It’s been weeks since I listened to a New York Times podcast featuring Allie Beth Stuckey, a far-right, fundamentalist Reformed Baptist social media influencer and podcaster on politics, theology, and lifestyle advice. She is instantly identifiable as such by her look, featuring all the MAGA woman signifiers: the flowing hair streaked with blonde, the masklike makeup, the ruffles and lace. She’s a fast and lucid talker, and what she had to say has stuck with me like a painful splinter.
She was interviewed by Ross Douthat, the furthest right of the Times‘ opinion columnists. Stuckey described herself as “a Christian wife and mom who is trying to navigate the chaos of our culture with as much clarity and courage as God is willing to give me.” Which reminded me of Phyllis Schlafly, with whom she has often been compared: someone who glorifies the roles of wife and mother grounded in an understanding that they are subsidiary to men, but whose work life expresses ambition, authority, toughness, and aggression that contradict that right-wing ideal.
For instance, in this interview she blithely proclaimed her own superior understanding of the Bible as compared with “a lot of evangelical leaders and pastors.” “I’m not trying to throw all of them under the bus,” she said, “but they’re just not as clear about what the Bible says about gender or what the Bible says about marriage.”
She goes on cite the period following the murder of George Floyd, when some churches were counseling white evangelicals to “sit back and listen and learn.” Instead, Stuckey says, “No, that’s not biblical. That’s not how I’m talking about it. I’m not going to shame white women. I’m not going to say that they need to sit down and shut up and be lambasted for something that someone who might have looked like them in the same geographical region did 200 years ago or 50 years ago. That’s not the biblical definition of justice.”
She condemns evangelicals for having gone “soft and just moved to the left, especially on social justice and race issues. I have been one of the only ones that these women are listening to willing to say no. And not because I am cruel, not because I’m harsh, but because I don’t think that’s what the Bible says.”
The whole conversation is worth listening to if you want to understand the Christian right, but the part that keeps dogging me has to do with the idea of “toxic empathy,” a pet peeve of Stuckey’s. What is it?
She wrote a book called Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. She’s skeptical about empathy in general, as she said: “Empathy is not in itself a virtue. It is not in itself something that we should aspire to.”
Here’s how she explained “toxic empathy”: “It is allowing feeling how they feel to lead you to justify what they are doing — which happens in abortion and the gender debate and the sexuality debate and the justice debate and the immigration debate.
“Because we feel so deeply for this one purported victim, we say, well, maybe deportation is wrong, or maybe I should affirm this person’s stated gender, even though it mismatches their biology, or maybe I should affirm the right to have an abortion because I feel so deeply for this person’s plight.
“That is when your empathy has led you in a bad direction and has turned toxic.”
She attributes the practice almost entirely to progressives, and retells a remarkable story she heard on NPR to prove her point. It’s about a woman who “found out that her baby had a fatal fetal anomaly at the 20-week mark, but in Texas she wasn’t allowed to abort her child. NPR tells the story as if this was horrible for Samantha, who had to go through the financial, physical, emotional burden of bearing this child, only to have this child to die.
“By the end of the story, the reader feels exactly how it seems NPR wants them to feel, which is that this is a great injustice toward Samantha. How dare these draconian laws force her to do something so painful, so financially burdensome. We need to liberate women from these anti-abortion laws that are making them go through so much.
“You have so much empathy for Samantha that you support the pro-abortion position by the end of this, through the mode of storytelling. What I try to do is tell the story from the other perspective: The actual victim in this story — that NPR and most mainstream media outlets do not want you to know about — is the baby.”
Without abortion, Stuckey says, the baby “was delivered and clothed and named and held and loved and buried like the full human being that she is.” In sum, “What you progressives in many cases are calling empathetic or calling nice is actually really cruel. It’s actually really bad. I’m saying that the progressives use empathy as a vehicle to ultimate cruelty.”
In the face of counter-examples, Stuckey retreats to an ironclad argument, that they are untrue: “it’s difficult for us to know where to go to get the accurate information because when you’re only seeing that stuff from people who hate Donald Trump anyway and want Christians to hate him, it’s a little hard to take that at face value….[I]f you are allowing your outreach and your compassion to be exclusively or primarily dictated by what the mainstream media says is right and wrong, then yes, I do think that you are probably being led by toxic empathy.”
Douthat brings up Trump’s cruelty, his mockery of suffering, his delight in inflicting pain. Stuckey seems unmoved. And that is what I’ve been sitting with these weeks, that this woman actually believes that forcing another person to carry to term an unborn guaranteed to be born dead is acceptable and not at all cruel compared to the holiness of providing a dead body with a clothed burial.
What’s scary is that Stuckey seems to think empathy is in short supply and can only be granted to one side of her story. It’s easy and natural to feel terrible for the sufferer of a fatal illness, whether in utero or IRL. It’s easy and natural to feel terrible for a women who has been forced by the state to live every day with the knowledge that she is prolonging that suffering by being denied reproductive rights. I try to imagine waking up every morning in that real-life horror movie, and my entire body shudders with pain and revulsion.
This has been nagging at me so incessantly because it appears Stuckey’s beliefs are shared by a large number of Christian evangelicals, who have far more pull in the MAGA regime than those who share my values. I absolutely believe Stuckey is speaking her truth, but no matter how hard I try, I cannot imagine embracing it. In the interview, she repeatedly uses the word “soft” to express disapproval. But I am knocked sideways by the hardness of her judgment.
Stuckey is a biblical literalist, believing the world was created in six days. I believe that the Source of Life, however one understands that, granted us these big brains to think for ourselves, question certainties, and to help spread love. I think fundamentalism of any stripe is extremely dangerous. To me, it is a form of idolatry, worshipping your own creations, including the sacred texts that have been written and rewritten, interpreted and reinterpreted many times. Books that were written in ancient Aramaic, then translated and retranslated over centuries into contemporary English and other modern languages are treated as if in their present forms they express the one and only literal truth.
Let me close by noting that the proof texts for empathy in the Hebrew bible are very well-known and while open to interpretation, pretty straightforward: “Love your fellow as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) and “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20). Of course, they are transgressed as often as they are followed, as with virtually all spiritual teachings. But no matter how you spin them, I can’t see a path to living into them that involves forced births, unwarranted deportation of innocent immigrants and citizens, and depriving people of urgently needed healthcare. That Stuckey and influencers like her can, I find frightening.
Dee Dee Bridgewater, “God Bless The Child.”