More evidence that politics kills our soul

God does not care what political candidates we vote for or what political ideology we subscribe to. None of these things of Mammon matter. In fact, the more politicians talk about God and morality when they run for office, the more morally bankrupt they become when in office. Power corrupts. You also cross a line to outright evil when you imply that God wants you to be powerful. It is blasphemy in service of lust for power. Or worse, intoxication with power leads you to justify injustice and cruelty in the name of God.

A new study published in Psychological Science illustrates the inherent evil in our political allegiances. The experiments by Ed O'Brien and Phoebe Ellsworth examined the impact of our political identification on our ability to empathize. The moral of the story is very simple. We are less likely to empathize with the sufferings of people with different political identifications.

This shows that the tendency to project your feelings onto others does not extend to people who are very different from you, even when the feelings otherwise overwhelm your judgments. This might reveal a surprising limit to our ability to empathize with people we differ from or disagree with. For example, other research has shown that people are less likely to endorse torture after they’re given a brief burst of pain. But these results suggest that people might feel less opposed to torture if it’s being used on people very different from themselves. Similarly, feeling hungry or cold might not be enough to make people appreciate the plight of the homeless, if they perceive the homeless as very different from themselves. “Even if you’re feeling shared pain, you may not let that connection affect your opinions of people are very, very different from you,” O’Brien says.

The more we view each other as fellow children of God, the less likely we are to ignore the suffering of others or be tempted to harm others. Loving others as Jesus taught comes naturally the more we believe that God loves us all. It becomes more difficult when you start to view others as so different from ourselves that we cannot empathize with their struggles and suffering. Or worse yet, we succumb to the temptation to believe that God loves us more than others. Then if we see these perceived inferiors suffer, we smugly believe that they have it coming.

Jesus said that sibling rivalry among God's children is not acceptable to Him. In fact, Jesus said to love your enemies and pray for those that harm you (Matthew 5:44; Luke 6:27). Politics is just another way we devalue the humanity of others. It is also a temptation to stay silent about injustices promoted by people with the same political identification.