Most people assume that empathy is always virtuous. Some recent publications explain how empathy can be sinful.

Four articles by Joe Rigney come on the heels of his interview with Douglas Wilson titled “The Sin of Empathy” (episode 1 of Man Rampant, 1 October 2019). In that interview, Joe Rigney distinguishes between sympathy and empathy. He defines sympathy as showing compassion, and he defines empathy as joining people in their darkness and distress and refusing to make any judgments. He uses the analogy of how to help someone who is sinking in quicksand: you could show sympathy by attempting to help him get out of the pit (e.g., by holding firmly to a branch with one hand while reaching into the pit with the other), or you could show empathy by jumping into the pit with him.

In the interview Rigney gives some people the impression that he is inclined to disbelieve women who claim to have experienced abuse. That is not what Rigney intended to communicate. Rather, his point is that when someone comes to a pastor with an allegation, for example, the pastor should communicate that he is for that person but not necessarily that he is unconditionally committed to taking that person’s view on the matter.

After that interview, Rigney wrote four articles for Desiring God that clarify his intention:

1. Rigney, Joe. “Killing Them Softly: Compassion That Warms Satan’s Heart.” Desiring God, 24 May 2019. [like one of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape letters]
2. Rigney, Joe. “The Enticing Sin of Empathy: How Satan Corrupts through Compassion.” Desiring God, 31 May 2019. [like one of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape letters]
3. Rigney, Joe. “Dangerous Compassion: How to Make Any Love a Demon.” Desiring God, 18 January 2020. [based on C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves and The Great Divorce]
4. Rigney, Joe. “Do You Feel My Pain? Empathy, Sympathy, and Dangerous Virtues.” Desiring God, 2 May 2020.

The fourth and latest article is the most important one. It summarizes what Rigney has been attempting to communicate about empathy, and he even uses abusers as an example of people who attempt to manipulate feelings of empathy from others.

Rigney is criticizing what C. S. Lewis calls “blackmail.” Lewis describes how a child “sulked in the attic” instead of apologizing in order to provoke others to give in and apologize to the sulking child (The Great Divorce, pp. 131–32).

Neil Shenvi calls this “the dangerous culture of apology.”

John Piper calls it “emotional blackmail.”

Piper argues in What Jesus Demands from the World (pp. 217–20),

The next obvious implication of Jesus’s words for the meaning of love is that it is not unloving to call someone an enemy. We live in an emotionally fragile age. People are easily offended and describe their response to being criticized as being hurt. In fact, we live in a time when emotional offense, or woundedness, often becomes a criterion for deciding if love has been shown. If a person can claim to have been hurt by what you say, it is assumed by many that you did not act in love. In other words, love is not defined by the quality of the act and its motives, but by the subjective response of others. In this way of relating, the wounded one has absolute authority. If he says you hurt him, then you cannot have acted lovingly. You are guilty. Jesus will not allow this way of relating to go unchallenged.

Love is not defined by the response of the loved. A person can be genuinely loved and feel hurt or offended or angered or retaliatory or numb without in any way diminishing the beauty and value of the act of love that hurt him. We know this most clearly from the death of Jesus, the greatest act of love ever performed, because the responses to it covered the range from affection (John 19:27) to fury (Matt. 27:41–42). That people were broken, wounded, angered, enraged, and cynical in response to Jesus’s death did not alter the fact that what he did was a great act of love.

This truth is shown by the way Jesus lived his life. He loved in a way that was often not felt as love. No one I have ever known in person or in history was as blunt as Jesus in the way he dealt with people. Evidently his love was so authentic it needed a few cushions. It is owing to my living with the Jesus of the Gospels for fifty years that makes me so aware of how emotionally fragile and brittle we are today. If Jesus were to speak to us the way he typically spoke in his own day, we would be continually offended and hurt. ….

The point of this is that the genuineness of an act of love is not determined by the subjective feelings of the one being loved. …

Feeling unloved is not the same as being unloved. …

God is God and the loved one is not God. The judgment of the wounded loved one is not absolute: It may be right, or it may be wrong. But it is not absolute. God is absolute. We give an account to him. And he alone knows our hearts. The decisive thing about our love when we stand before God is not what others thought of it, but whether it was real. That some people may not like the way we love is not decisive.

Joe Rigney’s critique is also in line with this article:

Dodds, Abigail. “The Beauty and Abuse of Empathy: How Virtue Becomes a Tyrant.” Desiring God, 14 April 2020.

Dodds, who coined the term untethered empathy, explains three ways to distort or abuse empathy:

1. Untether it from reality, from truth (isolated empathy).
2. Pseudo-compassionately coddle sin (cowardly empathy).
3. Let it turn inward and become a tyrant (manipulative empathy).

What Rigney and Dodds say about empathy is a thought-provoking, insightful, and wise way to apply the Bible.

Related:

1. Roberts, Alastair. “An Ethic of Nerve and Compassion.” Alastair’s Adversaria, 27 May 2013.
2. Dodds, Abigail. “From Empathy to Chaos: Considerations for the Church in a Postmodern Age.” Abigail Dodds, 18 June 2019.
3. DeYoung, Kevin. “Sympathy Is Not the Point.” The Gospel Coalition, 10 March 2020.

Updates:

1. Wilson, Douglas. “The Empathy Wars.” Blog & Mablog, 17 March 2021.
2. Roberts, Alastair. “The ‘Sin’ of Empathy? (With Hannah Anderson and Joe Rigney).” Adversaria Videos and Podcasts: Scripture, Theology, Liturgy, and Culture, 18 March 2021. (77-minute podcast)
3. Rigney, Joe. “Where Do We Disagree? Golden Rule Reading and the Call for Empathy.” Desiring God, 12 April 2021.
4. Piper, John. “How Have You Processed the Sin of Ravi Zacharias?” Desiring God, 29 April 2021. (See the section titled “Loose Truth and Untethered Sympathy.”)
5. DeYoung, Kevin. “What Does It Mean to Weep with Those Who Weep?” The Gospel Coalition, 13 September 2021.
6. Rigney, Joe. “On Empathy, Once More: A Response to Critics (Part 1).” Medium, 14 October 2021.
7. Rigney, Joe. “On Empathy, Once More: A Response to Critics (Part 2).” Medium, 14 October 2021.
8. Dodds, Abigail, and Tilly Dillehay. “Untethered Empathy with Joe Rigney.” Home Fires, 15 November 2021.
9. Doug Wilson’s interview of Joe Rigney is now free on YouTube (67 minutes):

10. Rigney, Joe (moderator), Abigail Dodds, and Jonathan Worthington. “Compassion and Empathy.” Bethlehem College & Seminary Chapel, 4 May 2022.

11. Ponder, Doug. “We’re Commanded to Love Our Neighbors, Not to Make Them Feel Loved.” Sola Ecclesia, 5 June 2023.

12. Naselli, Andrew David. “Winsomeness Can Be a Virtue or a Vice: Winning Some vs. Pleasing Some.” American Reformer, August 24, 2023.

13. Rigney, Joseph. “Brothers, Don’t Be Steered: Identifying and Resisting the Tactics of Manipulation.” American Reformer, 9 October 2023.

14. Wilson, Douglas. “Empathy as the Headwaters of Cruelty.” Blog & Mablog, 8 November 2023.

15. Wilson, Douglas. “The Bottom of the Empathy Hole.” Blog & Mablog, 20 November 2023.

16. Daws, Josh. “The Sin of Empathy with Joe Rigney.” The Great Awokening Podcast, 20 November 2023.

17. Rigney, Joe. “Empathy, Feminism, and the Church: Women’s Ordination Is Indeed a Watershed Issue.” American Reformer, 26 January 2024.

18. Rigney, Joe. “Of Empathy and Monsters: There Can Be No Covenants between Men and Lions.” American Reformer, 1 February 2024.

19. Rigney, Joe. Leadership and Emotional Sabotage: Resisting the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the World. Moscow, ID: Canon, 2024. Doug Wilson commends the book here (1 March 2024). My endorsement: “The wise insights Joe Rigney presents in this book are the result of his marinating in the Bible, plundering the Egyptians, and applying sound principles in challenging contexts. Joe is entirely committed to the Bible’s authority, and he does not waver when people slander him. His goal isn’t to please people but to please God. Weak leaders often fail by having a failure of discernment (especially because of untethered empathy that hinders how others grow by affirming their low pain threshold) and a failure of nerve (especially by fearing to take stands at the risk of displeasing people). In this book Joe explains what a leader should do when people are highly reactive and anxious and combustible—like a gas leak that can explode with just a spark.”

20. Piper, John. “Leaders in the Church: Speaking and Living God’s Word.” Desiring God, 3 March 2024 (preached on 30 January 2024 at the Bethlehem Conference for Pastors in Saint Paul, MN):

If you are in a staff meeting, or a meeting with the elders, or a congregational meeting, and a controversial issue arises, and someone goes to the microphone and gives an argument, and the argument is based on factual mistakes, or incomplete information, or unbiblical assumptions, or illogical reasoning, or emotional manipulation, and the congregation is being swayed by this presentation, your silence, pastor, meek as it may seem, is not servanthood. It’s either a failure of discernment or it’s cowardice. It is not leadership.

Your job at that moment is to go to the microphone and say to the person, “These two parts of what you said are true, but here’s the problem with what you said.” And you set the record straight with facts, biblical truth, and clear thinking. You will feel the people shifting back from error to truth. Dozens of godly people out there who could smell the error but couldn’t name it will be thankful for you, because you rose to the occasion as a leader, and you named the error so that people could see it. You served them well.

If you sit there and think, “If I stand up and correct this person, they will very likely accuse me of shaming and abusing them,” and you let that fear cause you to be silent in the name of humble, caring, servant leadership, you have failed your flock and acted like a hireling. Jesus told us, “Blessed are you when others revile you . . . and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” (Matthew 5:11). So, the caution about the caution is this: Don’t let the spirit of the age define leadership. Trust God and be biblical.

21. Carlino, Michael. “The SBC Isn’t Drifting, It’s Being Steered: A Sober-Minded Response to Emotional Sabotage.” Christ Over All, 28 March 2024.

22. Basham, Megan. Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. New York: Broadside Books, 2024. My endorsement: “Megan Basham exposes and explains how some evangelical leaders are failing to affirm and defend with clarity what Scripture teaches about issues such as LGBTQ, abortion, abuse, and critical race theory. She also reveals how some wealthy secular progressives are targeting evangelicals with evil ideologies disguised as love for neighbor. But it’s not loving, she argues, to minimize or overturn offensive parts of Scripture. I pray that Megan’s book will embolden Christians to destroy arguments that keep people from knowing God and to take every rebellious thought captive to obey Christ the King. This book can help you recognize some ways you may have erred (even with good intentions) or some ways you have been misled so that you can walk in the truth.”

23. Stuckey, Allie Beth. Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. New York: Sentinel, 2024.