“In a world where you can be anything, be kind.” – Unknown
This is a quote that I often heard growing up. The message that it is sending—kindness as the highest good—is a seed that has been planted since my childhood and now taken root. There is perhaps no other generation more concerned about kindness and empathy than that of today.
One would think that this mantra has produced genuinely kinder people, and in return created a society where everyone is cared for and treated with respect. However, recent election results have once again illuminated just how unkind we are—all in the name of kindness.
If you’re a Christian who voted for President-Elect Donald Trump this month, chances are high that you have—directly or indirectly—been called some of the most hateful names conceivable. Perhaps family members or close friends in a rage of fury have demanded that anyone who didn’t vote like them block or unfollow their accounts on social media. Maybe there are those who simply ask, “How could a Christian vote for someone like that? Don’t you care about women, minorities, and immigrants—the least of these?” Perhaps you are one of those people.
While I cannot condone hateful comments or flippantly cutting off people from your life, I do believe that those two specific questions have often been asked in good conscious with the desire to care for others and perhaps even understand a different viewpoint. What they do not realize, however, is that by invoking empathy and creating a false dilemma, they are operating from a specific type of empathy that has become both hijacked and toxic.
Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion (2024, 170 pages) is a book by Allie Beth Stuckey explaining this. Stuckey is also the author of You’re Not Enough (And That’s Okay) and host of Relatable, one of the most prominent conservative podcasts on culture, politics, and theology today. She is a leading voice on Christian worldview and encourages Christians on how to engage the world around them. In her most recent book, Stuckey coins the term “toxic empathy” in order to explain what is happening to so many Christians today. We have the good desire to be kind and perceived as kind,
“But empathy alone is a terrible guide. 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. That’s exactly what’s happening today. Empathy has been hijacked for the purpose of conforming well-intentioned people to particular political agendas. Specifically, it’s been co-opted by the progressive wing of American society to convince people that the progressive position is exclusively the one of kindness and morality. I call it toxic empathy.” (page xii)
In five short chapters, Stuckey rebuts some of the key lies that take advantage of our emotions: “abortion is healthcare,” “transwomen are women,” “love is love,” “no human is illegal,” and “social justice is justice.” Our culture today has done an impressive job of making us think that these statements are a “given” and that anyone who questions them is questioning morality itself. But as we all know, just because something sounds good doesn’t make it true. What Stuckey asks us to do instead is think beyond the emotional appeal of these statements and consider their logical outcome, weighing whether they are truly loving or not.
I won’t deconstruct each lie—you can get the book and hear from Stuckey herself on that. Each chapter begins with a gut-wrenching situation, leading the reader to truly feel a sense of empathy for those involved and with the impression that the progressive lie must be the only right response. For example, her first chapter tackles the lie that “abortion is healthcare” by giving the example of a mother who was forced to deliver her baby with a congenital defect, only for the baby to die shortly afterwards, because pro-life laws in Texas prohibited an abortion. Certainly, allowing for an abortion in this case would have been the most compassionate option to minimize the suffering of both mother and child?
What Stuckey does, however, is continue the chapter by offering an alternative perspective to consider and the factual realities that accompany the lie—in this case, the perspective of the unborn baby that would have been brutally poisoned and crushed in the womb during the abortion. Instead of being given the opportunity to breathe and experience life in her mother’s arms (even if but only a few moments) and the dignity of a loving funeral honoring her humanity, her life would have been snuffed out and her body coldly discarded in a hospital waste basket. This is the truth that cannot be justified by any type of self-proclaimed empathy: abortion always takes the life of a real human being, and the consequences are real for both mother and child.
If you anticipate any of these lies rearing their head at the Thanksgiving dinner table, Stuckey’s book equips its readers to provide a thoughtful response and challenge the thinking of those who assume the “progressive” answer is the most empathetic—or biblical—one. Stuckey writes in her conclusion,
“The world would have you believe that Christians—particularly Christian conservatives—should separate our faith from our political engagement. They call our engagement ‘Christian nationalism’ or ‘Christofascism’ and insist that to really love our neighbor, we must vote against our conscience and biblical principles. But this is a trick of the devil. Every single person votes in accordance with their worldview, no matter what their belief system is. We, too, have both the right and the responsibility to do the same. Every law is based on a moral belief. The only question is, ‘Which one?’” (page 165, emphasis added)
Try as hard as we may, we simply can’t keep our worldview out of it—nor should we, as we all make our political decisions based on the foundation of what we believe is right versus wrong. The problem with leftists is that they think their morality is universal and position their solutions as over-simplified moral “no brainers.” Too many Christians are falling into this trap, either willingly or by threat of shame, and refuse to acknowledge that almost 78 million Americans may not actually have acted out of malice or hate—the only logical conclusion to the rejection of their “empathy”—but that it is possible that the majority of our country has simply said “no more” to the very real consequences of these propagated lies.
For someone who his well-versed in the culture wars of today or a dedicated listener of Stuckey’s podcast, you will most likely not hear any new or revolutionary arguments from Toxic Empathy, but it serves as a wonderful resource for those just beginning to articulate their position on these topics—or for someone genuinely open to understanding why others might have voted differently from them. Stuckey’s book helps well-meaning Christians think critically and invites them to examine the consistency of their own worldview, starting from the foundational premise that true empathy must be aligned with biblical truth as revealed in Scripture and through the person of Christ.
In a world where you can be anything, Christian, it’s not enough to just be kind. We are called to a deeper love that rejoices not in wrongdoing, but the truth (1 Corinthians 13:6). While there is room for disagreement on certain policies and their implementation—and certainly no political party has a monopoly on morality—toxic empathy goes a step further by requiring us to celebrate that which God clearly defines as wrong and reject God-given reality and principles. Don’t let the compassion that God has graciously given to you for others be manipulated or twisted by evil agendas—now, perhaps more than ever, is the time to be as gentle as doves but also as wise as serpents.
