Sunday thoughts.

The question of empathy.

I attended a great rally yesterday in Greensburg, PA, a city in Westmoreland County, where Trump won by almost 30 points. I was delighted to find a Roman Catholic nun and multiple pastors at our rally, which was framed as a tribute to John Lewis, himself a deeply religious man who died around this date about five years ago.

One of the pastors held a sign that struck a chord:

It jumped out because empathy is getting more scrutiny these days. It was addressed in two separate New York Times pieces this past week (here and here), and of course, Elon Musk has made the claim that empathy is a software bug for Western Man.

The criticism is basically that people on the American left went too far in the wake of George Floyd, etc. You can read more about it at the links above. To me, this pastor’s sign is the perfect response. The claim that empathy is “Christlike” is important because it less abstract than the defense you might normally expect a liberal to mount.

I have heard it said that in an age of competing ideologies (nationalism, socialism, communism, market fundamentalism), Christianity is anti-ideology. It focuses on the heart, and a concept Pope Francis referred to often, which is “encounter.” As I understand it, this is a claim about truth and knowledge. We tend to think of learning from books, facts, and abstract proofs. “Encounter” means that truth also happens in moments when you encounter another person, meaning that you truly see them and hear them. These are moments when God may act within us, or through that person, and help us understand what to do.

We heard the classic example of this in last Sunday’s Gospel, which is the parable of the Good Samaritan. My favorite part is that Jesus only tells the story in the first place because a lawyer “stood up to test Jesus.” He pressed for clarity on the concept of who, exactly, was his neighbor. Rather than offer him an abstract definition, Jesus told about the Samaritan who encountered someone in dire need, and unlike the priest and the Levite, took the risk upon himself of doing something about it.

Now we are getting somewhere. Empathy is not inherently “political” in the left/right sense. It is a question of attention and a question of will: would you notice the man on the other side of the road, and would you walk across the street to take a closer look?

Today, of course, there is an entire industrial complex dedicated to capturing your attention and overcoming your will. So it is hard to know when to stop, look, and possibly do something. But this weekend I had one of those moments. I read about a grandfather in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who was granted asylum in the United States in 1987, yet was detained by ICE last month simply because he went to replace his missing green card. His name is Luis Leon. His family was told that he died, only to later learn that he was, inexplicably, in a Guatemala hospital.

People like our two Pennsylvania senators, who have each in their own way supported Trump’s project when it comes to immigration, could easily stay on the other side of the road from this one. It is inconvenient for them, because it appears to be so obviously wrong and cruel, and far beyond what anyone was voting for.

Was this our neighbor? The articles so far state that he received asylum because of his experiences under the Pinochet regime in Chile, and that he was a law-abiding and productive person. It is said that he worked at a leather manufacturing plant. Presumably President Reagan, who admitted him to this country, would be proud. And given these fact, how different is he, really, from all of the Pennsylvanians whose ancestors fled oppression in Europe, only to come here and work blue collar jobs?

Almost two-thirds of Pennsylvanians identify as Christians. This seems to me like an easy case. Perhaps that is why Elon Musk and others want to downgrade empathy as a concept, so that we stop asking questions like this, and it becomes easier for them to accomplish their goals. But even in the original story, the privileged and respected (the priest and the Levite) were the ones who refused to cross the road. Nothing new for Musk there.

Senators are supposed to be uniquely capable of understanding who their neighbors are. But it is our job to make sure they never forget it. So in any way that you are able, perhaps you could reach out to them (here and here), and have an encounter.