Empathy is for Chumps

When I was growing up, my father served as a deacon in our Baptist church.¹ One day he described the arduous task facing strangers that asked the church for help. Forms to complete, stories to corroborate, character to assess. “What if we buy them some groceries, and they go to another church and do the same thing?” my father asked, a note of exasperation in his voice. What indeed? Under no circumstances did you give anyone cash. Who knew what unholy choices might unfold. Even then, that paternalistic notion the poor could not be trusted to manage their own lives permeated our small church, the way it continues to do so with even the largest nonprofit foundations in America.²

Running beneath the surface of all our efforts to treat everyone as our neighbor was a clear message. Don’t be a chump. I was reminded of my father’s story recently when New York Times columnist David French wrote an Op-Ed highlighting the chilling comments from Senator Joni Ernst from Iowa when responding to concerns Medicaid cuts would cost lives, “Well, we all are going to die.” But of course she couldn’t stop there. In a message shot in a cemetery, Senator Ernst claimed to apologize for the comment and then went scorched Earth, too bad you’re going to hell:

I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth. I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well . . . But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I’d encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ.

Mic drop. I assume even Satan had to slow clap that one. French went on to lament that so many Evangelicals had moved to a purely vertical religion that concerns itself only with an individual’s relationship to God (Read: only my relationship matters for the purposes of prosperity, power, and superiority. Or, in the immortal words of Grandpa Simpson, “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”) at the expense of our horizontal responsibilities to each other as we live out that relationship authentically.

But I would contend Evangelicals in America have never had much interest in a horizontal faith. We talked a great game, but when it came to our responsibilities to others, we always searched for the exception, the theological loophole, the clever interpretation of the Bible that allowed us to say, “That’s not what Jesus really meant.”³ As I have written elsewhere, they are much more concerned with how people are behaving than in how they should behave toward other people.

For those outside the walls, Evangelicalism is not a religion of mercy and compassion; it is a religion of correction and admonishment. It’s Old Testament smiting, not New Testament redemption. If I had a dollar for every time someone in my church said, “they just got what they deserved,” in reference to someone’s poverty, addiction, or other problems, I’d be writing this from my yacht. People outside the church simply existed as Cautionary Tales. I thought the entire point of Christianity was not getting what your deserved because of grace and helping others to demonstrate your gratitude. But maybe that’s just me.

Which brings us back to not becoming a chump. Enter Ronald Reagan.⁴  The political genius of Reagan intuitively understood what conservatives wanted to hear: of course we want to help people, but let’s face it, some people just aren’t worthy of the effort. And so the mythical Welfare Queen was born, a mysterious frightening creature that was living in the lap of luxury off your hard earned money. You began to wonder why politicians didn’t just quit everything to enjoy the joyride of food stamps, homeless shelters, and emergency room healthcare.

Evangelicals ate it up. The speed at which this language started being parroted in churches was breathtaking. This perspective quickly moved beyond government to every facet of life. Grinding poverty became nothing but a long con. Every person and every institution was on the make, trying to destroy or steal what was rightfully yours (we can save the racial overtones of all this for another day). And in the end the real goal was to eradicate Christianity. Trying to pretend the explosion of conspiracy theories in the country occurred in a vacuum is naive; Evangelicals had been primed for decades to believe dark forces were afoot, rendering even the simplest acts of charity or compassion useless, even dangerous.

What has changed is the absolute glee the Christian right takes in ignoring the suffering of others. All of you are chumps, they smirk. The real anthem for Evangelicals shouldn’t be a traditional Wesleyan hymn or a megachurch praise song. The real tune of the moment should be “Me and Jesus” by Tom T. Hall: Me and Jesus, got our own thing goin’/We don’t need anybody to tell us what it’s all about. Sorry, you’ll have to figure out how to get your own membership card to Jesus’ supernatural Costco of blessings and prosperity. The rest of you can go to hell. Just ask Senator Ernst. Say hello to the tooth fairy when you’re there, chumps.

1. First Baptist, in case you were wondering. You were called Second or Third for a reason. My numerical record was once attending a Tenth Baptist church. The town was hardly a bustling metropolis. Baptists have issues playing nice.
2. You can simply look at the furor that erupted when GiveDirectly started giving cash to people in Africa. Other nonprofits reacted as if heroin was being distributed to children. Charities like to chant “safeguards,” “stewardship,” “outcome-based programming,” and “fostering self-sufficiency,” when the real message is clear: We don’t believe in the people we claim to be helping.
3. Evangelicals are forever telling people the Bible is literally true only to tell you that’s not what it really means when it clashes with their comfortable lives.
4. People endlessly debate how religious Reagan actually was, but like most things, he was mostly nostalgic for an easy, God-bless-America religion that never really existed. What he couldn’t get enough of was the Evangelical fascination with the End Times. Authors like Hal Lindsey, whose book The Late Great Planet Earth insisted the Apocalypse beckoned any day now, made you feel like a witness to the end of history. Bloody Armageddon; the Whore of Babylon; the mark of the Beast; Reagan and I knew it was more entertaining than any filthy R-rated move we were forbidden to see. At least I was. Reagan even consulted Lindsey about Middle East policy. Whether to hasten or delay the final days of humanity was never made clear.