Dispatch Faith: Is Empathy a Sin?, by Alastair Roberts (Theopolis Institute):
Like other terms such as “freedom” or “love,” “empathy” is generally something of a “hurrah” word; people agree that, whatever it is, it is a very good thing. Recent decades have witnessed burgeoning literature on empathy. Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, suggested in 2001 that it was a panacea: “any problem immersed in empathy becomes solvent.” The Australian philosopher Roman Krznaric spoke in 2015 of an “empathy revolution” that has excited compassion for the humanitarian transformation of society, reforming institutions, extending rights, and deepening relationships. Perhaps most famously, Brené Brown, author of several New York Times bestselling books, has championed the power and importance of empathy in dealing with shame and feelings of inadequacy, in works such as I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t).
Empathy is not an unchallenged good, however. Over the past few years there has been a growing movement opposing the privileged place the term enjoys in much Western psychology, ethics, and political thought. In his 2016 book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, psychology professor Paul Bloom questioned the supposed virtue, arguing that empathy dangerously distorts judgment and can even encourage cruelty toward those deemed to threaten its objects. Following the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas, for example, many people angrily tore down posters of the Israeli hostages, while others expressed their indignance at footage and reporting of the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza: in war, empathy can be a zero-sum game, and as we respond in empathy to our favored side we can become calloused to suffering on the other.
The challenge to empathy has gained its greatest traction among critics of progressivism, who argue that empathy has been a tool of emotional manipulation by the left. Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion (2024) and Canadian professor Gad Saad’s forthcoming Suicidal Empathy both argue that empathy has produced and been used to advance bad policies on issues such as immigration. In his recent interview on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” Elon Musk declared that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Considering the value placed upon empathy by many liberals and progressives, the political salience of much of the current discussion should not be surprising.
Pastor and theology professor Joe Rigney’s latest book, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits, adds to this growing array of voices against empathy. The subject of empathy—and the rhetorical framing of it as a “sin”—has been prominent in Rigney’s writing for several years now, from his 2019 article “The Enticing Sin of Empathy” and his 2020 interview with Doug Wilson, “The Sin of Empathy.”
Rigney considers the term “empathy” in two senses: the first referring to the natural dynamic of emotion-sharing and the second to the “excessive and overpowering form of this passion.” The “sin of empathy” relates to the second of these senses; Rigney often refers to this as “untethered” empathy. An example of such “untethered empathy” might be the experience of watching a movie or reading a novel in which you find yourself profoundly connecting with a character, only to come to a sudden realization of how your absorption in their feelings and perspective has totally distorted your field of moral vision, blinding you to the objective character of their actions and the harmful effect they were having on other people. Writers of shows like Breaking Bad have wrestled with the way that many in their audience have identified with a villainous protagonist.
Rigney discusses appeals to empathy as forms of emotional manipulation in churches and in politics. The privileging of empathy allows people to hold groups hostage to their feelings, when people are unwilling to say or do anything that would offend or hurt them. “Christians came to implicitly adopt the subject logic of victimhood—‘I’m hurt, therefore, you sinned’—and thereby succumbed to the tyranny of the sensitive,” Rigney writes. As Christians and their leaders internalize high sensitivity to (claims of) hurt feelings, they allow themselves to be steered by appeals to empathy, with little reference to truth or the actual good. Indeed, Rigney claims that many conservative Christians operate as if they had a little progressive on their shoulder, constantly ensuring that everything they do is ordered around progressive sensitivities (which are weaponized for progressive ends). One could compare this to a situation in a family where one member’s thin skin or sharp temper causes all others to tiptoe around them, ordering everything they do around that member’s unreasonable sensitivities. If anyone were to stand up to that family member, the rest of the family might turn on them. Such “empathy” is a rigged game, Rigney argues, as it is very selective in its choice of objects and inexorably leads towards progressive ends. …
The recovery and development of a fuller, richer, and more precise psychological language is a crucial task. We are ill-served by the typical vagueness of terms such as “empathy.” The complex realities that are entangled in such a term need to be carefully separated, distinguished, and analyzed; This is not a Gordian Knot to be cut with recklessly flailing terms like “sin.” A less partisan engagement with empathy—and other terms—could equip us all in understanding, articulating, and cultivating both our inner lives as individuals, as well as our communities and societies. The threat of emotional manipulation is real, yet avoiding such risks is not our primary task: the principal duty that falls to us is rightly ordering our own hearts. Tenderheartedness comes with its liabilities, but, while guarding against such abuses, it is what we all must cultivate.
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