Allie Stuckey wrote a book titled, Toxic Empathy to confront how liberals weaponize emotional manipulation. At the same time, Joe Rigney’s The Sin of Empathy debuted appearing to argue that empathy is a counterfeit of compassion. The debate over empathy is on in Evangelicalism and for good reason. The term empathy has been popularized in the church over the last several decades despite having next to zero usage in the Christian tradition. But here to defend the term is the Christian Post and their feminist contributor Kaeley Harms.
Kaeley Harms once defended no fault divorce, and it’s no surprise she slanders Christians in her struggle session on empathy, in her article Can empathy be toxic?
Well now we’re seeing this same principle play out in the inverse, but instead of “toxic masculinity,” the broader discussion is centered on what the right has deemed “toxic empathy.”
It might help to pause here and at least define our terms. What is empathy, and how does it differ from sympathy? Whereas sympathy can be defined as feeling compassion for someone, empathy is feeling compassion with someone. It’s taking on their burdens as your own. Jesus is a prime example of healthy empathy. He didn’t just feel compassion for the suffering of those He loved. He joined in that suffering and wept along with them. So how can this could thing that Jesus modeled be construed as toxic?
Harms appears to frame “toxic empathy” on the same level as “toxic masculinity. She then defines empathy and sympathy and falsely claims that Jesus embodies empathy instead of sympathy. But the Bible is clear that, “For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses.” By definition, Jesus does not empathize with our struggles because he is without original sin. This framing of sympathy as morally inferior to empathy is biblically untenable and an entirely modern phenomenon.
The article quickly devolves from there.
Pastor, chauvinist, and anti-Semite extraordinaire Joel Webbon would be a prime example of this. He loudly trumpets talking points about how “the sin of empathy is the reason we allowed cities to burn in 2020” etc., but for men like Joel, it’s a very convenient thing indeed to categorize empathy as a sin. As long as it’s sinful, they don’t have to do any work to try to manufacture it in their own lives, and it saves them the trouble of faking it. What’s worse is that they openly salivate over the prospect of seeing people they dislike suffer. It’s as if the parts of the Scripture where Jesus commands us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us simply don’t exist in their paradigms.
The out of left field attack on Joel Webbon using woke buzzwords takes a lot of seriousness out of the article and misses his point about how Black Lives Matter used empathy to burn cities. The entire concept of struggle sessions is about using empathy to sell people on Cultural Marxism. That is why the experiences of oppressed classes were the focal point of “conversations on race” people were forced to endure. Empathy is used to overcome the inadequacy of anecdotal evidence, of which only one side is heard.
Or take Joe Rigney. His book is called The Sin of Empathy, and lest you be tempted to write it off as a fringe effort, you should know that just this past week, he interviewed Al Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. This is no small thing. The SBC is the largest Protestant denomination on the planet, and the presidents of their seminaries set the tone for all the (all-male) pastors who emerge from their ranks. The interview creates legitimacy where it should expel an immoral brother.
When dozens of concerned Christians reached out to Mohler to express their concerns with his decision to platform Rigney, journalist Megan Basham chimed in with a gobsmackingly mean-spirited response.
Now attacking Joe Rigney, she offers no criticism of his views other than the title of the book and his presence. Al Mohler, who has been an ally of wokeness in the past, is then made to be a villain for platforming someone mean. Megan Basham is subsequently attacked for defending the interview.
You know what may be even worse than toxic empathy? A psychopathic absence of empathy, and it’s all done in God’s name. It’s evil. The Bashams and Rigneys of the world are serving the same function as the histrionic man-haters denouncing toxic masculinity; they’re making it really hard for outsiders to even want to consider the conversation at all.
And this is unfortunate. Because the solution to toxic masculinity is not no masculinity. It’s virtuous masculinity. And the solution to toxic empathy is not no empathy. It’s empathy rightly surrendered to the truth and lordship of Christ.
Ironically, this entire debate seems to mirror the political war between the sexes. While the right likes to demonize leftist women (and specifically feminists) as the bane of society and the primary source of toxic empathy, the left, in turn, lays all the blame for the world’s ills squarely on the shoulders of white conservative men. And so the battle rages on, with everyone pointing fingers and refusing to contend with the rot in their respective camps.
Harms’s solution is a third-way approach where empathy is the term de jure and extremity is rejected. She equates those who reject the usage of empathy with hard(er)core feminists than she.
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Women all use empathy incorrectly. And this is how they weaponize it.
Empathy means onowing what someone feels. It doesn’t mean being drawn into it or making it your own. It just means knowing it. Its only knowledge.
Sympathy means you also care what you know others feel.
How women define empathy is a concept that perhaps there is no word for yet. But its very cloaw to just virtue signaling. Their definition is basically:
“Projectinf feelings you made up onto others, pretending you know that’s what they feel when its undoubtedly not even accurate, and then massively caring about these fake feelings to the point of destroying society for them.”
Well I guess “toxic empathy” is an ok word for that.
Vox Day says only men can have empathy, and this is correct. Women project and guess too much; they have no accuracy about the feelings of othee except occasionally of other women. Only men understand human nature enough to know what others actually feel. And also per Vox only high status men like Sigmas and Alphas know it with acurracy. Gammas lack empathy, but they engage in the female counterfeit of it (putting themselves forth as male feminist) in order to try and get women in bed.
A sigma knows how others feel but doesn’t usually care, and an alpha knows and cares in a way but not a way that will be detrimental to himself or usually the group. Gammas attempting empathy causes chaos because like women they are incapable of it and turn it into destructive narcissism.