(RNS) — Elon Musk, a massive donor to President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign and a key player early in the second Trump administration, told Joe Rogan last year, as he was DOGE-ing the federal government, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” More cryptically, he added, “There’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself.”

Musk seemed to be saying that empathy can go so far that our own good becomes obscured to the point that we favor the good of someone else. Empathy, at any rate, is not only weakness but dangerous.

Since then, empathy has become a dirty word in MAGA circles. 

Psychologists define empathy as “understanding a person from their frame of reference rather than one’s own.” It is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, understand them the way they understand themselves. The good news is that empathy is a habit we all possess to one degree or another, though one’s empathy seems to correlate more and more with where an American finds themselves on the political spectrum. Indeed, how we feel about empathy itself has become part of the political argument, especially as the administration clamps down on immigration.

In a 2026 interview with Fox News, Allie Beth Stuckey, author of “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” explained, “if you feel so deeply what someone else feels you can … be blinded to objective reality and morality.” Empathizing with the undocumented immigrant, she says, leads us to overlook the efforts of the person who was able to get into the United States legally.

Stuckey neutralizes empathy more than condemns it, saying “Christian compassion” should not be weighted toward those who need more help than others. The effect is to privilege the strong over the weak the same way Musk does, thus denying empathy any effectiveness in social life. We see this caution consistently across the MAGA world: Empathy distorts strength into a weakness. It blurs reality by exploiting compassion to upset the apple cart of morality.

The first thing we should say about these arguments is that they are not new. 

In 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche rejected the “slave revolt in morality” that had been incited, he said, by the deep-seated, vengeful resentment of the strong by the oppressed and weak of the world. For Nietzsche, Christian morality was a victory the oppressed of the ancient world had won by making a virtue of empathy. They had transformed the strong into the weak, renaming the natural oppression of the weak by the strong “sin,” and setting the world down a wrong path. “’I suffer: someone or other must be guilty,’” Nietzsche wrote, “and every sick sheep thinks the same.”

The predator is not evil when it eats its prey, Nietzsche said. Why must human morality be different?

Then again, Nietzsche’s ideas themselves were not so new. Callicles, a character in Plato’s Gorgias dialogue, spoke for the ancient world that Nietzsche regarded so fondly when he said that “it’s a just thing for the stronger man and the more capable man to have a greater share than the weaker and the less capable man.” Plato shows through the conversation with Callicles that the just man prefers a morality that gives special place to the weak and vulnerable.

That was a new idea for most of the ancient world, one that Christianity adopted and elaborated. Plato, Aristotle and Christianity reset the moral compass to privilege the vulnerable. For Nietzsche, this was a disaster. It set all of Western civilization down the wrong path. Or, as Musk would say, toward “suicide.”

This also is the view held by Jordan Peterson, a Nietzschean and psychologist who has been repeatedly platformed by Catholic Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire, an online evangelization ministry. (You can sample Barron’s platforming of Peterson here and here and here.) “Most of what passes for morality is nothing but cowardice,” says Peterson, echoing Nietzsche’s suspicion that what we call empathy simply masks the resentment that the weak hold for the strong.

Peterson calls this a “pseudo-morality” unless empathy is accompanied by the will and the capacity for confrontation and violence, which he locates in the male temper. Real morality is strength, and so empathy begins to feel like weakness. 

Why are these old ideas back? In large measure, they are back because they serve President Trump’s worldview. At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday (Feb. 5), Trump said he wants churches that are “stronger than ever.” “Strong” is a word Trump uses a lot. In the same speech, at an event organized each year “in the spirit of love and reconciliation as Jesus of Nazareth taught 2,000 years ago,” he inexplicably praised El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, for his “very strong prisons.” 

Trump’s prayer breakfast speech was bizarre if we think its purpose was to celebrate empathy — all of those things in Christianity that Nietzsche rejected. It makes more sense when we understand that Trump and the Make America Great Again movement, in order to gain power, are here to bend religion into a shape Nietzsche would like better. Misrepresenting Christianity is an important goal.

Throughout history, Christianity has been bent into strange shapes to suit someone’s need for power. This is what Karl Marx likely had in mind when he dismissed religion as “an opiate” even as he cribbed the Acts of the Apostles (“from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”) to describe communist society. Too often in history, Christianity’s disruptive and revolutionary character has been flipped to justify the strong’s oppression of the weak. Christianity gets reduced to an otherworldly promise while the powerful profit in this life.

Christian Scripture promises that the meek shall inherit the earth. It promises that those who hunger and thirst for justice will have their fill. It teaches us to have empathy for the poor, the vulnerable and the marginal. The Christian puts their needs before his own. No honest reading of the Bible could propose anything else.

The lies being told to discredit empathy are necessary for Trump because empathy and Christian faith discredit him. He represents something older, a view of the world that opposes everything Christianity teaches. He reminds us all the time. We should believe him.

(Steven P. Millies is the author of “Joseph Bernardin: Seeking Common Ground” and “A Consistent Ethic of Life: Navigating Catholic Engagement With U.S. Politics.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)