Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion

by Allie Beth Stuckey

Israel had to respect foreigners and treat them with dignity, but foreigners had to do the same to the nation of Israel, and they could not respect Israel without respecting its laws.

I do hope to demonstrate how highly God regards order, peace, and security for nations, and that walls—or any form of strong borders—are representative of them.

Chaos and disorder always have victims, and they’re usually those with the least physical, economic, or political power to defend themselves.

Contrary to popular opinion, borders aren’t an evil construct devised by tyrants. They’re a concept contrived by God.

refugees are those who have a “well-founded fear of persecution due to their race, membership in a particular social group, political opinion, religion, or national order.”[72] Not only that, but applicants must first apply for refugee status outside America in a neighboring country. An asylum seeker must meet the “refugee” definition and must be seeking admission at a port of entry of the United States. A person leaving an impoverished or less-developed country for a more prosperous one doesn’t qualify as a refugee or asylum seeker.

Second, it’s important that these Christian critics of immigration law enforcement get specific: How many must America accept to be considered Christlike? Ten million? A billion? More? Are there any limits or restrictions for which a Christian can advocate without being condemned as unloving? Do we have the right to express any concern about who’s entering into our country, from where, or how many? Or is the Christian position really that we must have no borders, lose our sovereignty, and forgo our ability to protect the rights and well-being of our own citizens?

It cannot be one nation’s responsibility to take in the world’s impoverished. Our system is already being crushed under the weight of the influx of illegal immigrants, which means we’re unable to properly vet those coming in. We simply cannot safely be the sole or even primary destination of every immigrant or refugee.

I also support the legal immigration of people who will benefit their communities through their hard work, love of liberty, and responsibility. There are good-faith immigration debates to be had among Christians, but the “we must allow everyone in per our Christian duty” isn’t a serious position. Yes, we are exiles on this Earth, but we are not absolved of our responsibility to steward the places God has sovereignly put us.

But in reality, it’s not accurate to say an entire group of people with one level of melanin have all wronged another group of people with another level of melanin. This is a secular, social justice idea, not a biblical one.

Forcing one group to bear responsibility for sins they did not themselves commit in the name of “reconciliation” is a form of toxic empathy bullying that is neither healthy nor godly.

Social justice ideology can accurately be described as the mobilization of particular grievances to accomplish left-wing political goals. These goals may be, in some cases, well intentioned, but good intentions are never enough. The questions we must ask of social justice advocates are: Are their claims true? Are their goals just? Are the outcomes of their policies and proposals helpful or harmful?

There is no evidence that such moves prevented cases like George Floyd’s or Elijah McClain’s, but there’s ample evidence that they enabled the loss of innocent lives.

Thanks to progressive soft-on-crime policies, the U.S. saw a 24 percent decline in arrests along with a 30 percent increase in homicides in 2020—the highest spike ever recorded. Philadelphia had more homicides in 2020 than since 1990, and more killing than cities vastly larger, like New York or Los Angeles. This victimization disproportionately impacts black and Hispanic residents who live in high-crime areas.

And yet, anyone pointing this out was met with the mallet of empathy that insisted compassion be felt only for the victims of allegedly racist police violence.

These social justice initiatives supported by organizations like Black Lives Matter created more black victims, not fewer. These victims are in addition to the black people killed in the BLM riots after George Floyd’s death, like David Dorn in St. Louis, Antonio Mays, Jr., in Seattle, and eight-year-old Secoriea Turner in Atlanta. Meanwhile, tragic incidents like Elijah’s may still occur.

That’s because social justice isn’t real justice. It focuses on outcomes, like the number of black people in jail, rather than the “why” behind these numbers, and attempts to change those outcomes through policies that favor criminals. Toxic empathy demands we ignore anyone hurt by a crime except the black suspect. But the result is more violence, not less.

According to a much-maligned study by Harvard professor Roland Fryer, black people are no more likely to be shot by the police than white people.[20] Any disparity in killings is likely due to the fact that black Americans are more likely to have interactions with the police, due to living in high-crime areas.

There is also a misunderstanding about how often suspects are shot by the police. One study found that self-identified progressives believe that one thousand to ten thousand unarmed black men are shot by the police every year. Conservatives guessed that the number is between ten to one hundred. The real number is typically between eight and twenty-seven.[21]