Many values today come in good and bad versions. Consider tolerance. Rightly understood, it is a great social good and even a Christian virtue. But so often it is grossly misused and abused, basically demanding that we accept everything and everyone, no questions asked. See more on this here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2016/05/16/when-compassion-kills/
And this is certainly the case with empathy. Too often now it is being appealed to for all the wrong reasons. Many authors have been discussing this lately. Here are three recent examples:
Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion (Sentinel, 2024)
Joe Rigney, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits (Canon Press, 2025)
Gad Saad, Suicidal Empathy (forthcoming)
Stuckey
As to the first, I have already reviewed her book and discussed its ideas:
For the Christian, empathy should never compel us to affirm that which God calls sinful or to advocate for policies that are ineffective at best and deadly at worst. . . . This book isn’t about killing empathy. It’s about embracing God’s vision for love, order, and goodness. My goal is to equip you with commonplace, biblical truths that dismantle toxic empathy from its foundations.
Real love – the kind described by the God who created and is love (I John 4:8) – always includes truth. The two are inextricably intertwined, since true love celebrates truth (1 Cor. 13:6). Christians are called to this kind of love regardless of whether we feel empathy or not. Christians love because Christ first loved us, not because we feel a certain way or have had a particular experience (1 John 4:19).
Rigney
As to the new Rigney volume, let me share some choice quotes from it. He argues that empathy as such is not wrong or sinful, but its misuse is. It can go unrestrained and unchecked. Early on he cites biblical passages urging compassion, but then looks at texts that command us to not tolerate that which is evil. He then writes:
So then, we are to be characterised by tenderhearted compassion and pity (like God), and yet there are times when pity and compassion are strictly and absolutely forbidden. It’s the second principle that is difficult for many moderns to accept. The idea that pity and compassion could ever be sinful, could ever be inappropriate and wrong, is almost blasphemous in the modern world. And as a result, the modern world has sought to give compassion an upgrade, to improve it and make it more loving. Enter empathy (“All rise”). This book is about that shift – the shift from compassion to empathy – and how it wreaks havoc on families, churches, relationships, and societies. (xix)
He uses an analogy:
[I]f a person is drowning in a river with a strong current, apathy is unmoved and therefore refuses to help at all. Empathy is overwhelmed by the danger and dives in and is swept away by the current. True compassion tethers itself to the shore with a rope and swims to the drowning man with a life preserver.
Both errors are related to the notion of tethering. Apathy stands on the shore, but refuses to connect with the sufferer. Empathy dives in to connect with the sufferer, but loses touch with the shore. The virtue of compassion or sympathy insists on being tethered to both.
And this untethering is precisely our challenge. As Chesterton put it:
“The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
Untruthful pity. Untethered empathy. These are the counterfeits of compassion. (pp. 14-15)
The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeitsby Joe Rigney (Author)
And he makes it clear that both the secular and religious left are primarily susceptible to all this:
Empathy feeds the competitive victimhood mentality that is rampant in our society. In an empathetic society, victimhood confers invulnerability. Victims (both real and imagined) must be affirmed and validated, and must not be questioned, challenged, or made to feel uncomfortable in any way, lest they be retraumatized. Moreover, they are absolved of all responsibility for their actions, and they can count on others to excuse all manner of behavior out of a misguided sense of compassion. Just think of the rationalizations offered after riots done in the name of oppressed groups. The endgame of this mentality was well expressed by a spokesman for Hamas after their brutal attack on Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023. “We are victims. Therefore nobody should blame us for the things we do…Everything we do is justified” (including, it seems, the rape and butchery of civilians).
The same empathetic logic lies beneath the societal indulgence of criminality that particularly plagues progressive cities (always provided that the criminal is a member of some aggrieved group), as well as the empathetic paralysis that prevents western nations from wisely and justly addressing the challenges of both legal and illegal immigration. Compassion for refugees and “kids in cages” is used to open the border to millions of able-bodied young men.
But nowhere is this pathological feminine empathy more evident than in the various controversies surrounding transgenderism…. (pp. 89-90)
Saad
It is not just Christians who are concerned about all this. Consider the work of Canadian psychology and marketing professor Dr. Gad Saad. He is an atheist and a ‘cultural Jew’. Here is part of a short essay he penned some months ago:
In my 2020 book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, I argued that in the same way that organisms (including humans) could be parasitized by physical brain worms that detrimentally alter the hosts’ behaviors to serve the neuro-parasites’ interests, human beings could be infected by another class of devastating ideological neuro-parasites. I called these idea pathogens, and they include but are not limited to postmodernism, social constructivism, radical feminism, and cultural relativism, all of which stem from the academic ecosystem. It takes haughty professors, fully decoupled from reality within the walls of their ivory tower, to come up with some of the most imbecilic ideas imaginable. I then explain how these ideas came to be, and I offer a global mind vaccine to inoculate us against such departures from reason and common sense. In the 21st century, it should not be a debatable issue whether men can bear children or have menstrual cycles, but once a mind is infected with a mélange of these idea pathogens, all epistemological bets are off!
The Parasitic Mind addressed what happens to our cognitive system when it is hijacked by ideological rapture. My forthcoming book Suicidal Empathy further examines the descent to madness by highlighting the inability to implement optimal decisions when our emotional system is tricked into an orgiastic hyperactive form of empathy, deployed on the wrong targets. This is how the rights of a minuscule minority of trans women (i.e., biological males) trample the rights of actual women in athletic competitions. It is how illegal migrants end up receiving greater U.S. aid than American veterans or American victims of natural disasters. Evolution has endowed our emotional and cognitive systems with the capacity to deploy our resources strategically. This is why parents are willing to jump in front of a bus to save their biological children but are less likely to sacrifice their lives to save a random child across the globe. It does not make them callous but Darwinian beings capable of cost-benefit tradeoffs rooted in universal features of our human nature. https://www.northwood.edu/news/parasitic-ideas-and-suicidal-empathy-are-killing-the-west/
Or as he tweeted just over a year ago:
A society dies when it cares more about exhibiting infinite tolerance and empathy than invoking its survival instinct. It truly is that simple. Suppose that a person tries to attack your children. Kin selection has ensured that you will die trying to defend your children. But let’s now suppose that an ideological parasite has taken over your brain such that you are now convinced that the most noble thing to do is to help the attacker abuse your children. Tough break for your children, I guess but at least you were empathetic and tolerant toward the aggressor. This is the state of the West. No hyperbole. Suicidal empathy will bring down the West. Get ready for my next book.
I am looking forward to that book, and I am grateful for what Stuckey and Rigney wrote as well. Away with this unhelpful and dangerous empathy.
Exaaaactly! Thanks Bill.
I’m not sure where to put this under but it is another bewildering recent development:
https://www.christiantoday.com/news/concerns-raised-about-the-creation-of-three-parent-babies