Allie Beth Stuckey weaponizes her gender to sell the idea of a cold-hearted Jesus
Amanda Marcotte at Salon:
Thanks to Elon Musk, most Americans learned earlier this year that MAGA thinks empathy is evil. Cruelty isn’t the problem, the Tesla CEO claimed in an attempt to justify his turn toward authoritarian politics. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” he declared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in February.
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But I’m not here to debate Musk and Saad’s self-serving delusions. More interesting is that while they have tried to frame this anti-empathy discourse in faux-scientific and masculinized rhetoric, the right’s modern war on empathy really began with a woman. Unlike Saad and Musk, fundamentalist Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey doesn’t see empathy as a failure of evolution. As a creationist who denies the scientific reality of prehistoric dinosaurs, she doesn’t even believe in evolution. And even though she believes the Bible forbids women from being pastors, Stuckey has made it her mission to rewrite the teachings of Jesus so that her savior is a harsh disciplinarian whose “love” has little to do with empathy. Stuckey’s book “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion” came out in late 2024, but the idea for it appears to have originated on a 2022 episode of her popular podcast “Relatable.” She hadn’t yet come up with the catchphrase “toxic empathy” — which, in true trolling style, appropriates the progressive use of the term “toxic” to describe unhealthy and cruel behavior — but her basic argument is right there.
“Feeling too much for someone can blind us to reality,” she argued. “It can cause us to ignore the truth, the objective truth, in favor of how a person feels.” What Stuckey asserts as “objective truth” is anything but: That being gay is wrong, that women are meant to submit to men, that immigrants are dangerous to Americans, that trans identities are illegitimate and that the only meaningful racism in America is “anti-white.” In a sense, she is simply reworking a longstanding argument from the Christian right that kindness and compassion are not what Jesus meant by “love.” To the contrary, true Christian love is what looks, to most people, like beating someone into submission. Denying someone equality or basic dignity, this argument goes, may be painful now, but it supposedly saves them from hell, so hatefulness is actually a deeper form of love.
This line of thought has always been the paper-thin rationale for bigotry and abuse. But Stuckey’s sinister genius was in using her gender to make these tired gambits seem fresh and modern. Everything about “Relatable,” including that try-hard name, is exquisitely designed to invoke a stereotypical feminine softness. The logo’s font is straight out of mid-century woman’s magazine. Stuckey has soft blonde hair and favors pastels in her clothing and decor. Like so many Phyllis Schlafly knock-offs before her, Stuckey has built a career on arguing that women can’t be equal to men. That way, she gets to relish being an ambitious career woman, while enjoying male support — she’s hosted by Glenn Beck’s Blaze Media — that she would never get insisting that women are equal. Stuckey’s ability to package her work as fluffy girl stuff worked well on the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, who presented her to his well-meaning but gullible liberal audience as a harmless church girl whose podcast is the equivalent of a Sunday afternoon ladies brunch. He gushed about her “strong parenting and motherhood and female life element,” portraying her as reaching “younger religious women” with content about “sunscreen and parenting styles and the secret to fixing your period.”
But that’s all nonsense. Stuckey’s “fixing your period” episode, for example, was actually about scaring women into stopping birth control by falsely portraying it as dangerous. Stuckey is just one of many far-right female commentators who have realized that they can use hyper-feminine aesthetics to conceal what would immediately register as dystopian, even fascistic sentiments if they came from a man. But what makes her especially dangerous is that she applies this strategy to the concept of empathy. Whether consciously or not, Stuckey grasps that “empathy” tends to be coded as a feminine virtue. When men attack empathy, it comes across as sexist and condescending. But a woman opposing empathy is counterintuitive. In our era of vibes over facts, that twist makes her message feel more persuasive, especially to those who already are sick of hearing that being mean to other people is bad.
The right-wing war on empathy was started by TheBlaze host Allie Beth Stuckey, who seems to be the next Phyllis Schlafly in presentation and demeanor.
