Jason Kottke flagged a finding this week from PRRI's 2026 American Values Survey. PRRI asked Americans to choose between two statements about empathy.
One said empathy is "a foundational moral value that helps build a healthy society."
The other said it "can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God's truth."
Most Americans picked the first one, 68% to 27%. So did nearly every religious group:
Around two-thirds or more of all major religious groups believe that empathy is a foundational moral value for a healthy society, including about eight in ten religiously unaffiliated Americans (83%), members of other non-Christian religions (80%), and Jewish Americans (77%). By contrast, a majority of white evangelical Protestants (54%) believe empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God's truth.
Only 42% of white evangelicals called empathy a foundational moral value.
This is infuriating and absolutely embarrassing. I'm ashamed of what the Christian faith has become.
The utter irony of that statement. Empathy is dangerous, apparently, when it leads people away from "God's truth." But the people who think empathy is dangerous are the ones who have abandoned God's truth. They've abandoned the way of Jesus. They have a fundamental misunderstanding of what their own faith is about, of what Jesus is about. For a Christian, God's truth is Jesus himself: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" (John 14:6).
I don't understand how you have a faith built around Philippians 2 and come to the conclusion that empathy is dangerous. Paul sets up that hymn by telling the church to "look not to your own interests but to the interests of others" (2:4). Then he tells them to have the same mind as Christ, who "emptied himself" (ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν, heauton ekenosen) and took the form of a slave (2:5–7). The self-emptying God. That's the mind we're supposed to have.
I don't understand how the symbol of your faith is a cross and you come to the conclusion that empathy is dangerous. A man was put to death, and no matter what your theology of the atonement is, in some sense he was put to death for us. Hebrews says we don't have a high priest who is unable "to sympathize with our weaknesses" (4:15). The Greek there is συμπαθῆσαι (sympathesai), to feel with, to suffer alongside. Hebrews counts that as part of what qualifies Jesus to be our high priest.
I don't understand how one of the names we give our Savior and Lord is "friend of sinners" and you come to the conclusion that empathy is dangerous. Remember where that name came from, too. Jesus' critics called him "a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners" (Matthew 11:19). The religious insiders of his day thought his empathy was dangerous too, and Christians later took up their insult as a title.
It's this sort of thing that makes me want to disaffiliate from Christianity. If it has failed this awfully, it's a scourge on the world and deserves to be destroyed.
I don't disaffiliate, though, because I refuse to have my faith taken over by jackasses who are so ignorant and have allowed themselves to be so twisted by hate or fear. They've made a mess of Christianity. I won't abandon my faith to them. They don't get to define what Christianity is. Jesus does, and I will follow Jesus, not them.
But boy, it's a real test to stay connected to a faith where so many people have utterly and completely missed the point.
