A Response to Madam Secretary
When I first saw that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had called me “an extremist pastor” in The Atlantic, I immediately thought, “I should probably double my life insurance.” My next thought was “This should be fun to answer.” After all, we have very different worldviews. Probably the only two things we agree on is that 1) Empathy is central to our cultural divide, and 2) Epstein didn’t kill himself.
Clinton identifies me and Allie Beth Stuckey as part of a “cadre of hard-right Christian influencers who are waging a war on empathy.” According to Clinton, we reject “bedrock Christian values such as dignity, mercy, and compassion” and our criticisms of empathy “reveal a moral rot” and reflect “moral blindness or moral bankruptcy.”
Set aside whether Hillary Clinton is the right person to lecture anyone on ethics, morality, and what it means to be a good Christian. Set aside whether the woman who described a quarter of Americans as “a basket of deplorables” who are “irredeemable” is in the best position to criticize “dehumanizing rhetoric.” Even set aside the “strange new respect” she shows for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both of whom were vilified by the Left when they were in office and are only rehabilitated now as a way of attacking the current obstacle to the Left’s power. (Personally, I can’t wait until they start to rehabilitate Trump; I predict it will be right around the time that J.D. Vance announces his campaign for president.) Instead, let’s consider the substance of her claims about the use and abuse of empathy.
Contrary to Clinton’s claims, those of us criticizing the corruption and weaponization of empathy are not against compassion. In fact, we are very much in favor of it. The opening pages of my book quote the biblical commands to have sympathy and a tender heart, and the final chapter is entitled “In Praise of Compassion.” In her opening chapter, Stuckey writes, “Toxic Empathy is not a call to abandon empathy but a call to realign it with biblical truths.” Unlike the progressive Christianity that Clinton represents, conservative evangelicals do not pick and choose which parts of the Bible to believe and obey.
Instead, both Stuckey and I are identifying the ways that compassion and empathy are frequently used as tools of emotional manipulation, especially when they are untethered from what is true and good. Clinton’s article offers a case study in weaponized empathy.
For example, Clinton claims that empathy doesn’t “overwhelm our critical thinking or blind us to moral clarity.” But in reality, our emotions and the emotions of others can in fact overpower and obscure our vision. It’s why we say things like “I was blinded by anger” and “paralyzed by fear.” Emotions are very powerful and they can frequently sweep us off our feet. Empathy is no different, especially since it acts as a spotlight, highlighting the suffering of some and overlooking the suffering of others. It’s why more and more social scientists are recognizing the correlation between increased empathy and increased tribalism and polarization.
Clinton’s article is a perfect example. She highlights “families torn apart” because the government is enforcing our immigration laws. But what about the family of Laken Riley? They were torn apart, not by lawful deportation orders, but because an illegal immigrant murdered their daughter while she was out for a jog. And there are thousands of families like hers in this country, whose loved ones were raped or murdered or killed by illegal immigrants, many of whom were detained and released back into the country by “empathetic” government officials. But Clinton’s version of empathy has no time for families like that.
Clinton also mentions children who are afraid to go to school, presumably because ICE is seeking to enforce our immigration laws. But what about children who are afraid to go to church, because leftwing radicals disrupted their worship service and screamed in their faces? Has Clinton expressed any compassion for those children? Again, empathy is selective and feeds outrage and tribalism. Ask any of those agitators who stormed the church and terrified those kids, “Are you an empathetic person?” Every one of them will say “Yes. In fact, empathy is what motivated me to disrupt that church service.”
This is why empathy must be anchored to what is true and good. The human tendency to share the emotions of others and to relieve their pain and fear and hardship must be guided and governed by reason and law; otherwise it does blind us. Lawbreakers should fear law enforcement. And that includes those who have broken our immigration laws. And their fear of deportation is no reason to abandon law and order.
Throughout her article, Clinton draws a contrast between empathy and cruelty. But a central argument in my book is the way that calls for empathy frequently mask cruelty. In fact, it’s amazing how much cruelty and harm you can commit in the name of empathy. You can murder innocent children in the womb. You can buy and sell them on the surrogacy market. You can castrate and mutilate them when they are teenagers. You can release career criminals and repeat violent offenders into the population where one of them can brutally murder a young woman on a bus. All in the name of empathy.
Indeed, Clinton’s entire article is designed to obscure the fundamental issue in the national crisis that has come to a head in Minnesota: are we a nation of laws? Or does the empathetic mob have a veto over immigration policy? Put very simply: Can we deport those who are here illegally?
And for all of her fine-sounding rhetoric, Clinton’s answer is clearly “No.” In her empathetic vision, “neighborism” is “a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.” Translation: Love for your neighbor means that you must protect them from lawful deportation, even if they are violent sex offenders. After all, it doesn’t matter “who they are.”
For Clinton and those on the radical Left, empathy means “no borders.” No boundaries. You don’t get to have a country with laws that can be enforced. Empathy means that Joe Biden can remove barriers at the border and you can’t do anything about it. Empathy means that Democrats can release millions of people into this country, and you may not resist. They can move millions of people into your cities and towns and overwhelm your schools and social services, and you must simply accept it. Even if you vote for a President to undo that damage, leftist governors and mayors can simply refuse to cooperate, and count on Antifa’s insurgency to create chaos in the streets. Because of empathy.
In sum, Clinton’s call for empathy is not actually motivated by compassion. It’s a tool of emotional blackmail designed to neutralize resistance to the Left’s path to power. She is not soft-hearted; she’s Hillary Clinton for goodness sake! But she (along with global super-villain Klaus Schwab) is counting on the soft-heartedness and generosity of the American people to enable the Left’s path to permanent political power.
Put simply, that path includes 1) A large and generous welfare state, established in the name of “compassion for the needy,” that has become a slush fund to pay off left-wing client groups, and 2) the importation of millions of immigrants, also in the name of empathy, to distort census apportionment and, thanks to lax voting laws in blue states and cities, sway elections and give Democrats the kind of permanent power they have in California, Illinois, and New York. That’s the true crisis in Minneapolis, and the true moral rot beneath the lawlessness of the left.
In other words, Clinton’s call for empathy is simply cover for fraud at every level—from health care to education, from Somali daycares to government contracts, from refugee status to voter verification. Her article offers a devil’s bargain: “If you submit to the Left’s vision for America—mass invasion of foreigners, government fraud, lawlessness in the streets—then we will call you good Christians. If you don’t, you are bad Christians. And you don’t want to be a bad Christian, do you?”
For those like me and Allie Beth Stuckey (who is doing the Lord’s work debunking the Left’s propaganda in that hub of Leftist radicalization known as Instagram), the answer is clear. We don’t intend to allow corrupt politicians like Hillary Clinton to define what it means to be a faithful Christian. We intend to obey God and love our neighbors with courage and clarity. And yes, with compassion, the kind embodied and modeled by Christ himself.
Weaponized empathy got us into this mess. Only biblical courage can get us out of it.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
