Photo: Thalassa Raasch/The New York Times/Redux
When President Donald Trump attended a prayer service at the Washington Cathedral in January, Bishop Marian Edgar Budde had a message for him. Now that he was president again, he could show “mercy” to those who feared his return, she said. A predictable outrage followed. Trump called Budde “nasty in tone” and said she was “not compelling or smart,” while his Christian loyalists preferred a more theological justification for their temper. Ben Garrett, a podcaster and pastor, tweeted a photo of Budde in a miter and said, in part, “Do not commit the sin of empathy.” Garrett went viral, though his rhetoric was not original. His initial claim — that empathy can be sinful — has long percolated among a loose network of far-right writers, pastors, and theologians whom some critics call TheoBros.
Evangelicals as I knew them loathed abortion and women in the pulpit and the prospect of same-sex marriage, but that is not enough for Garrett and his peers. They want a Christianity with teeth, a fighting religion that will not only vanquish but eradicate their foes. When Garrett spoke of sinful empathy, he merely echoed writers like Joe Rigney, who helped popularize the idea years before publishing The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits in February.
When elders persuade a pastor to avoid certain topics in the name of racial reconciliation, when physicians ask parents to accept their trans children as they are, they use emotion to manipulate, Rigney argues. “Pity, of course, is a good thing. It spurs us to help those who are hurting,” he writes. “But unmoored from what is good and right, pity becomes destructive.” Compassion mutates, turning into something he calls “untethered empathy.” Christians must “distinguish good from bad, healthy from toxic, the virtue of compassion from the sin of empathy,” he adds.
Rigney has written against “untethered empathy” for years, and he’s not the only Christian to do so. Last October, Allie Beth Stuckey of the popular Relatable podcast published Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. Stuckey does not write as a pastor; in her world, women can’t do that. Instead she is a “content creator” and podcaster, and her book reads more like a script than a sermon. Still, there’s a logic at work, and it’s similar to Rigney Thought: Stuckey believes there is a difference between “toxic empathy” and biblical compassion. “If you really care about women, you’ll support their right to choose,” she complains. “If you’re really compassionate, you’ll welcome the immigrant.”
A movement against empathy makes sense for the Trump era. The president riles up his base with successive acts of cruelty, which his vice-president, J.D. Vance, has defended in religious terms. Unlike Rigney and Stuckey, he is Catholic and has spoken not of the “sin of empathy” but of “ordo amoris,” or the “order of love.” As he told Fox News: “We should love our family first, then our neighbors, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world.” That definition is hardly universal among Vance’s fellow Catholics. The late Pope Francis even appeared to contradict Vance in a subsequent letter to Catholic bishops in the United States, writing, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.”
Empathy can be difficult to define. For most of us, empathy is an intellectual exercise. We step outside ourselves and into another person’s skin, or at least we try; we imagine what the world looks like to them, and perhaps we are changed by the effort. Feelings have a role, but there’s more to empathy than a warm sense of compassion. Empathy requires something from us. It’s a new way to think. That is where the trouble starts for Christians like Rigney. He thinks empathy has become a tool of the enemy, a means to force Christians off the righteous path. To press his case, he rarely cites scholarship and relies instead on the work of consultants, or former consultants like Aaron Renn, who is best known for his “negative world” theory suggesting that right-wing Christianity has become a social handicap, in contrast to previous eras in American life. Yet Christians are somewhat to blame for their own tribulations, Rigney writes. By striving for credibility in a hostile society, they helped usher in the “negative world” they now face. Under what Rigney calls “the progressive gaze,” certain “values and concerns were normalized and taken to be the default operating system for society.” Some congregations “implicitly adopted the progressive victimhood hierarchy, identifying minorities (especially African Americans), immigrants, women, and the LBGTQ+ community as oppressed,” he argues.
Over time, “Christian compassion, which was degenerating into empathy, kicked in, and under the banner of social justice, Christians became Advocates and Activists, seeking to rectify past and present wrongs and build ‘credibility’ for the gospel,” he adds. Perhaps that’s true of some mainline Protestant denominations; it is not really true of the conservative Evangelical tradition that raised and educated me. Rigney doesn’t bother with such troublesome distinctions, however. Any Christian who disagrees with him is guilty of wrongthink, which is to say, sin. Here a conspiratorial tendency sneaks in. He complains that books promote “specious statistics” on sexual assault and the incarceration rates of Black Americans, though he does not explain why they might be wrong, or even what the books might be. His word must be sufficient. Later, he describes in vague terms a pattern where members turn on church leaders and accuse them of shocking psychological and spiritual abuse, a phenomenon he blames on progressives.
Rigney works for Douglas Wilson of Christ Church, the preening king of a far-right Christian world based out of Moscow, Idaho. His version of trollish religiosity often veers into bleak, even repressive territory. In 2011, he officiated the wedding of a young woman in his church to a convicted pedophile he’d welcomed back into the congregation. (The pedophile would later re-offend, this time with his infant son. Wilson has denied wrongdoing.) Women who have left Christ Church, or who attended Logos, the classical school that Wilson founded, have reported sexual misconduct and other forms of abuse, a concept that Rigney attributes to “the prevailing ideology of victimhood.” One girl told the writer Sarah Stankorb that Wilson and his wife, Nancy, urged her “to forgive her father for inappropriately touching her and watching her shower.” Wilson has described sex between men and women in highly specific terms that support his vision of male leadership: “a man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”
Large portions of Rigney’s book are legible mostly as apologia for the practices of Wilson and Christ Church rather than biblical exegesis. His error is not only moral, but intellectual; poor exegesis is a failure of interpretation and of criticism, too. He writes, “Normal marital challenges began to be regarded as abusive.” What’s normal? Rigney doesn’t explain. What is a marital challenge, and how is it different from abuse? He doesn’t explain that either. Instead he complains that “complex pastoral situations were now adjudicated, not in courts or in church meetings, but on social media.” Occasionally he refers to scripture, like any good biblical literalist must, and beats the reader about the head with his rigid interpretations. He stumbles from generalization to generalization. Sometimes he appeals to C.S. Lewis, an Anglican writer and Christian apologist who is long dead and cannot defend himself from how we comprehend him today. When Rigney writes of “COVID death-shamers,” he quotes Lewis, who observed, “Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty.” To him, Lewis would be in obvious harmony with today’s authoritarian Christianity. Though Lewis was not a progressive and was perhaps even a reactionary, he also had a mind and an intellectual life, and it is not such a simple thing to shove him into one modern category or another. Rigney reads Lewis like he is looting a corpse. He takes only what seems agreeable and discards the rest.
The most vicious chapter in his book concerns women, and that does not seem like a coincidence to me. Empathy is a woman’s problem, Rigney insists, and it’s why she can never wield spiritual authority in the church. She is simply too emotional, one might even say hysterical. “She-wolves, especially ones who present themselves as victims, give faithful men fits because of the unavoidable asymmetries in play,” he writes. Rigney later blames women, or rather a “pathological feminine empathy,” for the rise of what he calls “transgenderism.” When women forgo their natural role as the submissive helpmeet of a male leader, society falls apart. Don’t correct them with a more conservative woman teacher, either, he adds. In breaking the glass ceiling, even right-wing women “simply want to turn the clock back to an earlier stage of feminist rebellion.”
Where does that leave a woman like Allie Beth Stuckey? She’s working on borrowed time at best, but like most women in her position, she is either blind to the trap she has set for herself or simply believes that she deserves to be inferior. In Stuckey’s formulation, empathy is “the ability to place yourself in another person’s shoes,” and that isn’t always a problem. “But empathy alone is a terrible guide,” she writes. “It may be part of what inspires us to do good, but it’s just an emotion and, like all emotions, is highly susceptible to manipulation.” Progressives are guilty of “toxic empathy,” which urges Christians to ignore what they know to be true.
She recalls the story of Samantha Casiano and her daughter, Halo, who was born with a fatal condition called anencephaly. Casiano told NPR in 2023 that she wanted an abortion, but she lives in Texas, and it was impossible to obtain one. The state forced her to give birth knowing that her daughter would only live for a few hours after birth. Stuckey acknowledges Casiano’s suffering. “As a mom, I can feel the pain she must have suffered during and after pregnancy,” she adds, and then concludes that actually, Texas was right to make Samantha give birth to an infant who was missing part of her brain. Although she once supported certain exceptions to abortion bans, she now believes that she’d fallen prey to “toxic empathy.”
On race, Stuckey is hardly more thoughtful. She writes of Elijah McClain, a young Black man who died after cops injected him with ketamine and choked him in the street. This was an injustice, she adds, but she can’t help herself; there’s always a catch. “Every year civilians are the victims of undue force by police officers, and the media insists this brutality disproportionately affects black people,” she argues. She cites Harvard scholar Roland Fryer, who, as she puts it, found that “black people are no more likely to be shot by the police than white people.” The study she mentions is controversial among academics because its findings were so narrow, as reporter Dara Lind explained at Vox — a fact Stuckey ignores.
The willingness of some Christians to contort themselves into various and tortured positions is not a new phenomenon. I grew up hearing about “post-abortion syndrome,” although there is no evidence that women who end their pregnancies suffer from emotional distress or depression at higher-than-average rates. Go back even further and some 19th-century biblical literalists thought a flat Earth was divine truth. As Kelly Weill wrote in Off The Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything, Joshua Rowbotham’s “zetetic model” relied heavily on the Bible. The flat-Earther was “cherry-picking passages from the Bible and applying a literal reading so that they appeared to reference a flat planet.” Weill adds that this was “the opposite of skeptical inquiry” because it “demanded that readers discard everything they believed in and put their blind trust in Rowbotham’s limited interpretation of one faith’s much-debated holy text.”
Skeptical inquiry and religious faith are not inherently at odds with each other. Even atheists like myself can learn something from theology, if only to understand what millions of Americans believe. Lately that process has become fraught; the second Trump administration careers from one depravity to the next while right-wing conspiracies proliferate online and off. American Christians face a struggle that will be familiar to anyone. It is getting more difficult to think. We all face a tidal wave of garbage in our pursuit of a rigorous mind. For some on the right, that’s an opportunity.
The turn against empathy can only obfuscate the truth. If empathy is a sin, so is the act of inquiry. In 1994, Rigney’s mentor, Wilson, and Steve Wilkins, a Reformed pastor who served on the board of the League of the South, published Southern Slavery: As It Was. In it, they complained that “slavery is considered such a wicked practice that it alone is sufficient to answer the question of which side was right in that unfortunate war.” That alone should have brought General Sherman back from the dead, but they went on. To have “a closed mind” on slavery “is to be cloaked in virtue,” they wrote, again in complaint. Christians may dismiss their argument that a godly man could own slaves, but in doing so, they reject the Bible itself. “This points to the need for Christians to learn the biblical way of avoiding ‘problem texts,’” they added. “Christians must recognize that they are under the authority of God, and they may not develop their ideas of what is ‘right’ and ‘fair’ apart from the Word of God.” Lobotomize yourself and drift away. Pastor will tell you how to think.
Wilson pulled the monograph from publication over attribution errors and has said he would re-characterize portions of his argument, though not the ideas I reference here. He remains a strong proponent of R.L. Dabney, a Confederate chaplain who deplored public education and racial integration in the church and in public life. This is all well known in Rigney’s world. It’s what he signed on for when he moved to Idaho and joined the faculty of Wilson’s college. Reading his book, I found he thinks in a similar way. He doesn’t write about slavery or segregation, but he is committed to a hierarchy with men like himself at the top, so the Bible is merely the means to an end. Stuckey lacks his academic credentials, yet she is engaged in the same work. The goal is authoritarianism, which does not tolerate questions or uncertainty. Everyone knows their place, and everyone does what they’re told, even if they’re in pain. Cruelty is a perk of conquest.
But authoritarianism is more fragile than it first appears. No one can entirely stop a person from thinking or feeling. When I looked through the online catalogue of Canon Press, I noticed it sells works of classic literature with “worldview guides.” One is Jane Eyre, a novel I loved as a teenager. Though Jane Eyre is not quite liberated by the end of the novel, there is a reason the book became so important to me, why I carried it around like I did my Bible. “I am no bird, and no net ensnares me,” she tells Rochester, her employer and love interest, in one pivotal moment. “I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.”
For now we can think and feel for each other, and reach our own conclusions about the world. The social contract is held together by empathy, which is why authoritarians fear and despise it so much. All they can offer is a net.
