What does it look like when empathy becomes sinful? How can we support people who are in need in a God-honoring way? Dr. Joe Rigney is here to share insights to help us identify the differences between healthy empathy and sinful empathy, as he draws from his book, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.

Marlin Detweiler:
Welcome again to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. My voice is a little horse today, but that won't stop our guest, Joe Rigney, from talking. And I've encouraged him to help me out there, too. Welcome.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Hey, thanks for having me, Marlin. Good to be here.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Joe, give us before we get into a book that you've written that has wrestled some feathers and raised some eyebrows. Tell me a little bit about yourself personally. Your family, your education, your career.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Yeah. Great. So I grew up in West Texas, in Midland. My whole life up till college. And I went to Texas A&M, where I met my wife. Also felt the call to ministry while I was there through, you know, largely through the ministry of John Piper was very moved and inspired by him. And so after I graduated, moved to Minnesota for seminary up there at Bethlehem at the time, Bethlehem Institute, now Bethlehem College and Seminary.

And so that's where I went to seminary. And while I was there, discovered, actually, that I was pretty good in the classroom and so pivoted a little bit from the pastoral side, got into the education side as a college professor and taught at Bethlehem for, gosh, probably 15 years or so. And then towards the end was also the president of the college and seminary there for a couple of years.

Marlin Detweiler:
I didn't know that. I missed that.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Yeah. Spent two years as the president before making a pivot and moving out here to Moscow, where I now serve as a fellow of theology at New Saint Andrews. And so I've been teaching Lordship, which is our kind of freshman theology class, for the last few years. This year, I'm actually teaching Rhetoric and then I oversee our ministerial training program, Greyfriars Hall, which historically has been kind of a church based, purely church based thing.

Now it's come under the banner of New Saint Andrews. And yeah, and so it's now a full Master of Divinity program. And I oversee and teach that as we try to train ministers for the next Christendom.

Marlin Detweiler:
And so how many students does that have presently?

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Yeah. So we've got about 13 or 14 students. It's a three-year program. And so we've got two years running at this time. So last year was our first year. We got a new group this year. But it's a great little program. You know, it's got the biblical languages. So Greek and Hebrew plenty of that, theology.

And then internships linked up here with our churches here in Moscow. Practical ministry experience kind of try to blend the academy and the church context as a way to prepare ministers, because quite frankly, there's so many needs in that you wouldn't believe the number of people who are constantly saying, we would love to have a solid covenantal, reformed, post-millennial church in our area. And we don't have one we need somebody. And so we're trying to train those men to go.

Marlin Detweiler:
Out and have a real supply problem with pastors right now.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
They talk about the graying of the pulpit. Just the average age of pastors continues to climb because they're not getting replaced underneath. And so trying to get young, ambitious guys who want to go make a difference for the kingdom to really see that, hey, worships the heartbeat of everything. If we have communities that are worshiping God rightly, then we can expect that God will bless our efforts as we do all of the other great things, important things that we do out in the world.

Marlin Detweiler:
Very good. How about your family? You have children?

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Yeah. So I'm married to my wife. We've been married now for 20, almost 21 years. And we have three boys ranging from 17, 15 down to 7.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay, so you're in the thick of it.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
In the thick of it. Coaching all the things. The coaching football, coaching baseball, having a big time with the guys.

Marlin Detweiler:
Very good. Very good. Well you wrote a book. I didn't put the year that it came out. Leadership and the Sin of Empathy. What year did it come out?

Dr. Joe Rigney:
I think it was 2024.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. So it's a recent book, which I thought it was, and I well, let's just start by saying I loved Al Mohler’s quote that I found, “Joe hit a hornet's nest.” What do you think he meant by that?

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Yeah. Well, so this is a topic I've been working on for a long time. Actually, back in, I want to say 2017 or 2018, I recorded an interview with Doug Wilson called The Sin of Empathy for their one man rampant. One of their shows here and when we came up with that title, it was meant to be provocative, make people kind of turn their head, but did not realize at the time that it would kind of become what it did, which is it's actually been a major hornet's nest. It's provocative.

Marlin Detweiler:
Cat’s out of the bag. Just keep clawing.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Yes, exactly. And so it was like, oh, we're over the target. We're hitting something. And so after doing that, I spent, you know, a number of years writing articles and at Desiring God and other places like that, I'm trying to explain what I meant. Why did I say this thing? Because I meant it and defend it.

And then over time, it kind of began to migrate outside of merely the kind of evangelical corner of the world where I was living to where now you've got multiple books on this subject, kind of from different authors. So Allie Beth Stuckey has a book on the subject, and there's a recent secular guy who's got a book called Suicidal Empathy.

And so it's now a part of the larger conversation. Elon Musk talks about this sort of stuff. And so I like to think I was a little bit of an early adopter and influence in that conversation because I do think it's an important one.

But I think for a lot of people it's a the phrase sin of empathy does two things. It's one, most people have no category for empathy being bad. It's just it's a kind of unadulterated good. How could you possibly think that this could be sinful?

So I think that's one I think the other thing is it kind of bridges or brings together to paradigms that can live in tension with each other, and then I'm slamming them together to collide. And one is a kind of traditional Christian moral framework where words like sin are going to show up prominently, and then empathy kind of really emerges and is kind of taken root kind of in the therapeutic context.

So there's a kind of a therapeutic framework. And so when you say sin of empathy, I think I'm really bringing together both of those frameworks and saying these need to really engage with each other. We can't adopt a fully therapeutic framework unless we have this kind of Christian moral foundation, biblical foundation. And so that's, I think, why it stirred up the hornet’s nest.

Marlin Detweiler:
I'll tell you another reason. I think it stirs it up because the very title almost implies empathy is sinful.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Right?

Marlin Detweiler:
But I understand that's not entirely what you mean, right?

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Yeah. So not entirely, but kind of. So, you know, the subtitle is compassion, and its counterfeits. And so a big angle that I'm basically taking is one of this is one of the things I learned from C.S. Lewis. I've written a number of books on C.S. Lewis, on Narnia and C.S. Lewis on the Christian life and things like that.

He's a major influence. And one of the things that Lewis, you know, wrote a whole book about, the Four loves was basically that when love becomes a god, when a natural love becomes a god, it becomes a demon. And so when you allow a natural love to kind of ascend to the heights, it goes wrong, it becomes corrupt, and the greater it would be in the natural order, the greater the good it would be, the more harmful and destructive it becomes when it goes bad.

So he uses examples like the love of your family, or romantic love or friendship to say, these are really great and glorious loves love for your family, love you know, love for your children. But if it goes wrong, if God's hands not on the reins and it's not governed by love for God, if it's not anchored to love for God, then that love for your family can become really destructive, harmful, demonic.

Marlin Detweiler:
And I've heard it phrased recently, this is a conversation I had last week with a friend where these things become idols.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
That's exactly right. And so Lewis made that observation and use those examples. And one way to think about my project is to simply say that love for the hurting, the weak and the broken has the same vulnerability. So it's when it's good, it's really good when God's hands on the rain. Praise God.

Compassion is a virtue. It's in the Bible. It's a biblical. It's modeled by Christ, you know, and we're called to do it. But if God's hands not on the reins, if it becomes untethered and unmoored from reality, from what's true and what's good, it becomes very destructive and all the more so because it's often unrecognized as a problem, because people can't imagine how it could be bad.

So when I say empathy, one way to think about it would be the same way that we would talk about the sin of anger. Or you might talk about the sin of grief and you say, how could grief be a sin? Well, Paul talks about there's a worldly grief. There's a worldly sorrow that leads to death as opposed to a godly sorrow, independence in life.

And so there's two different kinds of sorrow. There's two different kinds of anger we talk about in your anger don't sin. So there's so there’s a phrase from the book, in your empathy do not sin. And I think that's the thing is where people have a category for sinful anger. Anger that's out of control, right? Anger that overwhelms the rational faculties.

And you get blinded by anger. You get overwhelmed by grief or paralyzed by fear. These other emotions we recognize are very powerful, and they can overwhelm us and make us do really stupid things, really sinful things. My argument is empathy/compassion can do the same. It can overwhelm what's good and what's right. And when it does, what do you call that?

What's the name for? Whenever empathy or compassion overwhelms your rational faculty so that you do things that are wrong. And it's like, well, that would be the sin of empathy.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. So you've started to answer the question I'm going to give you. I just want you to keep on packing. What problem are you seeking to solve here?

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Yeah. So part of where this came from is there's a secular author, Jewish author named Edwin Friedman was writing back in the 90s and early 2000s, and he died in 2008 or so and wrote a book called Failure of Nerve Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. And one of the chapters in that book highlights what he calls the fallacy of empathy.

And by that he means basically that when empathy becomes the dominant virtue in a community, effectively it becomes a tool of emotional manipulation. So where the community adapts to the most immature, most reactive, most passion driven members of the community. So basically the person who throws the biggest tantrum wins. And so he was identifying this as a sort of pathology in American society that kind of ran from the, you know, he's a family.

He was a family systems kind of counselor. So family counselor, but he also advised corporations and did things like that. And he said, there's a common thread that runs through dysfunctional families, the dysfunctional churches and synagogues and religious communities to businesses, to nations where when we elevate empathy as the highest virtue. And he actually was the one who made the point that empathy was a recent word.

It doesn't have a long pedigree. It shows up in the 20th century, actually, in the realm of art appreciation; it's a word from esthetics, German word in esthetics, and it replaced and supplanted the older Christian classical word sympathy or compassion and sympathy.

Marlin Detweiler:
I understand, definitional as you know, your father died and your mourning; my father died. I can sympathize with you.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
So sympathy didn't die. I can empathize with you.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Well, so. Yeah. Well, there's different. This is part of the challenge, I think, that the newness of the word empathy means that everybody has a slightly different shade of what they think it means. So it's a word that's very, I think, very nebulous. So you wouldn't believe since, you know, over the last 6 or 7 years, the number of people who have said your definition of empathy is wrong, here's the true one.

And I've got about 15 different true definitions of insisting that theirs is the one true one. And part of my point is this is actually the problem: the confusion about the definition is what allows these it to cover over these really destructive social dynamics. So if you actually break down the kind of root and I think this is a good way in is sympathy means to suffer with.

So you're in the pit and I'm going to suffer with you. I'm going to join you in the pit, but I'm with you. Empathy, at least when it's proposed, is proposed as an improvement. It's frequently done this way. Is that sympathy is, you know, this good, but empathy is this good. And you go, well, what makes it better?

What makes empathy a better response to suffering people? Well, empathy literally means to suffer in. And so the visual image that comes to mind then is a more it's a total immersion in the suffering and pain and hardship of another person. You go all in, and you hear that and people go, yeah, that sounds exactly right.

And you go, well, but wait a minute. If you go all in, what if they're sin in there? Are you going to join them in the sin? And so the analogy that I've frequently used to explain the difference is that if you have someone say, who's, you know, sinking in quicksand, there's basically three different ways that you could respond to them.

The first would be to simply pass by on the other side of the road, kind of the classic the bad guys and the parable of the Good Samaritan who just say, I'm not getting anywhere near that. And the word for this would be apathy. It's indifference. I don't care. And everybody recognizes that's bad. Then you have two other possible responses.

One is that you say they're drowning in quicksand. I've got to help them. I'm going to jump in and go all in. And so you jump in with both feet, and now you have two people sinking in sand. And I'm saying that is empathy. Now some are going to go, “That's not what I mean by empathy.” And I go, that's fine.

We don't need to. I'm not mainly concerned with making sure we have our dictionaries written properly. I'm concerned with what people actually do in practice, and I would say people actually do that in practice where someone is drowning and they lose touch with reality.

Marlin Detweiler:
They jump in and give a concrete example, we don't have quicksand as a concrete example in 20th century 21st century America. But give me a concrete example of what that might look like before you go to the third.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Yeah. So it would be so here would be a good example. Probably this is at the kind of the extreme end, but hopefully you can work back from there to more normal ones. It would be something like I think the entire transgender phenomenon is fueled by the center of empathy. So here you have someone. You have someone who has what they call gender dysphoria, who believes they've been born in the wrong body and they're in a great measure of emotional distress because of this.

And so they're hurting. And so in your desire to alleviate their pain, you affirm and validate the feelings that are false. This is a man whose biological man who feels like he's a woman. And so out of empathy and compassion in his distress, you say, yes, you are a woman.

Marlin Detweiler:
So you’ll let him play in the WNBA.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Exactly. And you're going to encourage him to get surgery. You're going to castrate himself in order to conform his body to his emotional feelings. And you're so and especially you think about when the, you know, the worst parts of this is when it's done to young children who are confused and they've been indoctrinated into it, and now they feel like they're going through puberty, their bodies changing, and they say, yes, because you're in the wrong body.

And it's like everybody has a hard time with puberty. What are we doing? People is literally the oldest, you know, phenomenon in the universe. And you guys are saying because you feel like your body is out of joint, you must be really you're really a girl or you're really a boy. And then we give them chemicals, we castrate them, we cut off their breasts, and you say, what?

Why would we do this? Why would we do this crazy destruction to these young people? And the if you ask the people who are doing it, what's motivating you to perform this surgery to give this advice and counsel, the answer is going to be empathy. Yeah. It's like I so feel the pain of this distressed person that I've lost touch with biological reality and with truth.

And I'm now going to try to conform reality to their feelings and to my compassion. So I think that would be like at the extreme end. Maybe I'll give you one more.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. As you give me one more. Maybe you've got this in mind already, but what we've just done is given an extreme example that this audience, the people listening to us, will say, yeah, I get that. Push us to the middle where we've got a little bit more strife in it.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Yeah. Good. So here would be another situation. Your wife is having a really hard day. Okay? Your wife's having a real, real hard day. And in the difficulty of the day, she starts to lash out at the kids. She starts to lash out at everybody. And to suffer with her would be to say, I know this is hard.

I know you've had a hard day. I hear you, but you can't talk to the kids that way. So it would be an assertive boundary as you're trying to step into the pit, as opposed to simply affirming and validating every feeling that she has. In other words, to sort of seek to benefit by simply agreeing or validating with the person who's suffering.

And I think anybody who's ever been suffering knows that we often make unreasonable demands of those who are trying to help us; in other words, we say things, we exaggerate,

Marlin Detweiler:
I'm trying not to take this personally, Joe.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Right. So I would say this if somebody goes, I don't really understand with a sin of empathy in daily life, I would say, have you ever been on the receiving end of a pity party? And everybody has been on the receiving end of a pity party. Everybody has seen a loved one exaggerate or use their suffering as a tool of manipulation to try to get you to do something that you don't think is good or wise.

But they're going to play on your heart strings, have a little bit of a martyr complex. They're going to throw a pity party in order to get it. So if you've ever if your listeners have ever read the book The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, there are multiple examples in that book where the damned spirits, they're having these conversations between people in heaven and are meeting with their former loved ones in, in on the Green Plains kind of halfway house between heaven and hell.

And the common tactic on the part of the spirits is to try to manipulate the emotions of the solid spirits. I'll look how much I'm suffering, look how hard I've had it. And Lewis calls this the passion of pity. And it's basically when he says this, he says, so pity was meant to be a spur to help, for that would get people who are joyful to help those who are hurting.

So pity is like, hey, you're in a good spot. They're in a bad spot. Pity is the thing that gets you to help them, he said. But it can be used the wrong way around. It can be used as a kind of emotional blackmail. You don't really love me if you won't do X.

And if you succumb to that, if you give in when they're seeking to manipulate you into doing things that would be bad for them or bad for you or bad for others, I'm saying one way to describe that is when you give in to that is that that's the sin of empathy. Your empathy has become untethered from what is true and what is good. So that's the difference.

And so then if we go back to that analogy of the quicksand, what's the proper response? Well, what I say is compassion, biblical compassion or sympathy. Those are the words I choose to use.

I think that's the best words. They're Bible words. What is that? Well, it's when someone's in the quicksand and you want to help them, which means you need to get in there with them at some level. So you get you reach in there, you grab hold of them, but you also grab hold of a branch, a tree, you’re anchored so that you actually have leverage to help them out. And so that's tethered compassion as opposed to I'm just going to jump in and drown with them. Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
What has made this topic a real and present concern?

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Yeah. So part of where it came from, as I mentioned, Edwin Friedman, I read his book and then it looked back in probably 2010, 2011. And then over the next 7 or 8 years, it looked like the world just conspired to prove his point. It was like everybody gave a signal and you just saw everywhere what I've now affectionately dubbed the victimhood Olympics, where people have been competing to see who's the greatest victim. So everything that we've sort of now, we colloquially call it wokeness or the critical race theory, all the critical theories, the LGBT kind, the gender kind, the race kind. All of them were basically an attempt to say the greatest victim wins. If you can demonstrate that you're the greatest victim, everyone will reorganize society around your feelings.

Wow. And the transgender thing is kind of the apotheosis of it. But there were all kinds of different lesser shades where whether it was on racial issues. If someone, if a minority claimed that they had been discriminated against or in some kind of ways, it was unquestionable, you couldn't ask. But is it true? Did it happen?

Because to do so would be to revitalize them. If a woman claim to be abused that her husband was abusive, which does happen. That wasn't the problem, the problem wasn't the claim. The problem was it was an claim. Because if you said, well, did her husband really do this thing immediately, what are you going to be accused of? You're cruel, you're heartless, and you're revitalizing it.

Marlin Detweiler:
You're not believing them.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
You're not believing all women. Right. So that whole phenomenon, I think, was just fueled by this untethered empathy where compassion for people who claim to be hurt, whether some of them really were and some of them were just faking it. But that emotion overrode any sense of we should actually get to the bottom of this. We should ask some questions.

We should keep our heads. And you would see whole communities basically steered in a kind of like triangle that becomes the engine where you have an alleged victim or victim class. They're the objects of empathy. Okay. Then what would typically arise is an advocate class sometimes drawn from the same people, you know, women who had abusive husbands become advocates for other women or other just advocates, social justice warriors.

That's what we typically called them. And they are the arbiters of justice because they say these people are hurting and we need to do justice, but their justice is no longer tethered to the Bible or to God's standards. Now it's simply oriented to the feelings of the aggrieved. And then the target is the nice guys, the compassionate hearts, the people who would be steered because they don't want to be seen as heartless and cruel, and they want to be respectable and having the right kind of compassion for the right kind of groups is how you get respect in the wider society.

And so it was that thing that meant that if you had a community where somebody comes and says, we need to form a task force on ethnic relations, or we need to form a task force on abuse, and they started to make proposals about what you wanted to do if you said, but wait a minute, I don't know if that's going to be a good idea.

I think that actually might make racial relations worse, or I don't think that this is just according to God's standards, because we're not hearing both sides or we're not taking we're not doing 2 or 3, you know, 2 or 3 witnesses to establish testimony. You start to object on biblical grounds. 100% of the time you would be accused of being cruel and heartless. Yeah. In other words, you're not being empathetic.

Marlin Detweiler:
Are there any things that you would say differently, having lived with a few years of the book in print?

Dr. Joe Rigney:
No. If anything, I'd probably say them more.

Marlin Detweiler:
So that would be different.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Yeah, yeah, it would be different, I guess. So basically, I think early on I made the, I used the provocative language and then had a bunch of people, some people got it. I did the analogies and the explanations and they said, oh, this is explaining so much of my church experience right now. So I had lots of those kind of emails, and then I had a bunch of people who lost their heads.

And initially with some of them, I think it was sincere. They were just confused by the terminology. What is sympathy? What is empathy? What is compassion? What are these different words? And if confusion is a problem, I'm a professor, I value clarity. So confusion is the problem. Clarity is the solution. Let me say it another way. Let me define my terms.

What I discovered is over time is that there were people who realized that the best way to undercut the arguments was to feign confusion, to pretend to be confused, or to be confused on behalf of other people. So they were willfully misunderstanding, willfully misrepresenting. So they would say back, you know, here's what Rigney thinks. And I would say no, I don't say any of that.

And therefore they would deliberately try to confuse things. And I spent there was a window of time where I spent a lot of time trying to diffuse that. I think that that was simply a sabotage technique. They were doing the thing that I was describing. And so now I would just I'm much more prone to say I've defined the terms, I've said what I meant by it, I've described the dynamics. You can use different words.

I one of the things I regularly do, there's some critics who have said, hey, that's not true empathy. When you talk about this untethered, jumping in with both feet, losing touch with reality, that's not true empathy. That's, codependence or that's fuzing with another person or things like that. And I want to say, great, if you got these great in measurement, that's one that comes from the psychological world.

You're being enmeshed with another person and you need to have boundaries. And I say, good. You use whatever language you want to use to describe it. I care about the phenomenon, and I look out at the culture right now and I see people. Oh, I see empathy just awash in a sea of emotions. And it mucking up a lot of stuff because emotion – this is part of the point.

Emotions are really powerful. They can sweep us off our feet. They can override what was good. So one of the ways I distinguish empathy and compassion in the book is to say empathy is often oriented to the immediate feelings of the sufferer, whereas I think tethered biblical compassion is oriented to their ultimate good.

Marlin Detweiler:
So that distinction.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Right. So if you say the main thing I need to do is relieve the immediate pain, you might do something that in the wrong than the long run are going to be more harmful. In other words, you might indulge lies. You might indulge the lies because you think that will leave the immediate distress as opposed to, in the long run, saying what's true in a loving way, in a kind way, but in a stable way, actually might be the thing that helps this person in the long run.

And one example of this biblical example, you asked one more that are kind of more realistic or more our normal experience. This one came later.

Marlin Detweiler:
I was talking about was one that might get us feisty.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Yeah, exactly. So. But if you think about the story of Job, there's this moment in the story after he's lost all this stuff, and his kids have been killed and his wife comes to him. And if you just have to take a minute and think about the scenarios, the situation, she has just had, the worst possible thing for any mother has happened to her.

The worst possible, worst imaginable thing like there is nothing worse. Ten children dead in an instant by this great storm that came through. So she is a grieving mother and here's her husband in sackcloth and ashes, scraping his sores from this wasting disease that he's been afflicted with after he's lost all of his wealth. And she comes to him and she says, do you still hold fast your integrity, curse God and die, curse God, and just blaspheme this God of yours, that you've been blameless and feared the Lord.

Clearly you're wrong. I understand as a pastor, it's in her grief and her anguish that she is speaking this curse God and die. And in that moment, I can imagine certain pastors or counselors, even Christian counselors, saying to him, what should he say to her in that moment is, hey, I know this is a really hard situation for your wife.

Just agree with her. Like just the way to comfort her is to say, yes, God is bad. God has abandoned us to agree with her. And Job does not do this. He looks at her. He looks at a grieving mother, his wife, the mother of his children, and says, you're speaking like one of the foolish women.

What you just said is very foolish. Shall we receive good from the Lord and not evil like the Lord gives? The Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord he holds. So what is he doing? He's it. That's actually compassion, because the only hope that she has for real comfort is the living God. And she's trying to untethered from him.

She's saying, I'm done with God, and Job is saying, don't be done with God. It would be foolish for you to be done with God. The only hope that either of us have is to cling to God, and Job clings to God on her behalf, and by the end of the story, God has restored not only Job, but her right.

She has, she has, she has additional children, and he's got, you know, the grandkids bouncing on the knee. And that's the way the story ends with this kind of restoration. But it's because Job did not abandon God in his compassion for his wife. So I think that's another good example.

Marlin Detweiler:
That really is a good one. Joe, thank you so much. This has been powerful. Thanks.

Dr. Joe Rigney:
Yeah. Thanks so much, Marlin. Appreciate you having me on.

Marlin Detweiler:
Folks, thank you for joining us on another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. We hope to see you next time.