Do evangelical churches preach about the dangers of empathy? (Not so much)

PRRI’s 2026 American Values Survey asked Americans to choose between two statements: empathy is a foundational moral value that helps build a healthy society, or empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God’s truth. Most Americans (68%) chose the first. White evangelical Protestants were the only religious group where a majority (54%) chose the second, and 39% agreed strongly, more than twice the national rate (17%). Only 30% of white evangelicals strongly agreed empathy is foundational, against 52% of all Americans. PRRI’s founder, Robert P. Jones, calls this an “empathy gap”.

That may describe people who call themselves evangelicals. It does not describe what is preached in evangelical churches. We find no direct evidence that evangelical sermons spread the idea that empathy is dangerous. Evangelical churches mostly don’t talk about empathy at all, while progressive and mainline churches do.

Silence, not opposition. Evangelical preachers rarely say “empathy”. They also rarely talk about the Sermon on the Mount or “love your enemies”. When they reach for the idea, they say compassion, at the same rate as mainline preachers. Negative framing is close to zero in every tradition: between 0.5 and 2 sermons per 1,000. Where the debate over “toxic empathy” does come up, it is mostly progressive pulpits reporting and answering it.

So where does the belief come from? Probably not from the pulpit. It more likely comes from outside the churches, in circles that include many evangelicals: most plausibly political environments, such as commentary, media and campaign messaging, where warnings about “toxic empathy” circulate. A survey measures what people who identify as evangelical believe; sermons measure what their churches teach. Here the two diverge.

Limits: these are sermons that churches publish online and that Divining transcribes, cut to the sermon itself; phrases are found by pattern matching, so a preacher could argue the idea without the words we search for. Sermon silence also can’t rule out teaching in small groups, classes or conversation.