Is Empathy a Sin?

Like other terms such as “freedom” or “love,” “empathy” is generally something of a “hurrah” word; people agree that, whatever it is, it is a very good thing. Recent decades have witnessed burgeoning literature on empathy. Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, suggested in 2001 that it was a panacea: “any problem immersed in empathy becomes solvent.” The Australian philosopher Roman Krznaric spoke in 2015 of an “empathy revolution” that has excited compassion for the humanitarian transformation of society, reforming institutions, extending rights, and deepening relationships. Perhaps most famously, Brené Brown, author of several New York Times bestselling books, has championed the power and importance of empathy in dealing with shame and feelings of inadequacy, in works such as I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t).

Empathy is not an unchallenged good, however. Over the past few years there has been a growing movement opposing the privileged place the term enjoys in much Western psychology, ethics, and political thought. In his 2016 book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, psychology professor Paul Bloom questioned the supposed virtue, arguing that empathy dangerously distorts judgment and can even encourage cruelty toward those deemed to threaten its objects. Following the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas, for example, many people angrily tore down posters of the Israeli hostages, while others expressed their indignance at footage and reporting of the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza: in war, empathy can be a zero-sum game, and as we respond in empathy to our favored side we can become calloused to suffering on the other.

The challenge to empathy has gained its greatest traction among critics of progressivism, who argue that empathy has been a tool of emotional manipulation by the left. Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion (2024) and Canadian professor Gad Saad’s forthcoming Suicidal Empathy both argue that empathy has produced and been used to advance bad policies on issues such as immigration. In his recent interview on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” Elon Musk declared that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Considering the value placed upon empathy by many liberals and progressives, the political salience of much of the current discussion should not be surprising. 

Pastor and theology professor Joe Rigney’s latest book, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits, adds to this growing array of voices against empathy. The subject of empathy—and the rhetorical framing of it as a “sin”—has been prominent in Rigney’s writing for several years now, from his 2019 article “The Enticing Sin of Empathy” and his 2020 interview with Doug Wilson, “The Sin of Empathy.” 

Rigney considers the term “empathy” in two senses: the first referring to the natural dynamic of emotion-sharing and the second to the “excessive and overpowering form of this passion.” The “sin of empathy” relates to the second of these senses; Rigney often refers to this as “untethered” empathy. An example of such “untethered empathy” might be the experience of watching a movie or reading a novel in which you find yourself profoundly connecting with a character, only to come to a sudden realization of how your absorption in their feelings and perspective has totally distorted your field of moral vision, blinding you to the objective character of their actions and the harmful effect they were having on other people. Writers of shows like Breaking Bad have wrestled with the way that many in their audience have identified with a villainous protagonist.

Rigney discusses appeals to empathy as forms of emotional manipulation in churches and in politics. The privileging of empathy allows people to hold groups hostage to their feelings, when people are unwilling to say or do anything that would offend or hurt them. “Christians came to implicitly adopt the subject logic of victimhood—‘I’m hurt, therefore, you sinned’—and thereby succumbed to the tyranny of the sensitive,” Rigney writes. As Christians and their leaders internalize high sensitivity to (claims of) hurt feelings, they allow themselves to be steered by appeals to empathy, with little reference to truth or the actual good. Indeed, Rigney claims that many conservative Christians operate as if they had a little progressive on their shoulder, constantly ensuring that everything they do is ordered around progressive sensitivities (which are weaponized for progressive ends). One could compare this to a situation in a family where one member’s thin skin or sharp temper causes all others to tiptoe around them, ordering everything they do around that member’s unreasonable sensitivities. If anyone were to stand up to that family member, the rest of the family might turn on them. Such “empathy” is a rigged game, Rigney argues, as it is very selective in its choice of objects and inexorably leads towards progressive ends.

Rigney’s is, unlike those of Bloom or Friedman, a highly politicized account of empathy. He argues that the fetishization of empathy is the “common denominator in the conflicts surrounding all things ‘woke’” and that the success of “wokeness” can largely be traced back to the elevation of empathy over all other considerations. His account is also a very gendered account, for which much of “wokeness” is downstream of feminism. As most writers on the subject note, often favorably, empathy is generally much more pronounced among women. For example, Baron-Cohen, the Cambridge professor, wrote in 2003 that “The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.”

Empathy has its limits and liabilities, many of which Rigney observes. This is especially the case when empathy is treated as the north star for justice, truth, goodness, and for the crafting of policy. However, Rigney’s rhetorical handling of empathy as a sin, his focus upon feminism as the root problem, and his more dismissive posture to work such as Brown’s—much of which deals with the transformative potential for women of well-ordered emotional connection—results in a position that, even against his declared intentions, tends to devalue women’s ways of engaging while privileging men’s.

In the “vibe shift” that we are supposedly living through, strong resistance to appeals to empathy have been emboldened (for instance, J.D. Vance’s viral “I don’t really care, Margaret” response). However, with such responses have also come open celebrations of cruelty, callousness, gross insensitivity, and schadenfreude. For instance, one will certainly not arrive at a sane immigration policy with an overdependence upon the dictates of the instinct of empathy, yet taking delight in or wilfully hardening your heart to the distress of women and children being deported is perverse and spiritually destructive. Likewise, it is easy to countenance all sorts of evils (jokes about sexual abuse in prisons being one example of many) against persons or groups classed as criminals. Rigney’s “sin of empathy” rhetoric has been taken up by several who argue that we should “properly hate” or “harden our hearts.” Rigney neither adequately registers nor addresses some of the dangers here, nor does he guard against some foreseeable abuses of his “sin of empathy” position.

“Sin of empathy” rhetoric is certainly provocative. It sparks controversy, helps marketing, and is serviceable as a slogan (movements are often animated by provocative slogans with esoteric rationalizations that polarize responses—“abolish the police” on the left, for example, and “blue lives matter” on the right). Consider the difference between the following expressions that someone might use: “the sin of empathy,” “the sins of empathy,” “sinful empathy,” and “disordered empathy.” The first implies to most that empathy is—at least ordinarily—sinful in and of itself. The second implies that empathy can, at least on occasions, produce bad fruit, and the third that empathy, at least in some forms, can have a sinful character. The fourth implies that empathy is a good thing, yet can be twisted. Each expression conveys something different and Rigney’s choice of terms seems to have sacrificed precision and illumination for provocation.

Indeed, the “sin of empathy” discourse needs to be approached in light of the radical impoverishment of our modern emotional language. The historian of emotion Thomas Dixon observes the shift from a formerly sophisticated, highly structured, and typically theological account of our psychology, which distinguished between categories such as passions, appetites, desires, and affections and the large array of species of feeling within them (see, for example, the deadly sins and their corresponding virtues), to the dominance of the flattened-out, largely unordered, and secularized category of “emotions.” (See, for example, the few simple emotions portrayed in the Pixar film Inside Out.) As such a paradigm has gained popular traction, the subtle variations of an emotional lexicon that employed many terms such as rage, wrath, resentment, and fury has been subsumed to the basic emotion of “anger.” One might here wonder whether “empathy” might be getting the same treatment—that is, turning into a simplistic denominator for the motives of left-leaning politics, as people on the left have often attributed right-leaning politics to the emotion of “anger.”

Rigney’s book addresses some of the contemporary inclarity surrounding our emotional language and identifies some of the ways this compromises our judgment and disorders our societies. The powerful role played by free-floating sensitivity to the feelings of others in contemporary society and politics should be a matter of concern and attention: Rigney has definitely chosen a worthy topic. He seeks to introduce various distinctions and categories that will enable his readers to interpret and order their emotions more thoughtfully, and to resist some of the ways that emotions detached from virtue can be exploited. But his analysis swings too clumsily and wildly. By developing his positive account overmuch against the narrow foil of more left- and female-coded abuses of empathy, he is unable to give emotional connection its due—proper use is seldom best framed by accounts that focus upon abuse.

Nor does he engage carefully and charitably with the claims of the advocates of empathy, many of whom make crucial distinctions, present necessary controls, and situate empathy within a broader framework for which reason has a crucial role to play. For instance, Krznaric, the Australian philosopher, writes:

Empathy and reason are not polar opposites, as critics like Bloom would have us believe, but rather mutually reinforcing ideals on which we can build a more humane civilisation. Indeed, it is “the gut wrench of empathy” that wrenches open the door of our common concern—and only then does reason have a chance to wedge it open with laws and rights.

More careful and receptive interaction with such voices might have tempered and deepened Rigney’s account of empathy, although perhaps at the expense of its direct appeal to those looking chiefly for a diagnosis of the emotional pathologies of the contemporary left. 

The recovery and development of a fuller, richer, and more precise psychological language is a crucial task. We are ill-served by the typical vagueness of terms such as “empathy.” The complex realities that are entangled in such a term need to be carefully separated, distinguished, and analyzed; This is not a Gordian Knot to be cut with recklessly flailing terms like “sin.” A less partisan engagement with empathy—and other terms—could equip us all in understanding, articulating, and cultivating both our inner lives as individuals, as well as our communities and societies. The threat of emotional manipulation is real, yet avoiding such risks is not our primary task: the principal duty that falls to us is rightly ordering our own hearts. Tenderheartedness comes with its liabilities, but, while guarding against such abuses, it is what we all must cultivate.