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.

Empathy has been hijacked for the purpose of conforming well-intentioned people to particular political agendas.

The goal of statements like these—examples of toxic empathy—is to get us to suppress our opposition to a particular issue or point of view by playing upon our desire to be a good person.

That’s why toxic empathy is so persuasive. It extorts a real and good desire that most people have, which is to be, and to be perceived as, kind. But empathy and kindness are not synonymous, and neither are empathy and compassion.

Empathy by itself is neither loving nor kind; it’s just an emotion. Love, on the other hand, is a conscious choice to seek good for another person.

The erroneous conflation of love and empathy has convinced the masses that to be loving, we must feel the same way they do. Toxic empathy says we must not only share their feelings, but affirm their feelings and choices as valid, justified, and good.

Toxic empathy bullies us into believing that the unwise, immoral, and unbiblical position is actually the righteous one.

While empathy may help us love, it is not love itself. Empathy feels pain, but love always “rejoices with the truth” (1 Cor. 13:6). We must seek and speak the truth in love (Eph. 4:15). Because God is love and is the Source of truth, we can only embody this truth-and-love dichotomy to which we’re commanded by defining both love and truth as He defines them (1 John 4:8). We look to His Word—not our feelings—as our guide in all things, including the hot-button cultural and political issues of our day.

God’s definition of what is good and loving will almost always contradict the world’s definition, which will inevitably put us at odds with mainstream culture.

the gracious reality is that God doesn’t need perfect messengers, just willing, prayerful ones.

softening the truth about an issue doesn’t persuade people. Be kind, yes, but be clear and strong.

For the Christian, empathy should never compel us to affirm that which God calls sinful or to advocate for policies that are ineffective at best and deadly at worst.

Putting yourself in someone’s shoes may help you feel their pain, but their pain isn’t determinative of what’s true or false, right or wrong.

According to the Bible, God’s justice is, among other things, impartial (Leviticus 19:15). It doesn’t show favoritism toward people because of their socioeconomic class, ethnicity, gender, etc. Black Lives Matter and those aligned with the organization seemed intent on indicting some people of racism and alleviating other people of responsibility based on the color of their skin.

too many Christians had been erroneously manipulated by toxic empathy when it came to so-called racial and social justice. They weren’t willing to hear competing data or arguments to their narrative, because to do so would seem unempathetic.

For example, “love is love” isn’t really a call for us to love gay people by recognizing their innate worth as human beings and treat them with kindness; it’s a call to legally redefine marriage and family. “Black lives matter” isn’t just a true statement about the value of black people; it’s a call to political change, which typically includes removing funding from police forces and redistributing wealth to black Americans. These are examples of the exploitation of empathy to achieve political power, not peace.

What’s the difference between a child conceived in rape and a child not conceived in rape? In other words, why are diagnoses or the circumstances surrounding a person’s conception justification for killing them?

the trauma endured by Samantha doesn’t outweigh the reality of abortion: it takes a human life.

if you’re on the right side of an issue, you don’t have to lie to convince people to join you.

Of the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed each year in the United States, 39.2 percent are undergone by black women, despite this demographic making up only about 12.4 percent of the U.S. population as of 2020.[18] In 2013, more black babies in New York City were aborted than born.[19] These statistics alone satisfy Sanger’s founding vision for her movement.

Gates, Buffett, and the Rockefellers are only a portion of the Malthus-motivated American elites funding abortion. With unquantifiable power and prestige, the world’s billionaires carry the torch of the population control industry’s doctrine of death.

my inability to understand the plans God carries out for his own glory doesn’t obscure his clear commands.

They’ve imbibed the dark, depraved, demonic lie that humans in the womb are less people than humans outside the womb.

what about when affirmation causes damage to the very people we say we’re loving?

What someone wants or feels can’t tell us what’s morally right or beneficial, either for the person as an individual or for society as a whole.

Feelings are often misaligned with reality and can actually blind us from—rather than lead us to—wisdom.

Our bodies were designed in certain ways. No matter how much empathy you have for gender-confused people, rejecting that design comes with a heavy cost.

The history of transgender treatment isn’t built on solid science and empathy. It’s built on the eccentric ideas of perverse, powerful men who all had the goal of deconstructing traditional morals to achieve their sexualized vision of how the world should be. Instead of helping kids, these “experts” hurt children by subjecting them to cruel experiments to justify their theories and play out their sick sexual fantasies.

One big reason adults go along with the madness is moral blackmail. When their child comes out as trans, they’re immediately asked: “Would you rather have a living son or a dead daughter?” This is one of the main empathy-driven pressure tactics the transgender movement uses. It’s based upon studies purportedly showing that kids who don’t medically transition are significantly more likely to commit suicide. If you don’t accept the transition, you’re complicit in your own child’s death, the argument goes.

Some studies cited by the trans movement actually show the opposite, such as that those on puberty blockers can be more likely to commit suicide than those not on blockers.

First, most of the kids aren’t born with innate gender dysphoria. They adopted a transgender identity much later. Second, gender confusion is largely spreading among friend groups through something called social contagion. Dr. Littman’s research showed how kids wanted to be socially accepted, so large portions of groups of mostly teen and preteen girls start “coming out” at the same time.

Perhaps most frightening, transgender identity appears to be spread through heavy internet use. On social media, being a normal, heterosexual, and, heaven forbid, white girl often means you are automatically an enemy, an oppressor, and privileged. Trans people, on the other hand, are celebrated and affirmed victims.

But the transgender craze is also extremely popular because it is making powerful people rich. The market for sex reassignment surgery in the United States was estimated to be $1.9 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $5 billion by 2030.[48] The cost of phalloplasty ranges from $20,000 to $40,000, and the entire “bottom surgery” package can generate up to $100,000 for hospitals.[49] “Chest reconstruction” can cost $40,000 per patient, and vaginoplasty generates at least $20,000,[50] not including the hospital stay, anesthesia, and post-op visits. Increasingly, health insurance is required to cover it all.

“These surgeries make a lot of money.”[52] And that’s not to mention that people attempting to trick their body to “become” the opposite sex must regularly pay for hormones, injections, and other pharmaceuticals for the rest of their lives to keep up the charade. To the medical establishment, child transitioners are the best customers of all—they will pay for medical services from puberty to their graves. And if a kid has regret and wants to detranstition? Well, then the medical system can make even more money on more treatments.

In Logan Correctional Facility in Illinois, the state’s largest women’s prison, a female inmate was raped by a gender-confused male. The victim says officials tried to cover it up, and she was punished for reporting the crime because the state wanted to justify its policy of putting men in women’s prisons.

A bearded man named Darren Merager entered the women’s-only section of Wi Spa in Los Angeles and exposed himself to several women, including a six-year-old girl. The women reported that Merager was aroused, and they were mortified by this violation of their privacy and safety. They reported the incident to the spa, but afterward the media claimed their complaint was based on transphobia, while Merager said he was the real victim of sexual harassment because he’s trans.

In Windsor, Canada, a male with visible five-o’clock shadow who renamed himself Desiree Anderson slipped into bed with a woman at a women’s shelter and sexually assaulted her.

When it comes to gender, we know what the biological and biblical reality is. There is no scientific nor scriptural category for a “gender identity” that is independent from sex. Sex is not a spectrum, and gender is not fluid. While the manifestations of femininity and masculinity vary somewhat from culture to culture, or even between individuals, this variation does not create new identities or sexes. No amount of empathy for confused people can change that.

We were not given our bodies arbitrarily, but by a God who does everything with intention and purpose.

The prophet Isaiah urges us explicitly to accept the body God gave us: “Woe to him who strives with him who formed him, a pot among earthen pots! Does clay say to him who forms it, ‘What are you making?’ or ‘Your work has no handles’?” (Isa. 45:9).

Christians should never affirm confusion.

But now she realized that these nonaffirming Christians weren’t hateful at all. They’d just seen what she originally couldn’t: denying the gender God purposely gave her would only lead to more confusion and desperation.

“We are not made up of our feelings, instincts, and inclinations. Despite our feelings, we can choose our behavior. We are made in the image of God.”

there’s no excuse for those of us who see the truth to pretend we don’t for the sake of “empathy.”

If God says it, why should I be embarrassed by it?

Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and the vast majority of Americans weren’t extreme for opposing the redefinition of marriage. They simply believed what human beings across the world have known for millennia—that a society has an interest in protecting the special union between a man and a woman, primarily because of its unique ability to produce children. Without this life-giving relationship, no society exists.

The Centre for Social Justice in the United Kingdom issued a report in 2019 finding that the rise of divorce and single-parent households has led to the destabilization of children’s lives. The breakdown of the family nearly doubles a child’s chances of failing at school, doubles a child’s chances of becoming a criminal, more than doubles a child’s chances of becoming homeless, and increases the risk of mental health problems and drug addictions.

Meanwhile, children in a stable, married household have better economic mobility, financial stability, educational achievement, and physical, social, and emotional health.

But it’s not enough for children to have two parents—whoever those parents may be. The family diversity myth which posits kids do just as well being raised by any loving adults, is wrong. As Brad Wilcox, a professor of sociology at University of Virginia and fellow at the Institute for Family Studies told me on my podcast, “When you actually look at the data, what you see is that kids are much more likely to be flourishing when they’re raised in an intact, biological married family with their own mother and father.” In fact, a study by the Department of Health and Human Services found that children living in a home with an unrelated adult were nine times as likely to be emotionally, sexually, or physically abused than kids living with their biological parents.

Suffice to say, two out of five studies in the analysis found children with gay parents suffer more emotional problems than kids with traditional parents. One study showed children with lesbian parents had worse physical health. Likewise, in four of the six studies analyzed, children in gay households had lower graduation rates and worse educational attainment than kids in traditional households and were more likely to repeat grades.