Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion

by Allie Beth Stuckey

I thought was my staunchly pro-life position that abortion should be illegal except in cases of rape, incest, fetal abnormalities, and perhaps some other cases, someone challenged me. They asked a simple question: 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?

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?

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.

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.”

my inability to understand the plans God carries out for his own glory doesn’t obscure his clear commands. If we love God, we will love the things he loves and hate the things he hates. If we love God, we will seek every means possible to protect voiceless, vulnerable children from the horror of abortion.

pro-life is about abortion—not every other factor that makes life easier to live. It’s supposed to be.

There is no perfect political party. Not even close. The Kingdom of God isn’t split by Republican and Democrat, red and blue. There are sincere Christians and counterfeit Christians in both parties. But let’s just be clear: that does not mean these two choices are morally equivalent.

The church must be what it has always been in times of tumult: a beacon of clarity to combat confusion, courage to combat cowardice, and compassion to combat callousness.

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

In 2013, Glennon Doyle wrote, “I know my Jesus, I love Him, and I think if he needed me to believe that homosexuality was a sin, He would have mentioned it.”[13] This is a popular idea: homosexuality isn’t a sin because Jesus never said it is. But this argument is illogical, a misrepresentation of Jesus, and a misunderstanding of Scripture. It’s illogical because the absence of condemnation doesn’t equal support. Just because we don’t see Jesus mentioning homosexuality by name in the Gospels—just as we don’t see him mentioning, say, sex trafficking or torturing animals—doesn’t mean he supports it.

If I believe that God is the Creator and Authority over all things, and if I believe that His ways are better than ours, it’s illogical to support institutionalizing sin.

Rosaria Butterfield explained, “It is never in a Christian’s interest as someone who is to love your neighbor as yourself to put a law between a fellow image bearer and a holy God that would prevent her from coming to Christ.”

That’s what Christians do. We share arrows with our brothers and sisters when they’re in the line of fire.

The entire purpose of the American government is to protect America and Americans. That is its number one job. As long as we have unchecked illegal immigration that undermines our sovereignty, our safety, and our culture, the government is failing at its job. While immigrants can be incredibly beneficial to a society, it is not immoral for a country to limit the number of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers it accepts. A nation’s government has an interest in prioritizing the well-being of its own people by being selective in who gains entry. This is a key part in protecting a country’s sovereignty, which is its ability to govern its own defined territory and control its own affairs. Without sovereignty, a country isn’t really a country. Every nation has this right to sovereignty. Sovereignty is legitimacy. A nation’s legitimacy is necessary to enact and enforce laws, which represent the rights of a country’s citizenry. If a country has no borders, it has no sovereignty. If it has no sovereignty, it has no legitimacy. If a country has no legitimacy, it has no authority to create laws. If it has no laws, chaos ensues, rights are lost, and citizenship means nothing. A country without any meaningful citizenship isn’t a country at all.

But, Satan may say: Isn’t that legalistic? Isn’t that pharisaical, overly religious, divisive, judgmental? Aren’t you called to tolerance, acceptance, and empathy? How do you think that person feels? They’re oppressed, marginalized, in pain. Wouldn’t you like someone to affirm you and celebrate your choices? Surely the empathetic approach will win them over. You can worry about the rest later. Just a little compromise. Just a slight softening of the truth. Just a slight departure from Scripture. Just a small dose of worldliness. It’s kind. It’s for the greater good. What will it hurt? “You will not surely die…” Satan is crafty, but he’s not creative. Through toxic empathy he’s dishing out the same lie to women today that he hissed to Eve in the Garden. Many of us are falling for it. Yes, toxic empathy is satanic. It is a tool of the Deceiver to convince women that biblical love means affirming someone’s sin. It makes its victims weak-kneed and simpleminded, convincing them that standing up against evil is mean and that niceness is an acceptable replacement for obedience to God. When God Is Right, He’s Right Christians are commanded to love, and empathy can help us love well. But empathy without biblical truth isn’t love at all—it’s hate. It’s hate, because—just as Satan did with Eve in the Garden—affirming sin means nudging someone off the edge of the cliff. It means helping them toward the thing that’s going to destroy them and those around them. It means both spiritual a...

Every law is based on a moral belief. The only question is ever, “Which one?” Will it be Christianity, Islam, atheism, or something else? There’s no neutrality, and there never has been.

politics matter because policy matters because people matter. Politics affects policy and policy affects people, and people matter to God.

Jesus called out the Pharisees not because they cared too much about holiness but because they didn’t care about it enough.

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). We will never outstrategize Him in appealing to the unbelieving world. People are won over by Christian courage, not Christian compromise. The Word of God never returns void (Isa. 55:11); we have no such promise about our own words.