Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion

by Allie Beth Stuckey

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.

Kindness describes how we treat someone, either in word or deed. Compassion means to suffer with someone who’s struggling. Both kindness and compassion are necessary components of love. But empathy literally means to be in the feelings of another person. 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.

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.

While empathy may help us love, it is not love itself.

In what other situations should we use size, location, dependence, age, sentience, poverty, disability, abuse, or conception circumstances to advocate for the extermination of people who have already been born?

“We need to do more for women” is not an excuse to support the legal killing of children. It’s toxic empathy masking the brutality of abortion and obscuring the reality that the work is already being done. The only question is whether we will choose to be a part of it.

Likewise, these aren’t random kids coming out as trans. The vast majority of those studied by Dr. Littman have a mental health condition, like autism, or have suffered trauma of some sort in their lives, like a bad breakup or their parents’ divorce.

The inconvenient reality is that we have a priority that’s higher than our own or others’ momentary happiness, and that’s truth.

The law functions as a teacher, educating people on what society considers to be morally acceptable. If America accepts abortion, euthanasia, gender-free marriage, and transgender policies, in the process it will absorb the worldview that justifies those practices—a two-story fragmentation of the human being that denigrates the body and biological bonds such as the family.

That’s what true love is—choosing to suffer for the benefit of someone else. And that is deeper and more life-giving than any empty slogan like “love is love” or empathy-driven affirmation of someone’s preferences.

We can have compassion for the plight of immigrants without advocating for liberal border policy that endangers our own citizens and incentivizes trafficking.

It is because of—not in spite of—God’s heart for the vulnerable that He gave us the ideas of nations, borders, governments, and laws. Acts 17:26–27 says, “And [God] made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.” Contrary to popular opinion, borders aren’t an evil construct devised by tyrants. They’re a concept contrived by God. And yet, not everyone in the church agrees that we should restrict illegal immigration.

Social justice is an inherently collectivist, power-seeking ideology. It seeks widespread, top-down, systemic change by forcefully shifting power (or perceived power) from one group to another. It encompasses other forms of ______ justice: economic justice, racial justice, reproductive justice, and so on.

“Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, ‘social justice.’

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

Don’t apologize for what you are not sorry for.

We are still very much in the barbaric business of butchering children’s bodies and exploiting them as political objects.

The heavenly Logos—the Word of God—the Word made flesh—trumped the worldly logos, making “foolish the wisdom of the world” (1 Cor. 1:20).

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

We rebuff attempts at emotional manipulation hoisted upon us by toxic empathy and instead rely on God’s Word and the capable minds he gave us as our guides.