This very morning, I caught myself again—scrolling past a headline that should have stopped me cold. Another raid. Another detention center built to house immigrants. Another politician peddling cruelty as “common sense.” Perhaps because it feels too painful to absorb. Or too distant to change. Or maybe—if I’m honest—because I’m growing indifferent.
That’s what this reflection is about: the creeping indifference that is at work in so many of us. I can feel it in me. And I will not allow it to become my state.
There’s no doubt—we’re all being conditioned, slowly and methodically, to not flinch at the suffering of others. We are numbed by algorithmic news and trained by the headlines to skim past pain as if it were mere spectacle. We begin to confuse emotional detachment with maturity. We shrug and say, “What can we really do?”—as if apathy were a virtue. And over time, the call to neighborly compassion is replaced by muted moral distance. Indifference: the opposite of love.
But this numbing carries a cost. It requires us to surrender the basic human instinct to respond to pain. And for those within the Christian tradition, it demands that we surrender the gospel itself—for something smaller, weaker, and ultimately abusive and false.
Let me be clear: this is a pastoral lament. Yet I know there are some who can only hear these words through a partisan filter—because political identity has become the only lens they’ve been trained to use. But for those with spiritual ears to hear, this is about what happens to our humanity—and to the witness of the Church—when we stop being disturbed by injustice, suffering, and cruelty.
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells the story of a wounded man left on the side of the road. The ones who strolled passed him by were the religious leaders. The moral citizens. People with credentials and civic pride. But they walked past suffering because it didn’t fit their agenda. Because it was inconvenient. And, frankly, because of their disgust for the one suffering. It was the good Samaritan—racially, religiously, and politically other—who stopped, who saw, who was moved to act.
That story is not ancient history. It’s a mirror.
So hear me—especially my white, affluent, church-associating peers:
Your bumper-sticker patriotism is salt in the wound of those suffering under the guise of “making America great again.” Your casual “I’ll pray for the president” is a punch in the face of the immigrants stripped of their humanity and locked in for-profit detention centers. Your silent nods toward cruelty-as-policy are not political neutrality—they are a grief to the God of justice and a desecration of the image of God in those being targeted.
Still, even as I lament what’s happening “out there,” I am pastorally concerned about what’s eroding “in here”—in me, in my family, in the insulated, predominantly white spaces I move through. The creeping indifference that masquerades as social balance. A spiritual detachment that can sing worship songs but cannot wail for the suffering.
I’ve heard Christians say, “But they broke the law…” as if that justifies literal cages for men, women, and children whose only crime is the color of their skin and immigration from their country of origin. (Most reports estimate that over 70% of those arrested by ICE have no criminal record other than their immigration status.) To which I ask: What law are you most loyal to? Because it’s clearly not the law of God. Scripture is explicit: Welcome the stranger. Care for the foreigner. Love your neighbor.
Let me say it plainly: if your theology makes peace with imprisoning people for the “crime” of being an immigrant, then it is not the gospel you are following.
When images of separated and detained children no longer stir us to action…
When we hear of detention camps and commodified cruelty and feel nothing…
That is not moral clarity. That is moral decay.
And yet somehow, many of us—especially in white Western Christianity—have confused faithfulness with emotional numbness and walking past the issues of our day. As if God’s peace requires detachment. As if faithfulness means not getting dirty. Indifference is not a fruit of the Spirit.
So what do we do?
I don’t yet know the final required actions. But, we must start by telling the truth. We name the indifference—in ourselves, in our churches, in our circles of influence. We confess the ways we’ve made peace with cruelty and violence because it helps us stay comfortable. Then we look even deeper.
When the headline scrolls past—pause. Let it hurt.
When someone reduces a life to a label—resist. Ask for their story and listen.
And remember, silence is rarely neutral. Loving action will be required.
We were never called to stroll past suffering. We are called to see, to stop, and to love. Because numbness is not peace. Emotional distance is not maturity. And indifference is not Christlike.
Shane Ash 