I tried listening to a conservative, call-in radio program last night. Five to ten minutes was all I could take before my bleeding ears forced me to change the station.
The topic of conversation was the “invasion” of immigrants “flooding” across America’s southern border.
The first thing I noticed was the ignorance on display about the average person’s living circumstances in Central American countries where the U.S.
has toppled governments in the recent past. The second and most prominent factor was the hard-hearted lack of empathy or compassion voiced by both the bloviating host and his lynch-mob minded callers.
It was painful to listen.
The ability to empathize – that is, feel an impulse for putting ourselves in another person’s place, to understand their pain, to try to feel what they are feeling as they are feeling it – is an important trait for every human being to possess. Some would say it is part of what makes us human.
Unfortunately, not everyone can do it. Many don’t ever try.
Both sociopaths and psychopaths can be identified by their inability, or well-practiced disinterest, in feeling empathy. So, they can skin cats alive and watch other people suffer without experiencing a twinge of concern or human kindness.
I can only hope that a high percentage of psychopaths make evening calls to conservative radio talk shows . Otherwise, America really is in deep trouble.
Perhaps you have heard the old saying about empathy: Before you criticize another person first walk a mile in his shoes. Then when you do criticize him you will be a mile away AND have his shoes.
At least, that seems to be the American, conservative understanding of empathy nowadays.
The painful lack of public empathy that I witnessed last night is also glaring evidence that many Americans who call themselves Christians do not know Jesus Christ from a hole in the ground, no matter what their “testimony.”
Empathy is THE cardinal Christian virtue.
The incarnation of Jesus Christ was/is the supreme demonstration of divine empathy. The Father’s empathy for us, lost sinners, motivated him to send
his one and only eternal Son into this world. Empathy for humanity moved the Son to become fully human; to experience all that we experience; and to stick with it for an entire lifetime. He walked in our shoes, carried our burdens, suffered injustice, died our death, and finally experienced resurrection as our Precursor.
To know Jesus is to know empathy.
To be like Jesus is to demonstrate empathy for others, but especially for 
those who are the most “unlike” us. The Son of God was UTTERLY unlike sinful humanity in every way. Yet, He set aside all privilege in order to rescue undeserving, ungrateful, self-destructive people like you and me.
The kingdom of God is a kingdom founded on empathy for others unlike ourselves.
It is a kingdom founded upon practical action to meet others in their suffering and to alleviate their distress, to bring practical solutions to human dilemmas, to save life, to make more room for those seeking safety, to share whatever we have with those who have lost everything.
Without empathy there is no such thing as Christianity.
Without empathy there is no discipleship.
Without visible demonstrations of practical empathy there is no Christian Church.
Without empathy there is no hope for the human race or the planet.
LGBTQ people in the same way that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination against African-Americans.
book, 
debate:
people they don’t like, or don’t agree with, or see as the unclean enemies of their beloved Christian civilization. Let’s get real – many evangelicals are homophobes (though I do not like that term). They don’t want anyone telling them that they must accept gay/transgendered people as equally human with the same dignity as anyone else, whether in the workplace, at school or anywhere else.
discrimination against the surrounding community. Why should the church’s neighbors be required to pay more for their community services (which is what happens) in the way of a public subsidy for the tax-exempt churches, which most of them don’t attend anyway?
but around the world. (Read John Perkin’s book, 
mesmerized by the dark enchantment of a mythical, fire-breathing monster called “trickle-down economics.” This farcical tax policy was conjured up from the pit by President Ronald Reagan, the national bamboozler-extraordinaire. Others have relabeled it supply-side economics or Reaganomics. But call it what you will, it remains the same destructive strategy for continually enriching the rich while further impoverishing the poor.
dollars when he took the president’s office) launched a new, immoral class war against the poor and the middle-class. Reagan whipped up irrational – even racist – hostilities against “big government” and supposedly ghetto dwelling “welfare queens” in order to sell his political snake oil dressed up as a tax plan. However, the real goal was producing a vast economic benefit for Reagan’s friends and campaign donors, members of an exclusive club I call the Triple-Bs: Billionaires and Big Business.
assistance.
and warned that a growing movement of “right wing extremist movements” posed the greatest threat of political violence and domestic terrorism 
in the United States.
assessment.
“Right-wing extremists have been one of the largest and most consistent sources of domestic terror incidents in the United States for many years, a fact that has not gotten the attention it deserves.”
them are shot, killed, and arrested by police at wildly disproportionate rates is a stunning display of white privilege in and of itself.