The Newest “Sin” of Empathy—And Why It Scares the Shit Out of Fundamentalist Christians

When Christians Call Empathy a "Sin", You Know Something is Off

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“Empathy is not a sin.”

“Well, duh.” That was my first thought when I initially saw a progressive voice say that on social media.

Then I saw it again, and again, and again.

Obviously, these various progressive voices were protesting what they believed conservatives were saying somewhere on the interwebs.

I have to admit, I was skeptical. After all, who in their right mind would say empathy is a sin?

Think about it for just one moment…

Being able to connect emotionally with another is a prerequisite to stepping into their shoes and being able to identify with them. Empathy is the condition for love. If you remove empathy from the equation, no one would ever be able to love their neighbor as Jesus calls us to do.

So, I had a sneaking suspicion this was a straw man argument. And what should one do when one suspects a straw man argument? Look it up and see what conservatives are actually saying.

Look what I found

It turns out that there is an entire book on the issue entitled, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits. The author, Joe Rigney, did a promotional podcast interview with Albert Mohler in which he discusses it.

I also discovered a podcast on Religious News Services that reflected critically on that podcast. What was especially helpful in this reflection was that they had a small clip from the interview. The interview clip starts at 28:33. So if you don't have time to listen to the entire interview, it would be worth it to take time for that snipit.

Because I think it's important to try to hear and understand what people are saying, I want to go through what I think the highlights of the interview are, what I hear as the author’s main concerns, and then offer my own response.

The perceived problem

Despite the title of the book, The Sin of Empathy, Rigney does not believe that all empathy is a sin. His goal with that title was to be intentionally provocative. There's really only a certain kind of empathy that is a sin. And this sinful empathy is the kind of empathy that opens someone up to emotional manipulation.

When he uses the word “empathy” (the sinful kind), he's primarily talking about when one jumps into another's emotions fully. When this happens, people react to situations without thinking about them. This is bad.

Leaning on what he learned from reading the systems theorist Edwin Friedman, he notes that it is better to position yourself so that you have only one foot in the emotions of another. He argues the other foot needs to be firmly anchored in God's Truth as portrayed by the Bible. So the goal is to connect with people emotionally, but not to take on their emotions as your own. Rigney portrays this one-foot-in and one-foot-out posture as a form of biblical “compassion”.

As a complimentarian, he believes that men and women’s God-ordained roles in society are reflected in and reinforced in how they function emotionally.

Men have to make hard decisions. They have to interpret and preach the Word of God. They have to decide who is in and who is out of the community. And he doesn't want men leading with empathy because that will make them extra sensitive to how people who are wrong or excluded might feel about being told they are wrong or excluded in some form. Empathic sensitivity can cause them to falter in their biblical interpretations, teaching, and decisions.

Meanwhile, Rigney does not see empathy as bad in women. In fact, he argues that empathy is a woman's gift. Women are meant to be emotional, feel other people's emotions, and be healers as a result. This, he points out, is why women cannot and should never be pastors or priests.

The primary concerns

Now, let’s take a moment and try to piece together what his primary concerns are, at least as revealed in his conversation about the content of his book.

Emotional manipulation

His biggest issue with empathy is the way it makes conservative Christians vulnerable to emotional manipulation by the left.

For example, leftists accuse conservatives of lacking compassion because these Christians support eliminating funding for children’s free meals and oppose the inclusion of the LGBTQAI+ community. As the left tells stories that cause conservative Christians to empathically identify with others, this manipulation can cause those Christians to question or reject more reasonable approaches to issues, such as fiscal responsibility and what the Word of God clearly says about human sexuality.

As a result, empathy can make these conservative Christians feel bad. Next thing you know, they are condoning ungodly things such as “sodomy”.

This is how leftists leverage sinful empathy and emotionally abuse Christians by taking advantage of their soft-heartedness.

Feminism

How did we get here? This is where Rigney points his finger at feminists. Indeed, according to him feminism is an active threat to God's complementarian ordering of society and the driving force for making churches abandon God. This is why acceptance of feminism must be strongly resisted.

Women cannot be allowed into leadership positions. Once women with their empathy become pastors and priests, that's the beginning of the end. It's inevitable that once Christian communities accept women in leadership, they are going to become LGBTQAI+ inclusive denominations.

To make things more difficult for conservative churches, we have a cultural context conducive to emotional manipulation. Everybody in America wants to be a victim. As a result, we have people portraying themselves as victims who are not real victims. The most obvious example of these “false victims” includes the LGBTQAI+ community. He also makes brief reference to black people.

This is where Rigney see the combination of empathy and a culture biased toward the victim as especially dangerous. The left has been able to leverage identity politics in their favor. As leftist leaders start to tell their abusive, emotionally charged stories about the marginalized and oppressed in order to tug at conservative heartstrings, their manipulation is hard to resist.

And to make matters worse, according to Rigney conservative Christians are not allowed to challenge the narratives of false victims. Their victim status makes them untouchable. Any voices that attempt to challenge their position are not allowed because of leftist identity politics.

This leads to empathy as a source of cruelty. According to Rigney, empathy is about feeling with one's own in-group. And when there's a perceived threat to the group, it triggers rage and reaction. This leads to a cruel response toward the out-group. In this sense empathy fuels war and bloodshed.

Deconstruction

There's a brief mention that could easily be missed in Rigney’s concerns around the words “abuse” and “trauma”. As he portrays it, “abuse” used to mean some form of physical or sexual violence. Now, thanks to empathy, it means “any disagreement whatsoever,” and if you cause distress to another you automatically become an abuser. Meanwhile, “trauma” used to mean something like PTSD that resulted from war, but now it includes “you had a bad experience at a church and you’re living with the trauma”.

These seem to me to be clear references to the deconstruction movement. Hop on just about any social media platform and you can find people telling the stories of their deconstruction. You can listen to them talk about their experiences of emotional and theological abuse in fundamentalist or conservative Evangelical communities. Because of this new publicity, we now have therapists who specialize in helping people heal from religious trauma and abuse.

Clearly those who have deconstructed and are speaking out against their former religion fall into Rigney’s category of “false victims”. If the left hadn't given the words “abuse” and “trauma” new meaning as a result of leveraging empathy, their victimhood would be considered invalid.