Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion

by Allie Beth Stuckey

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.

you really care about women, you’ll support their right to choose. If you really respect people, you’ll use preferred pronouns. If you’re really a kind person, you’ll celebrate all love. If you’re really compassionate, you’ll welcome the immigrant. If you’re really a Christian, you’ll fight for social justice.

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. No one wants to be seen as unempathetic, because a person who completely lacks empathy may be a narcissist. They’re unable to see anyone else’s point of view and refuse to bear their suffering. They’re selfish and coldhearted.

Right. And personally, nothing hurts me more than being told, or having it implied, I am cold or a bigot. But then again, weaponizing those terms--who's really being unkind here?

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.

Extortion. I wouldn't tolerate it when it comes to money. So I'm still wondering why I've tolerated it in terms of my emotions, my mental health, my spirituality...

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.

it’s also harmed the very people empathy-mongers claim they’re trying to help: the truly marginalized and vulnerable.

As a disabled woman, a member of two historic minorities, do NOT get me started on this.

and can inhibit gay-identifying people from repenting and following Christ.

Yet another truth they won't tell you. I think Allie Beth just said the quiet part out loud...

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

I won't pretend this is easy to swallow. It's not. When people act like perspective and compassion don't matter--and I know and love some who do--it actually drives me nuts. But logic cannot govern emotion. Therefore, neither can emotion govern or guide logic.

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.

Again, dichotomies are hard. I have actually said to God, "I wish You weren't so polarizing. I wish You didn't have to be so tough and take a hard line on some of these issues." But once I've wrestled with whatever issue is at hand, I find the dichotomy comforting and more freeing than culture tries to tell me it is.

Understand that, no matter how sweet you are, if you’re saying something true or articulating a controversial perspective, there will always be critics telling you you’re being too harsh and divisive. They’ll demand, of course, that you have some empathy, which is typically code for: “You must agree with me.”

Yup. Lived it, especially for eight years in academia (two grad degrees). I love learning, but my goodness.

Again: real love—the kind described by the God who created and is love (1 John 4:8)—always includes truth. The two are inextricably intertwined, since true love celebrates truth (1 Cor. 13:6). Christians are called to this kind of love regardless of whether we feel empathy or not. Christians love because Christ first loved us, not because we feel a certain way or have had a particular experience (1 John 4:19). That’s why empathy is different from love and why it also must be submissive to love.

Why not both? Why can’t we be upset by the footage of George Floyd and condemn the riots? If the goal is justice, the protection of life, shouldn’t we care about both?

I was asking this back when it happened, and I love the fact, real people are asking it now (meaning I'm not the only one, I wasn't crazy).

That property was people’s homes, their businesses, their ability to feed their family, where they buy medicine and access necessary services. Innocent people, many of whom looked like George Floyd, were being punished for the actions of a police officer they didn’t know. “How is this justice?” I wondered.

I wondered the same thing, Allie Beth. And it galled me that I was made to think, "I can't say that in public."

Why should the death of George Floyd be deemed more worthy of our outrage than, say, the deaths of David Dorn, Antonio Mays, Jr., and eight-year-old Secoriea Turner—all black Americans killed by people rioting in the name of racial justice?

Indeed--but then again, that demanding progressive narrative, I have found, is also extremely selective. (Ask yourself: do you know the name Ethan Saylor? Yeah, there's a reason for that).

Then and now, in the world of social media activism, outrage is considered the measure of virtue, but only outrage going in the “right” direction.

Ding-ding-ding! We have a winner!

Jesus, unbiblical statements are often paired with something true. Think “Christians are called to love the foreigner” to justify chaotic border laws, or “The early church shared everything they had” to justify socialism. Just because something sounds good doesn’t mean it is.

Yeah, I've seen it a lot. Tends to be paired with theories like, "Jesus was a Palestinian Muslim refugee" and that sort of thing. However, many statements are not quite that blatant, so you do have to be careful.

When calling for empathy, inclusivity, and love, are they talking about how we treat these people as individuals, or are they actually speaking of achieving certain political ends?

That's exactly what they're doing, and it makes me ill. It has "condescending compassion" written all over it. Believe me when I say, I have swallowed *that* for 30-something years, and it doesn't feel any better coming back up than it does going down.

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.

Exactly! And that's what's so frustrating about it. I have no issues, not one, recognizing the innate worth of any human or human life. In fact, if anyone does, I'm the first one to step up talking trash (you want some of this? Because I may have cerebral palsy, but I will sacrifice my manicure giving it to you, you punk)! But so many people, including professing Christians, have twisted that moral obligation around to mean, "Agree with everything I do or else." It's...ugh! Help me, Jesus!

Biblical equity, for example, means fair, impartial judgment (Ps. 99:4).

As in, yes, you can and will be judged. (Those people who say, "Only God can judge me?" I'm like, "Dude, that should scare you!")

Progressive equity means equal outcomes. As Vice President Kamala Harris explained, “Equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.”[4] As we will discuss in the social justice chapter, equal outcomes are impossible outside of extreme, oppressive government intervention, and nowhere does the Bible indicate that justice means everyone having equal resources.

And that's where it gets really sticky and really ugly, really fast.

EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE:

Manipulative rhetoric lacks substantive, logical arguments and replaces them with demands that you feel a certain way.

When they call you hateful, bigoted, racist, or any other epithet, it usually means they don’t know why they believe what they believe, so their insecurity manifests itself in anger.

No need to say something like, “I’m not a bigot, but…” This shows you’ve at least registered their name-calling. You know such an allegation is ridiculous, and you don’t need to dignify it with a response. Simply continue to kindly, humbly, but confidently stand your ground. It may be that this conversation planted a seed in them that won’t blossom until much later on.

Note to self: Don't register!

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?

I've asked myself the same (rhetorical) question for decades. Hint: There is no justification for murdering an innocent baby.

The fact is, abortion purposely kills an innocent person.

Where is the compassion—the empathy—for her? She was a living human being. Did her diagnosis justify an abortion?

And not that disabled babies are any more important, because they aren't. Having said that, this particular part of the abortion issue is extremely personal to me. *Never* tell me a disability diagnosis is justification for death.

An uncomfortable, often ignored truth is that, whether via abortion or birth, a baby is still delivered.

Because there are only six states that require reporting of children who survive abortions, stories like Stanek’s are more likely than we know. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that between 2003 and 2014, there were at least 143 babies who died after being born alive after an abortion procedure.[3] There is a significant probability that that number is much higher.

Again, this is what they don't tell you.

While abortions at or after twenty-one weeks gestation are rarer than abortions earlier in the second trimester and in the third trimester, they still happen. The CDC puts the number at about ten thousand per year.[8] However, the number is likely far higher, as only a handful of states are required to report their numbers on late-term abortions.

Makes you wonder why so few stats are required...

It’s true that most abortions happen in the first trimester. But scientifically, these babies are still equally human. They’re just smaller and less developed. And killing them is still brutal.

As a reminder, a baby’s heart starts beating at about six weeks gestation. That’s only two weeks after a missed period. Despite desperate attempts by the media to belittle these heartbeats as “pulses,” doctors have long acknowledged this cardiac activity is, indeed, a heartbeat, even if the heart is still developing.[9] Abortion isn’t health care. What other form of health care involves killing a human being? Abortion is a vicious practice, no matter when it happens and no matter how much empathy we have for mothers in tough situations.

No other form of healthcare involves killing a human being. Ergo, abortion isn't healthcare. And no matter what certain narratives say, empathy for the mom does not have to coexist with the death of the baby. Real empathy in fact cannot coexist with the death of the baby.

“When you’re performing a procedure to save the life of the mother, it is not morally considered an abortion. Therefore, it is ethically permissible…. You act in the best interest of both patients. If the death of the unborn child is a result of your intervention, that is a tragic outcome, but nonetheless, our priority is to save the life of the mother…. That can be accomplished without performing an abortion.”[10] In other words, in a situation where the mother’s physical life is at risk, the baby should be delivered, and, if medically possible, helped to survive. In some cases, like when the complication occurs early in the pregnancy, the baby’s survival isn’t possible, so the mom must be saved by delivering her child. This is very different, scientifically and morally, from purposely and violently killing the baby inside the womb.

In Halo’s case, Samantha would still have delivered had she chosen abortion, but rather than delivering an intact baby she would have instead delivered a child mangled by forceps whom she and Luis would have never been able to hold, see, kiss, or tell “I love you.” Halo would have been unceremoniously discarded by hospital staff and waste management rather than buried in the presence of her family. Is that truly the loving option? Is that really the outcome that justice demands? Of course not. Both Samantha and Halo deserved compassion and love, not faux empathy that would have ended in the purposeful, violent ending of a baby’s life.

While Samantha’s pregnancy was painful, and while the delivery, Halo’s subsequent death, and the costly funeral all make for an unimaginably tragic circumstance, the trauma endured by Samantha doesn’t outweigh the reality of abortion: it takes a human life. Halo was a human being from the moment of conception.

She was alive. She had a sex that was determined when sperm met egg. In fact, all of her DNA was determined at fertilization. She wasn’t a tissue, a tumor, an organ, or a lifeless clump of cells. She was a unique human who was, as all of us were at our beginning stages, developing. This isn’t scientifically debatable. The disagreement is really centered on whether that little

human is a person—with value and rights. There has been much debate around what makes a human a person. Is i...

If we acknowledge that a baby in the womb (or fetus, embryo, or zygote—it doesn’t matter, because they’re all different stages of human development, like infancy and adulthood) is indeed a human being, then there needs to be some kind of reasonable justification on the part of abortion advocates for purposely ending their life.

"Fetus." "Embryo." "Zygote." Interesting how we have learned to use scientific words and definitions to make morals, ethics, and truth fit our own ends.

Why are these the human beings that the law should allow us to murder, while we don’t support legal murder for anyone outside the womb? Is it because she’s small? Is it that he’s inside his mother’s womb? Is it that her attachment to her mother keeps her alive? Is it that he’s at the earliest stages of his life? Is it that she lacks self-awareness? Is it because he’s unwanted, poor, or diagnosed with a disability? Is it because she was conceived in a horrific case of rape or incest? Why are these reasonable justifications for killing a human in the womb, but not outside the womb? 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?

People on the side of abortion use all kinds of euphemisms, half-truths, and straight-up lies to obscure what the procedure is and does. “Baby murder” simply isn’t good PR, so sterilized, misleading, unscientific terminology is adopted to make what’s always the gruesome killing of an innocent human more palatable to the public. A good rule of thumb is this: if you’re on the right side of an issue, you don’t have to lie to convince people to join you. The truth is, every person who considers

Yes. Tsk, tsk. "Murder" is such an ugly word. Until you remember, that's what it is.

themselves “pro-choice,” no matter what they say they believe, has accepted Peter Singer’s reasoning that human value and rights start sometime after birth.

And Peter Singer has accepted and perpetuated some disgusting views on human life.

In many ways, Thomas Malthus—the namesake of the Malthusian League—was Sanger’s intellectual predecessor. Malthus warned that overpopulation would lead to the dwindling of resources, which would lead to a deadly decline in living standards. The proposed solution to his Malthusian catastrophe was to limit the growth of the population as much as possible. Malthus’s theory, however, was wrong. While the world population has increased by seven billion people since 1800,[11] extreme poverty has decreased from 84 percent to 24 percent.[12] As it turns out, human beings add to and benefit our environments more than we subtract and detract from them.

This is the philosophical legacy of Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger, who forged a plot in the United States to minimize—if not eradicate—the existence of people she considered undesirable. Her plans quickly bore fruit. In 1927, the Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell effectively agreed, ruling mass sterilization was constitutional. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declared: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”[15]

Sanger was especially concerned about limiting black births, writing to the heir of the Procter & Gamble fortune that “the most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”[16]

Despite dropping “population control” and “eugenics” from its public list of goals, Planned Parenthood has followed the eugenics program to its inevitable conclusion. 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.

Abortion supporters may feel genuine empathy for those on the margins and believe they are providing ways to alleviate pain. Maybe Sanger felt the same way. But that empathy is inextricably intertwined with evil ideas like eugenics and population control. There is no compassion, no love, no humanity, no goodness to abortion. Not ever, and not today.

I highly doubt Margaret Sanger had empathy of any description on her mind. But let's pretend she did. Any empathy that has to kill to express itself, is no empathy at all.

This is what pro-life Christians do. They show up, in big and small ways. They meet needs. They love—before, during, and after birth. “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.

Compare this to the way Planned Parenthood and similar organizations "show up," with doom and gloom prophecies, veiled threats, and instruments of dismemberment.

As pro-life advocate and former Planned Parenthood employee Abby Johnson has recounted on my podcast, Relatable: “If a woman decides to parent her child, that’s where our assistance stops at Planned Parenthood because we don’t provide any prenatal care. We don’t have any resources for her: baby items, diapers, anything like that. So essentially, she becomes a person who is not revenue-generating for us. We don’t want her in our doors anymore…. She’s now become a money drain on us, a time-suck on us, so we send her out the door. The only way that we could keep our patients as revenue-generating clients was to sell them an abortion.”

Note to self and other readers: The opposing narrative has gotten a lot of traction from the idea that pro-life Christians only care about babies in the womb. Here we have just one testimony to the fact, that's untrue.

To do that, Abby told me, women are persuaded to believe abortion is a regret-free, uncomplicated, standard health-care option while they are routinely lied to about gestation, fetal development, and the risks.