Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion

by Allie Beth Stuckey

But empathy alone is a terrible guide. It may be part of what inspires us to do good, but it’s just an emotion and, like all emotions, is highly susceptible to manipulation. That’s exactly what’s happening today. Empathy has been hijacked for the purpose of conforming well-intentioned people to particular political agendas. Specifically, it’s been co-opted by the progressive wing of American society to convince people that the progressive position is exclusively the one of kindness and morality. I call it toxic empathy.

Empathy can help us see their perspective and foster compassion, but that’s all it can do. It can’t guide us into making the right decisions or donning the wise, moral, or biblical position.

Never before in history, he points out, has equality of outcome been achieved outside of the brute force of tyranny (think: communism).

Lady Justice is blind, holding equal weights, but Lady Social Justice would have open eyes, assessing the skin color, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, and other characteristics of each party and placing her thumb on the scales accordingly, in an attempt to rectify either real or perceived, past or present injustices against one party.

According to Scripture, God’s justice has at least four characteristics: it is truthful, proportionate, impartial, and direct.

Because God is love, we cannot outlove him. The most loving thing will always be to agree with Him.

As Christians who are called to wisdom and reason, we simply can’t allow empathy to make us stupid, to obscure what’s true in favor of what feels good (Rom. 16:19; James 3:17). That leads us to speak, act, and vote in a way that creates a society that makes it easy to celebrate sin and difficult to champion virtue. Everyone eventually suffers.

It’s tempting as Christians to believe that we can be nicer than God, that we can appeal to people better by being more polite or gentler than He is. We feel like we need to take God off the hook for the harsher things He’s revealed through Scripture. Maybe if we’re squishy or silent or secular enough on the controversial issues of our day, then the world will like us. Then we’ll have earned enough of their respect, we think, to be heard by them, so we can lead them to Christ. But this is both unbiblical and ineffective. It’s self-idolatry: believing we are more loving and wiser than God, who is the source of all wisdom and is love itself (James 1:5; 1 John 4:8).