Get Your Smart On
The Politicization of Anti-Empathy in Christian Evangelical and White Nationalist circles.
This piece picks up where “**Dangerous Feelings” left off. You might want to read that first. **
Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy was not published by an academic publisher that would vet the rigour of the research, but by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins. As a trade publisher, Ecco does not peer-review books the way scholarly journals or academic publishers do. Their focus is on editorial quality (writing, structure, marketability) and whether a book will engage readers, rather than whether every citation is used in good faith or every argument is methodologically sound. Nonetheless, it is on the strength of his academic position as a psychology professor at Yale, that Bloom’s book serves as an intellectual foundation for the evangelical and nationalist Christian war on empathy. This piece is about that link, and here we will take a look specifically at how Joe Rigney’s The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits (Canon Press, 2023) and Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion (Sentinel, 2024) both politicize the anti-empathy sentiment.
First, a little positioning: Canon Press is a prominent voice in the Reformed Christian publishing world. And Sentinel, a conservative imprint of Penguin Random House, specializes in publishing nonfiction works that align with “right-of-center” perspectives, including Donald Rumsfeld, Ann Coulter, and Amy Coney Barrett.1 Interestingly, both Canon Press and Sentinel were founded by the same person, Doug Wilson, founder of Christ Church and a major figure in Reformed circles2 based out of Moscow, Idaho. This is a sect dedicated to waging cultural and theological “wars,” and while it is a small and tight-knit group, it’s influence is outsized due to Wilson’s inroads into publishing.
This context suggests these two books, very similar in content but published so closely together right before the 2024 election, were meant to deliver a one-two punch to empathy and “wokeness,” creating an echo chamber for these ideas that would have them ripple out into more and more general audiences. Penguin Random House’s Sentinel is more mainstream, so the critique (if it can be called that) of empathy was published first in the more niche Canon Press, then pushed forward into a more mainstream Christian audience through Sentinel and Stuckey, who is a popular Christian podcaster. I had to really work to find a copy of the smaller Canon Press title, but Stuckey’s book is widely available (for example, in three formats through Amazon).
I start with this context because it is much easier to see what they are up to when armed with this knowledge. As before, my goal is not necessarily to offer a counter argument, but to show how this cultural war is being waged. The TLDR is that both Rigney and Stuckey politicize the anti-empathy arguments Bloom lays down in order to bring Christians for whom Obama’s message of hope and empathy resonated, and whose empathy towards marginalized groups may have grown due to exposure to widely spread social justice movements in the early 2000’s, back into the fold. Secondly, they wish to harm a chief value of liberal, multicultural democracy. In an upcoming post, we’ll see how important empathy is to the humanities and liberalism.
Empathy is an example of the playbook, and once you see how it works you can see it in play in some other appropriations. In a way, empathy is a failed appropriation. Where the appropriation of “woke” seems to have succeeded very well, other terms like empathy, performativity/gender performativity, feminism, and more have been less successful. We have yet to see what will happen with feminism — the jury is still out — but the invention of “choice feminism” (spoiler alert, this is not a thing) plays out similarly to empathy. I want to dig into that after completing the empathy series, stay tuned... Now onto the main program.
In his conversation with Albert Mohler3 on the “Thinking in Public” podcast, Joe Rigney tells us how he came to write about empathy. Ten years prior, he had read Edwin Friedman's book A Failure of Nerve, in which Friedman draws attention to the danger of empathy. Rigney wrestled with this idea while teaching a leadership class for a couple of years, and began observing, from about 2014 onward, what he describes as "angst and reactivity and passions raging" and people "being manipulated by empathy."
He then did a podcast episode in 2018 with Doug Wilson (mentioned above) on the topic and, according to him, “everyone lost their minds.” Then in 2019, he wrote a widely circulated and popular article “The Enticing Sin of Empathy: How Satan Corrupts Through Compassion” published on the website Desiring God. He says that he got a lot of attention and has since made the anti-empathy crusade his thing. He writes in the introduction to The Sin of Empathy that he is purposefully hitting a hornet’s nest, and he is pretty smug about it too. Here is Mohler setting up this “joke” for him:
This is a tactic that has since come to be known as rage baiting. It positions Rigney as a provocateur, using controversy to amplify his counter-culture message. Telling people not to care for their fellow community members is a hard sell — I believe that we are hard-wired to care — but you can more easily convince your people that being cold-hearted towards those most vulnerable is a necessary stand to take in the name of God and all that is good. His message is mostly a regurgitation of Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy4, but it weaponizes this for his regressive political ends. Remember, this is 2019, running up against the 2020 election of Joe Biden over a second Trump term. Two issues are highlighted in what follows: the misogynist degradation of women, and the use of transphobia to arouse his base against empathy.
Rigney rehearses the story, originating with Paul Bloom, that the word "empathy" is synthetic and artificial, a relatively new invention.5 He also reaffirms Bloom’s idea of empathy as excessive, an ungovernable passion, although he is not the Rationalist that Bloom purports to be. For Rigney, feeling empathy involves fusion with another through emotional bonds, a loss of boundaries and identity with respect to another — a felt loss of control. He uses an oft-repeated analogy of jumping in to save another who is drowning rather than staying on firm ground and throwing them a life-preserver. But who would jump in if there is a life-preserver right there that they can throw? Who doesn’t know that some situations do call for jumping in, and that this is jus tthe kind of act that ethicists talk about as courageous? Is it not cowardly to let fear override what one knows needs to be done?
Like Bloom, Rigney contrasts empathy with Christian compassion, favoring the latter. Compassion is thought to be anchored in biblical truths. In this case, their truth isn’t factual, empirical, or verifiable, but the truth that is found in their interpretation of the Christian bible, an interpretation that upholds the patriarchal authority of the church. Truth and goodness are conflated on this assertion of an objective moral order.
Rigney's explains further, on “Thinking in Public”:
“I’m not letting go of what’s true, what’s good. One of the ways I put it, compassion reserves the right not to blaspheme. And often when people are hurting, it’s really tempting to just go wherever they want to take you to let them sort of steer your emotional vehicle wherever they want. And if you’ve been told your whole life as a Christian to be kind and tender hearted as the Bible does, to be like Christ and to weep with those who weep, it becomes a really powerful motivator, and it’s easy to bypass these larger considerations of, but [sic] what’s good in the long run and what’s good for the whole group, that’s the danger.”
So here is an appeal to a utilitarian end, also Bloom’s framing. But unlike Bloom, Rigley explicitly politicizes this “good” end, writing that empathy is a product of the “woke” movement on the left, where alleged victims are always considered right, and questioning them is deemed heartless or un-empathetic. Rigney connects the problematic rise of empathy to a secularization of the self — what he wonkily calls “emotivism” and “subjectivism” — where feelings dominate in the absence of an objective moral order. The apotheosis of this, he tells us, is seen in the transgender movement, where feelings, supposedly untethered to biological reality, demand affirmation, and failing to affirm is labeled as heartless, cruel, or even evil. I doubt any queer would use the word evil, except maybe ironically, but let’s just put a pin here and note that the LGBT-rights-panic-button is being pressed.
There is one more step to take empathy from emotionally manipulative to a “woke” mind virus, but we’ll get there.
Rigney also extends Paul Bloom’s misogynist argument about women being less rational and more susceptible to empathy. Rigney links the substitution of empathy for genuine biblical compassion with gender trouble in the church. He argues that feminism has taken the natural, God-designed empathy of women and misapplied it to contexts (like church leadership roles requiring clear lines and fortitude) where empathy becomes a liability. This, he contends, is why “the empathetic sex” (women) is biblically barred from the pastoral office. (Ergo, it’s not patriarchy and a patriarchal outsized fear of loss of control, but women’s excessive emotions, including empathy, that are the gender trouble.) This framework, Rigney argues, has led many churches to adopt a cultural Marxist oppressor/oppressed view of the world, powered by empathy for the oppressed classes.
This argument shows us a way in which misogyny is linked to cultural Marxism in this context, caricatured here as a view that divides the world into oppressors and the oppressed. This is an internal war that has spilled out into secular worlds, between liberation theology and complementarian theologians6, where the former seek to uplift the marginalized, challenge patriarchal structures, and promote egalitarianism, while the latter double down on traditional gender hierarchies as divinely ordained. Complementarianism has been a defining feature of conservative evangelical circles, influencing teaching, church leadership practices, and family structures. For Christian Nationalists who believe the United States was meant to be a Christian nation, these attacks are about creating a white, Christian ethno-state.
Finally, Rigney asserts that empathy can be tied to cruelty, referring explicitly to Paul Bloom whom he quotes directly: “When most people hear the word empathy, they think kindness. I think war.” Empathy is coupled with rage, hatred, and the demonization of perceived threats on behalf of the oppressed. In over-identifying with victims, empathy leads to cruelty. Empathy is portrayed like rabies, a viral infection leading to irrational and uncontrollably lashing-out that in and of itself leads people to do bad things.
Rigley argues that in our fallen state, referring to biblical Adam and Eve falling prey to the evil serpent, our passions lead us astray if they are not governed by minds anchored in God's truth — an absolute, objective morality that joins goodness and veracity in faith. Empathy, when uncontrolled, can lead to folly and destruction, not just individually but also within families, churches, and communities. Those who are empathetic present a danger to good Christians, and here he pushes the fear button hard where he suggests that empathy can be a cover for "more sinister" things. He points out that while Christ is described as a “sympathetic high priest”(Hebrews 4:15), some modern translations mistakenly use "empathetic," accommodating the cultural moment and losing the crucial distinction that Christ's perfection is what allows him to be merciful without joining us in sin. We cannot expect to be empathetic like Christ was empathetic, because our weakness means that, unlike Christ who alone can understand our struggles without being “infected” or overwhelmed by the sin of empathy’s distortions, we are no Christ.
To be Continued…
TIMELINE of the Christian Right’s Anti-Empathy Crusade*
2007: Edwin H. Friedman publishes A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. Church Publishing, Inc., 2007.
2016: The book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom is published, arguing against allowing empathy to guide actions in areas like philanthropy and politics due to potential for manipulation and bias.
2018: Rod Dreher’s *The Benedict Option *argues that the broader culture’s “empathetic” or “therapeutic” turn was eroding Christian moral and social principles, helping to popularize this line of thinking among some conservative Christians.
2018: Pastor Joe Rigney begins evangelizing against what he calls the “sin of empathy,” linking it to feminism and the “politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood.” Rigney’s "article “The Enticing Sin of Empathy: How Satan Corrupts Through Compassion” published on Desiring God’s website was widely shared on social media, and became a flashpoint for debates within Christian circles about whether empathy is Christian or not.
February 2023: Joe Rigney’s book The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits is published, offering a critical examination of empathy and distinguishing genuine compassion from its misleading or superficial forms.
2024: Allie Beth Stuckey publishes Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.
January 21, 2025: The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde delivers a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral’s inaugural prayer service following President Trump’s second inauguration. She pleads with Trump to show mercy toward immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, and others fearing for their lives, urging compassion for vulnerable communities in a moment of national uncertainty.
Within days of January 21, 2025: Bishop Budde's sermon “touched off a firestorm among some of Trump’s evangelical supporters.” Christian podcasters Ben Garrett tweets “Do not commit the sin of empathy.” Allie Beth Stuckey tweets about “toxic empathy that is in complete opposition to God’s Word.” Pastor Joe Rigney describes Budde's message as a “clear example of the man-eating weed of Humanistic Mercy” and links it to feminism and the “politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood.”
January 30, 2025: Vice President J.D. Vance publicly advocated for a hierarchical interpretation of Christian love, known as ordo amoris, suggesting that love should be prioritized starting with one's family, then neighbors, followed by community, country, and finally the broader world. This perspective was articulated during an interview with Sean Hannity and further emphasized in subsequent public statements.
February 3, 2025: Cardinal Robert Prevost, who would later become Pope Leo XIV, responded to Vance's interpretation by posting on X (formerly Twitter), “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others,” linking to an article from the National Catholic Reporter that criticized Vance's remarks.
February 10, 2025: In a letter addressed to the U.S. bishops, Pope Francis responded to Vice President J.D. Vance's invocation of the theological concept ordo amoris to justify the Trump administration's immigration policies. Vance had argued for a hierarchical ordering of love, prioritizing family, community, and nation over others. Pope Francis countered this interpretation by emphasizing that Christian love should be universal and inclusive, drawing upon the parable of the Good Samaritan to illustrate the boundless nature of compassion. He warned against policies that criminalize migrants and stressed the importance of recognizing the dignity of every human being, regardless of their legal status. The Pope's letter served as a direct challenge to nationalist interpretations of Christian doctrine that exclude or marginalize vulnerable populations.
February 19, 2025: Joe Rigney promotes his book [The Sin of Empathy](http://The Sin of Empathy) on Albert Mohler's podcast, Thinking In Public, where Mohler offers his own critiques of empathy, calling it a “synthetic word,” too tied to “constant emoting,” Marxism, and identity politics.