(RNS) — Americans seem to disagree about almost everything these days. Five minutes on social media, cable news or at a tense holiday dinner make that obvious. Still, now and then, a small patch of common ground shows up.
Consider empathy. A recent Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey found that 8 in 10 Americans see empathy as essential to a healthy society. Only 16% called it a “dangerous emotion” that undermines “a society guided by God’s truth.”
In a nation that can barely agree on the weather, that’s striking. But just because we agree on a word doesn’t mean we agree on what it means.
Some conservative evangelical voices have declared a “war on empathy.” Allie Beth Stuckey, author of 2024’s “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” argues that empathy has become a tool of manipulation in the hands of progressives. Joe Rigney, in his 2025 book “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits,” warns that caring too much about others’ feelings can cloud our grasp of truth.
More recently, Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, went further, suggesting on his podcast “The Briefing” that empathy is not even a coherent category — just a modern invention confused with the biblical commands to love and show mercy.
On the other side of the political spectrum, Hillary Clinton recently argued in The Atlantic that critics of empathy mistake cruelty for strength and compassion for weakness. In her telling, empathy lies at the heart of both Christianity and democracy. New York Times columnist David French agrees. He writes, “empathy stands as a firewall against bigotry.”
So, what do we do with this?
As a historian, I’ve had cause to think a lot about empathy, its role in how we understand the world, past and present. Empathy is essential for historians — but it’s often misunderstood. People regularly confuse empathy and sympathy. But they aren’t the same thing.
Sympathy is immediate. As the historian John Haas recently pointed out, it’s what we feel when we see images of hungry children, read about civilian casualties or hear stories of injustice. Sympathy is visceral, emotional and often morally clarifying. Most of us don’t have to work at it.
Empathy is harder. It takes discipline. It asks us to step, as best we can, into someone else’s mental and moral world, especially if that world unsettles us. Sympathy is our reaction to reading about the execution of alleged witches in 17th-century Massachusetts. Empathy is what helps us understand why some Puritans believed they were protecting their community by prosecuting witches.
That distinction matters.
For historians, empathy isn’t endorsement. It’s not about excusing the past or glossing over its faults. It’s about asking a basic question: Why did this person act the way they did? What did they believe about God, nature, authority or community that made those choices seem reasonable — or even right?
To answer those questions, historians must set aside — at least for a moment — their own gut reactions. We don’t give up on judgment; we delay it. We try to see before we evaluate.
That approach can feel risky in polarized times, but trying to understand why a movement happened isn’t the same as endorsing it. If empathy means getting so emotionally absorbed that you lose your convictions, then yes, it can go wrong. But if empathy is about disciplined understanding — being open to someone else’s hopes, fears and moral point of view — then it’s key to finding the truth. It’s a form of intellectual humility.
Without empathy, our political opponents become stereotypes. Complex motivations get reduced to malice. In a diverse democracy, tolerating each other isn’t enough; we must try — however imperfectly — to imagine how our neighbors see the world. This is what makes empathy difficult. Stanford education professor Sam Wineburg called this kind of thinking an “unnatural act.”
Convictions without empathy too often harden into dogmatism. Sympathy without discernment becomes sentimentality. Empathy — the discipline of trying to understand before judging — helps steady both.
The PRRI survey suggests that most Americans still believe empathy is foundational to a healthy society. That shared intuition may be one of the last pieces of common moral language we possess.
The real question is whether we’re willing to do the harder work empathy requires. Not emotional posturing or turning empathy into a partisan weapon, but the quieter, tougher practice of seeing clearly—especially when we disagree.
If we lose that ability, our disagreements won’t disappear, they’ll just get harsher. And without understanding, even our strongest convictions start to sound less like truth and more like noise.
(John Fea is a visiting fellow in history at the Lumen Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and the author of “Why Study History: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
