Is Empathy a Sin?

When my dad died at 56, I had a hard time sleeping. 

 

It wasn't over my own sense of loss, but the sadness of thinking of my mom going to bed alone after decades of marriage.

I kept thinking of how strange and disorienting her deep aloneness must have felt. Perhaps it was a psychogenetic connection? Regardless, it affected me for many months.

Or maybe it was simply empathy.

Too bad, because in the last few years, empathy has taken a beating. Much of that criticism has come from evangelicals.

Author Allie Beth Stuckey argues in her book Toxic Empathy that misguided empathy can emotionally sway us to soft-pedal sinful behaviors and divert us from clear moral choices. She takes it even further, writing, “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.”

Joe Rigney—professor, former president of Bethlehem College and Seminary, and proponent of Christian nationalism—is even more direct. He titled his book Leadership and the Sin of Empathy. In the foreword alone, he references Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, a book popular in the Christian leadership circles I ran in years ago. Rigney writes, “Friedman argued that empathy today is often ‘a disguise for anxiety... and a power tool in the hands of the sensitive.’ Though the term ‘empathy’ is of recent vintage, Friedman argued that it has become a sacred cow, one which allows the least mature and most reactive members of a community to hijack the agenda.”

Of course we need to distinguish between compassion, sympathy, and empathy. But sorry: I don’t feel empathy deserves to be shamed. If we think of empathy as the attempt to slip into someone else’s Crocs—to view the world through their eyes—it’s a powerful idea. And perhaps it’s even—dare I say it?—incarnational. In a sense, isn’t that what God did: slip into the skin of humanity?

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.  PHILIPPIANS 2:6, 7

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.  HEBREWS 4:15

What if empathy is actually a God-gift that enables us to function like Jesus? And isn’t being like Jesus the thing we are to pursue? Yes, he is compassionate. Yes, he is sympathetic. He is love. But somehow, being inside human skin made him more than a doctrinal position. I would posit this: maybe he knows what he knows in a different way than omniscience alone affords.

Just a thought.

If anything, I need to amp up my empathy. Call me a heretic, but I think it will make me a better leader if I want to lead like Jesus. And I’m sure it would have made me a better pastor. 

Dave Workman | The Elemental Group

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