A Review of The Sin of Empathy by Joseph Rigney
Criticisms of empathy are coming fast and furious. Books like Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy presaged Elon Musk’s worry that modern countries are beset, as he says, with a “civilizational, suicidal empathy.” Standards corrode. Borders become meaningless. Emotional manipulation reigns. Leadership is compromised. No one resists the woke.
Joe Rigney’s The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits (Canon Press, 2024) captures something deep and abiding in the church today. On a practical level, in identifying the “sin of empathy,” Rigney describes a relatively new phenomenon: the moral power of a particular female perspective in our lives. Rigney, like Allie Beth Stuckey, provides the name: the sin of empathy.
Rigney starts with the common sense of the matter. The pity Christians naturally feel for the downtrodden can be manipulated to excuse the victim.
Drug addiction is not the crucible where the drama of empathy plays out in churches today, but it reveals the pattern. As Christians are wont to say when we see a strung-out drug addict, “But by the grace of God” go I (I Cor. 15:10). Since that could have been me, I should be kind-hearted, understanding, affirming, and helpful, as the strung-out understand it. Since the heroin addict could have been me, I should support a needle-exchange program. So the sensibility goes.
To understand is to forgive! To forgive is not to condemn! Not to condemn is to affirm! What starts as encouragement to gratitude, reflecting a duty to bring those blessings to others, ends up with drug legalization. Sufferers become unimpeachable victims. Accommodating victims as victims becomes the goal. Churches adopt syringe exchange programs.
Churches under the progressive gaze are tempted to endorse planks of identity politics. Churches want parishioners to understand the plight of local Muslim refugees, so parishioners must supply food, shelter, legal aid, and transportation. Churches are asked to affirm gay parishioners as they are or conduct same-sex marriages because gays are just born that way. Church bodies form racial reconciliation commissions so that whites can confess their racial sins because black claims of systemic racism must be taken at face value. Reparations should be considered, and church leaders bend the knee for career criminals and junkies. Christian parents are told to trans their kids lest their children commit suicide.
The “common denominator” in all this, Rigney argues, is sacralizing the self-understanding of the victim or, to be precise, “untethered empathy.” Blaming the victim becomes the opposite of empathy—and few can get away with blaming victims or even challenging “their truth.” To avoid blaming the victim, empathy becomes the crown of the virtues.
Knowing that Christians and progressives are prone to sacralize the victim’s perspective, ideologues weaponize appeals to empathy at every turn (as even staunch defenders of empathy acknowledge). The empathetic endorse Hamas terrorism, demand open borders, or transing the kids. Untethered empathy (Rigney often adds the modifier) leaves people unwilling and “unable to distinguish the distress of others and the harm to others.” “Weaponized pity” becomes a malignant feature of church life today, a “man-eating weed devouring families, relationships, even churches and ministries.” Leaders find it difficult to avoid the empathetic trap of sacralizing the victim’s perspective, and weaker leaders often cave to emotional manipulation.
Reviewers of Rigney’s book have sought to excuse or exonerate empathy. Their nitpicking, willfully missing the forest for the trees, is altogether unreasonable for two reasons.
First, Rigney makes fine distinctions between empathy, sympathy, compassion, and pity. He spends not a little time distinguishing a good empathy from a bad “untethered” empathy. It is clumsy to maintain the use of “untethered” before the bad form of empathy all the way through the book, so sometimes Rigney equates “empathy” with “untethered empathy.”
Rigney’s analysis is Aristotelian, so such nitpicking misses the point. Just as courage deals with fears and moderation deals with pleasures, empathy deals with attitudes toward suffering. How should one react to the suffering of others? A person who fails to recognize or do anything about the suffering of others is indifferent or apathetic, a deficiency of pity. A person who indulges sufferers—a person who tells them they have done nothing wrong and demands that all others adopt an uncritical perspective about why they are suffering—Rigney sees as an excess of pity. Pity untethered from reality, love, law, or the true cause of suffering, which Rigney often calls empathy. The mean between indifference and such empathy is, it seems, compassion. To condemn excessive pity, Rigney coins terms like “untethered empathy,” while others call it “toxic empathy.” Only the willfully blind could miss this analysis.
The second nitpick concerns the novelty of the term. Empathy is not a term from the Bible or traditional theology. It comes from progressive psychology, brought to the English language from German in the early 1900s, and is more a mechanism than a state of soul. The sin of empathy is not a mortal sin. It does not make a list of 82 biblical sins or other lists of even more. Empathy does not appear in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments nor does it make Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. There is nothing new under the sun! Is empathy new? If so, doesn’t that speak against empathy and hence Rigney’s analysis? What is gained from identifying the (new?) sin of empathy?
Perhaps Christians need to name sins newly prominent in our woke world. Unique in our situation is the elevation of the female perspective inside the church. Rigney’s “sin of empathy” names the deleterious phenomenon of the woke, white, college-educated female. “We can’t adequately address the dangers of empathy,” writes Rigney, “without considering feminism and its impact on the church” (p. 78). AWFLs naturally object.
As Rigney and others argue, women identify more with those who suffer than men do. Men tend toward the indifferent or apathetic deficiency, while women tend to the empathetic excess. “The same impulse that leads a woman to move toward the hurting with comfort and welcome becomes,” Rigney writes, “a major liability when it comes to guarding the doctrine and worship of the church,” because God’s word and law forbid empathy when faced with “gross sins.” Empathy can be an enemy of standards and better judgment, especially when women are sacralized as embodiments of the church’s pure conscience. Men who debate or contradict women in public are seen as bullies, so they cave (Rigney follows an excellent article from Alastair Roberts on this). Male “white-knighting” combined with female assertions of immunity from criticism, as Rigney argues, means that “mixed groups will inevitably tend to adopt female norms” (i.e., empathy).
Feminism exacerbates this dynamic by elevating the status of women as victims who must be heard, who cannot lie, and whose sins cannot be pointed out. Feminist complaints must be affirmed—especially when they are made on behalf of other victims.
Only after showing how feminism exacerbates the empathic tendency in women does Rigney discuss how the church should fight it. Most importantly, perhaps, leaders must name the problem.
The maintenance of male leadership within the church (and perhaps within society as such) is necessary to combat empathy. For Rigney, the importance of confining church leadership to males is crucial. Ordaining women opens the floodgates of liberalism through the door of empathy. Men and women are made differently—and these differences point to different pastoral and social roles.
Strong defenses of male leadership are connected to what Rigney helpfully calls “natural complementarianism,” which is a recognition that restricting “the ministerial office to qualified men simply cuts with the grain of God’s design in creation.” Men are made in leadership partly to avoid the traps of empathy. “Ideological complementarianism,” in contrast, holds that men and women have basically the same virtues and vices; male leadership, on this score, is merely “an arbitrary law overlaid on a neutered nature.” Empathetic women armed with feminist ideology are most likely either to wish away these (and all other) biblical restrictions or to see them as arbitrary and confined.
Rigney’s book names a corrosive problem in the church (which points to many others). The sin of empathy, as he knows, comes from a disrespect for Truth and a corruption of love. Yet the sin of empathy is not reducible to it. Fighting it requires bold male leadership. Rigney has provided a model for that in his indispensable volume.
