This article introduces empathy inversion, the recoding of compassion as corruption and of cruelty as virtue, as a mechanism of affective governance and develops it as a portable analytic framework. Drawing on the conservative evangelical discourse of the “Sin of Empathy,” it argues that White Christian Nationalism does not merely mobilize feeling but disciplines it, prescribing which forms of compassion are licit. Understood as a political-theological operation, the doctrine becomes statecraft: a theological concept secularized into administrative rationality. The article positions empathy inversion against affect theory, governmentality, and scholarship on White Christian Nationalism. It then demonstrates the concept’s analytic leverage through Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership as an interpretive case, showing how, across social-policy domains such as welfare and immigration, a consistent affective grammar renders the withdrawal of care from marginalized others legible as a moral duty to God.
