‘Empathy Is Not a Thing,’ Says Albert Mohler in Response to Hillary Clinton’s Essay

“Empathy is not a thing,” said Dr. Albert Mohler on the Feb. 3 edition of “The Briefing,” a show in which Mohler analyzes current events, giving his take on them from a Christian worldview. Mohler made his statement while addressing an opinion piece Hillary Clinton wrote in which she called out commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, as well as Pastors Joe Rigney and Douglas Wilson. 

“I want to say even as I’ve been challenged on this in the last few days, it’s not so much that I think empathy is wrongly defined. It is the fact that I don’t think empathy is a thing,” said Mohler, who is president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS). 

“I don’t think it’s real. I think it is a substitute for a real Christian morality,” he said. “A real Christian morality is not empathy, but sympathy and it’s feeling with—it’s compassion, feeling with—and then taking the requisite actions driven by Christian conviction.” 

Albert Mohler Responds to Hillary Clinton’s Atlantic Piece 

Hillary Clinton, former first lady, U.S. senator, and secretary of state, wrote a Jan. 29 piece for The Atlantic titled “MAGA’s War on Empathy.” A subheading said, “This crisis in Minneapolis reveals a deep moral rot at the heart of Trump’s movement.”

It has become common recently for certain prominent Christian leaders to speak out on the dangers of empathy. Stuckey and Rigney are notable voices on the topic, and both have come out with books on the dangers of empathy.

Stuckey’s is called “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion”; Rigney’s is called “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits, A Christian Worldview Guide to Discernment and Emotional Manipulation.”

RELATED: The Scandal of Evangelical Empathy: How Did We Even Get Here? 

Douglas Wilson is the controversial pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and a self-described Christian nationalist. Rigney is an associate pastor at Wilson’s church. 

In her piece, Clinton made the case that “an article of MAGA faith” is that “compassion is weak and cruelty is strong.” She contrasted President Donald Trump with his recent predecessors, including George W. Bush, pointing to the Trump administration’s handling of events in Minneapolis.

Clinton also pointed out Trump’s reaction to Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde shortly after the president took the oath of office for the second time, and she mentioned the late Pope Francis‘ indirect rebuke of Vice President J.D. Vance in February 2025.

Clinton said that true Christians would not act the way Trump and his supporters act. “I believe that Christians like me—and people of faith more generally—have a responsibility to stand up to the extremists who use religion to divide our society and undermine our democracy,” she said.