moment that her country's cultural atmosphere and political powers have turned against them. 'We know it's not always welcome,' she said. 'Yet we think that's what God calls us to do.' Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest and advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics who met frequently with Pope Francis at the Vatican, drew a contrast between two moments of Catholic witness in the news in recent weeks. The first was Pope Francis' visit last week to Rome's main prison, an annual tradition. This year he was too frail to wash the prisoners' feet, as he has done in the past to commemorate Holy Thursday, but he met with dozens of inmates. The second moment was the visit by Representative Riley Moore, a Republican from West Virginia, to the prison in El Salvador where the United States wrongly deported a Maryland man with no criminal record. Mr. Moore, who is Catholic, smiled for a photograph in front of a cell containing several prisoners, giving two thumbs up to the camera. 'The two pictures could not be more different, the two different paths in Christianity,' Father Martin said. 'One says we accompany people, no matter who they are, and the other says we turn our backs on them and mock them.' The loss comes at a fraught moment for the once-robust tradition of progressive Christianity. Mainline Protestant denominations, which attract many progressive Christians, have seen their numbers and influence decline steadily in recent decades. The papacy is also open at the same time as the seat of the archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of the global Anglican Communion. The percentage of Americans who are Catholics seems to have stabilized in recent years, but liberal Catholics are less likely to go to Mass and almost no new priests in the United States describe themselves as progressive. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, the leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, went to Mass on Monday night with her husband, who is Catholic. After her sermon at the inauguration prayer service when she pleaded with Mr. Trump to have mercy, many Christians have turned to her as a moral pillar. Now, that voice is gone, and she is grieving. Not just the loss of Pope Francis, but of what feels like a whole nation and moral universe, she said. Still, the job is to hope, she said. She pulled up Pope Francis' speech to Congress in 2015. ''Our efforts must aim at restoring hope, righting wrongs, maintaining commitments, and thus promoting the well-being of individuals and of people,'' she read out loud. Her voice wavered, and then she paused to reflect. 'Whatever happens in the rest of my lifetime or yours, some of us have to keep a candle burning. We can't let this go,' she said. 'Someday the pendulum will swing back.'
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
MAGA's war on empathy exposes misogynist fears
The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner is famous in people-who-read circles for his ability to get maloevent and/or stupid people in leadership to humiliate themselves in his interviews. Lucky for him, the right provides an endless supply of people who are egotistic as they are ignorant, meaning he will never go without subjects who don't bother to learn this history before agreeing to go on the record with him. The latest deserving victim is Albert Mohler, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who went from denouncing Donald Trump as a "predator" in 2016 to being one of Trump's loudest Christian right defenders. Chotiner drew Mohler, a supposed follower of Jesus Christ, to admit he now condemns empathy. Mohler sneered that empathy is "an artificial virtue," calling empathy "destructive and manipulative." "Empathy means never having to say no," Mohler insisted, attacking the straw-iest of strawmen. Much was made in the media, for good reason, of billionaire Elon Musk's crusade against empathy, an emotion he describes as "suicidal" and the "fundamental weakness of Western civilization." Musk is an atheist, but in this attitude, he is increasingly joined by the Christian right, as Julia Carrie Wong documented at the Guardian this week. A growing chorus of evangelical leaders has taken to calling empathy "sinful," "toxic," and "satanic." Right-wing Catholics are going there, too, with Vice President JD Vance rejecting Jesus's exhortations to love your neighbor and welcome the stranger, drawing a rebuke from the Pope. The political impetus behind this overt assault on what was once considered a baseline virtue is obvious enough. All these people follow Trump, a man who is incapable of empathy, so much so that many high-profile psychologists have argued that he should be considered a sociopath, despite not consenting to a formal diagnosis. Trump has eclipsed Jesus himself as the object of worship on the Christian right, as evidenced by the hosts of "Girls Gone Bible" invoking Trump's name as if he were God in their rewrite of the Lord's Prayer. At his inauguration ball, a "worship painter" even replicated Trump's image while the crowd sang "amen" over and over, underscoring this shift in the de facto theology of these "Christians."So yeah, Trump's sociopathy now outranks the empathy of Jesus in MAGA eyes. But there's another angle to this, as well: This is about the MAGA right's unhinged obsession with gender and escalating hatred of women. Empathy is seen as a "feminine" emotion by both the atheistic techbro right and the Christian nationalist right. Both firmly agree that femininity is the root of all evil. One doesn't have to speculate, either, to see this aspect of the war on empathy. Plenty of MAGA leaders will say the misogynist part out loud. When the Episcopalian Rev. Mariann Budde spoke out about Trump's cruelty during an inauguration service, Blaze Media's Allie Beth Stuckey tweeted that this is "to be expected from a female Episcopalian priest: toxic empathy." Stuckey has repeatedly argued that women cannot be pastors and that it's "arrogance" for women to believe otherwise. She also wrote "Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion." Pastor Joe Rigney, author of "The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits," also lambasted Budde for daring to speak back to Trump. He wrote that she displayed "the man-eating weed of Humanistic Mercy" that was "enabled by the feminist denial of the complementary design and callings of men and women." He's fine with women having empathy inside the home, for family members. But, in leadership roles, "empathy is a liability, not an asset." He's also called it "pathological feminine empathy" to defend LGBTQ people and immigrants. The "sin of empathy" talk got even louder this week when Justice Amy Coney Barrett was the only conservative on the Supreme Court to agree with the three liberal justices that Trump has no right to send innocent Venezuelan immigrants to a torture prison in El Salvador. The four justices who dissented against Trump are women, so William Wolfe, former aide to Al Mohler, used it as evidence that women cannot be trusted with power. "Illegal alien criminals don't need to be 'mothered' by the women on the Supreme Court," he screeched on X. (Wolfe is lying, it must be said. Reports show many, probably most of the men who were disappeared had legal asylum status.) He then called them the "Four Horsewomen of Suicidal Empathy." As journalist and lawyer Jill Filipovic noted in her newsletter, "Coney Barrett signing onto part of the dissent in the Supreme Court decision at issue here had nothing to do with empathy," but was based on a "cold, rational reading of the Constitution." It's the men who appear to have let their emotions — whether it's unjustified fear of immigrants or an unwillingness to cross Trump — interfere with rational decision-making. On the secular side of MAGA, the claims are just as unfounded, but possibly even grosser. As Wong notes, Musk gets his ideas about "suicidal empathy" from Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor who pretends to be an expert in biology as cover for his baseless gender essentialism and racism against immigrants. Saad likes to tell the story of Karsten Nordal Hauken, a Norwegian man who Saad mocks for calling himself "feminist and anti-racist." Hauken was raped by a Somali immigrant a few years ago and went public about the complex emotions he felt when his rapist was deported. "I felt a relief and joy that he was going away forever," Hauken wrote. "But I also got a strong sense of guilt and responsibility. I was the reason why he should not be left in Norway, but rather to face a very uncertain future in Somalia." Hauken has become a punching bag on the right, which has clung only to the word "guilt," while ignoring that Hauken wasn't opposed to punishing his rapist. He just had complex emotions about treating an immigrant more harshly than a native-born Norwegian. Saad excused making fun of a rape victim by saying it was necessary to prove his point about "suicidal empathy." But really, what he's doing is reiterating the misogynist fears driving the right-wing war on empathy. After all, the MAGA movement can hardly be considered anti-rape. They back Trump, who was found liable by a civil jury for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll. Saad is using Hauken's experience to signal not disapproval of rape, but of empathy. It's a fable about how empathy makes you a woman, which is what makes you eligible for rape in the grim Trumpian landscape. For years, there have been endless rounds of media hand-wringing about the loneliness epidemic among men, which is unfairly implied to be the fault of women. Rhetoric like this, however, is far more to blame. Men who buy this message that empathy is stupid, suicidal, and effeminate — which is supposedly the worst thing you can be — are going to struggle to make friends and maintain romantic relationships. Empathy is a basic skill people need to get along with other people. Yes, most empathy-haters will offer some throat-clearing about how the feeling has its place, even for men. But that caveat is drowned out by the hyperbolic and highly gendered language that frames empathy as emasculating. And, of course, by the continued hero-worship of Trump, a man who has likely never felt a pang of feeling for a fellow human being in his life.
