Toxic Empathy, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of the Gospels

How do Christian Nationalists manage to avoid the essential teaching of Christ?

I might be naive, but I tend to believe that many more people than we imagine are actually brilliant—potential geniuses whose spark was systematically extinguished when they were young. So many of us were brought up in situations that didn’t support the cultivation of our unique essence, our singular gift. In a normative culture organized around material productivity and social control, people learn from childhood to redirect the vast majority of their genius—intellectual, intuitive, creative—toward suppressing their own expressiveness, repressing their life force, and mutilating their own brilliance. They become geniuses at conforming. They become masters at the art of self-amputation and self-suppression.

In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse wrote about “surplus repression”—the internalization of social domination so complete that people police themselves more rigorously than any external authority requires. There’s a jouissance in this self-policing, a perverse satisfaction the superego derives from crushing stray thoughts and errant desires. The censor becomes the connoisseur of its own cruelty, as well as its cruelty toward others who won’t get in line.

Perhaps it is precisely this force of surplus repression—this compulsive, automated self-negation—that shapes collapsing authoritarian societies like our own. The connection struck me late last night when I learned the Supreme Court is allowing the Trump regime to stop paying SNAP benefits to 47 million people at risk of hunger. It was a confluence: I’ve been reading Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy, a book by a Right-wing Christian influencer, trying to understand how people who claim to follow Christ—like the Conservative justices on the Supreme Court—can be so callous, so spectacularly cruel.

I’ve also been reading a very compelling book, Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, by Joy Degruy, a psychologist. A mental health clinician, she looks at how centuries of slavery still shape the U.S., as a primary psychological and cultural condition from which this country has never healed. She notes:

Racism has run like poison through the blood of American society since Europeans first landed on these shores. And, since that beginning, America and Americans have invested much in denying it. America’s and Americans’ denial of their blatant racism and the attending atrocities committed throughout the nation’s history has become pathological. Such denial has allowed this illness to fester for almost 400 years. It is what keeps this country sick with this issue of race.

What Stuckey and her Christian Nationalist cohort have done is ingenious, in the darkest sense: they’ve constructed a theological model that transforms indifference into virtue. “Toxic empathy,” in her framing, is the sin of feeling too much for the suffering of others—particularly the undeserving, the weak, the dependent. Empathy becomes pathologized as a liberal disease, a sentimentality that enables dysfunction and rewards victimhood. In this moral universe, cruelty is rebranded as “tough love,” and the withdrawal of care becomes an act of spiritual hygiene. The poor must be abandoned so they can be “saved”—from themselves.

Stuckey offers the case of Maribel, a Mexican woman who crossed the border illegally in 2002, applied for asylum, and was approved to work and live in the U.S., checking in with immigration authorities annually. She raised four children in Fairfield, Ohio, including a three-year-old daughter with epilepsy, building what Stuckey herself describes as “a good, quiet life with her family... their home, their community, the place they loved raising their children.” When Trump returned to office, Maribel was arrested without warning and deported to Michoacán, Mexico—a region plagued by gang violence—where she now speaks to her children nightly via video chat, unable to hold them. To justify this cruelty, Stuckey invokes a handful of highly publicized crimes committed by undocumented immigrants (despite native-born Americans committing far more crimes per capita) and warns ominously about cartels, drugs, and “sex slaves” exploiting our “porous border.” Her conclusion: “We can feel for people like Maribel while still keeping in mind the big picture... mass illegal immigration enabled and encouraged by our leaders wreaks unnecessary and preventable havoc on our nation.”

What Stuckey’s “big picture” conveniently omits is the actual big picture: the U.S. has depended on massive influxes of both legal and illegal immigration to fill low-wage jobs Americans refuse to do, while simultaneously destabilizing economies across the Global South through IMF structural adjustment programs, trade policies, and resource extraction. Our consumption of the lion’s share of global CO2 and resources has accelerated environmental collapse in these regions, forcing mass migration. We created the conditions that drove Maribel north, profited from her labor, and then discarded her—ripping her from her children—in the name of border security. The argument against “illegal immigration” is always presented in a hermetically sealed vacuum, erasing the centuries of imperial policy that produced the crisis in the first place.

I don’t think Stuckey is, consciously, a hypocrite. She offers something more disturbing: a coherent ideological system that has conveniently inverted Christian morality. What we’re witnessing is the culmination of a long theological project—one that has weaponized Christian rhetoric to sanctify inequality and authoritarian lawlessness.

Stuckey and her audience may even believe they are enacting compassion by refusing to enable weakness. They’ve performed a psychological alchemy: their own surplus repression, their own self-throttling, has been contorted into a moral system. Having mastered the art of denying their own needs, suppressing their own vulnerabilities and eccentricities, they now demand the same sacrifice from others. The superego, having crushed the vulnerable self, projects its logic outward. You must suffer as I have suffered. You must be as small as I have made myself.

The Three Crosses (1653), print in etching and drypoint, by Rembrandt van Rijn,

Stuckey’s “toxic empathy” thesis goes against the core teaching of the Gospels. In Matthew 25, Jesus says: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” When his followers ask when they saw him in these conditions, Christ replies: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” The instruction is clear: feed the hungry; help the poor. The hungry person is Christ Himself. To withhold food from 47 million people is not tough love—it is a direct rejection of divine justice, charity, and compassion.

The Gospel teaching directly negates the “toxic empathy” doctrine of Christian White Nationalists such as Stuckey or the Supreme Court zealots who believe Trump is sent by divinity to bring about the Rapture for White people. The Sermon on the Mount, a foundational text, could not be any clearer:. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:3-5). Later in the same sermon: “Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you” (Matthew 5:42). In Luke’s version, it gets even more explicit: “If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return” (Luke 6:34-35).

Christian mysticism—the living heart of the tradition—points in precisely the opposite direction. Meister Eckhart, for instance, sought a radical dispossession of the self. Instead of promoting some bizarre form of righteous cruelty and miserliness, Christians should seek to become open to divine love. “The eye with which I see God,” he wrote, “is the same eye with which God sees me.” The moment you truly see another person, you see with God’s eyes—which means you are seeing yourself. The hungry person is not other; their hunger is your hunger. The mystics recognize that separation is, itself, the wound. Love – charity – doesn’t calculate or withhold. Love dissolves the boundary between self and suffering other, making Stuckey’s calculated cruelty amoral and untenable.

An alternative tradition within Catholicism is Liberation theology, which insists that God makes a “preferential option for the poor”—not because poverty is virtuous, but because God’s love flows toward those crushed by systems of domination. Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, and their comrades understood that the Gospel is not neutral. It sides with the oppressed against the oppressor, with the hungry against those who hoard grain. To follow Christ, in this interpretation, is to work selflessly for the overthrow of structures that produce starvation, homelessness, and despair. It is to recognize that a society allowing 47 million people to go hungry while billionaires accumulate obscene wealth is not merely unjust—it is blasphemous. It desecrates the image of God in every human being.

White Christian nationalists have abandoned the mystical core and essential meaning of their own faith. The overt imperative, restated again and again in the Gospels, to dissolve the armored ego and serve the least among us has been replaced by a technocratic theology of merit, a Calvinist hall of mirrors where wealth signals divine favor and poverty represents moral failure. The Supreme Court’s cruelty, draped in cold legalese, is the endpoint of this betrayal: a Christianity without Christ, a faith that destroys rather than heals.