This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
If empathy is a sin, most of those saying so don’t seem to have been tempted beyond their ability to bear it.
That’s one reason I’m not too worried about the latest rhetoric of empathy as the great danger to the church and the world, mostly from those who previously told us that danger was yoga, or yoga pants, or Harry Potter, or hip-hop.
Plus, this rhetoric fails the Screwtape test. “I’m with the Devil and I’m here to recruit you” is not the kind of language that works except with those already committed to the bit. The really dangerous stuff tries to be a little subtler.
Even so, perhaps I should not be so dismissive. We live in crazy times, after all, and we cannot count on biblical literacy when discourse is shaped not by Athens or Jerusalem but by Silicon Valley. And the memes and vibes are definitely against empathy.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” Elon Musk told podcaster Joe Rogan. “The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
For a certain kind of very-online young man, this sort of language seems strong and aggressive and full of meaning—even if he doesn’t recognize that he is buying into the pagan critique of, well, Jesus Christ.
The problem is not with the aspiring theocrats who parrot this kind of thing but with those who empower them by minimizing what seems unfashionable in order to seem “strong” enough not to be called a liberal.
The ironic danger is that an anti-empathy religion becomes—and very quickly so—a sin-coddling religion the like of which the old religious liberals could only dream.
Empathy is not a biblical term. It refers specifically not just to compassion for others (though it certainly includes that) but to a specific aspect of that compassion: the process of seeking to understand a person through imagination.
What most people mean by empathy is not the compassion itself but the ability to see the need for compassion in the first place—to imagine not just the propositions a person holds or the actions they carry out but what it would be like to be in their situation.
Intimacy is not a biblical term either, but it aims at something the Bible does describe. When we call out sexual immorality and refer to it as “intimacy,” for example, we are not saying that intimacy itself is a sin. We are saying that sinning sexually is a fake intimacy—something altogether different from what Ephesians 5 or Song of Solomon describes.
Can some justify sin under the professed rubric of “empathy,” saying that to understand something is to excuse it? Of course—they do the same for explicitly biblical virtues like love and patience and mercy.
Flannery O’Connor warned that a certain kind of “tenderness” ends logically in terror, in “forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” When does this happen? “When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness,” she wrote. This is precisely what Jesus warned the Pharisees: When obedience to Scripture is detached from the actual Scriptures, the end result is disobedience (Matt. 23:23–25).
Some Christians recognize that not everything that goes under the name of empathy is, in fact, empathetic. But the real problem is that some of them seek to ask the same question the lawyer once asked Jesus: “Who is my neighbor?” And they often ask for the same reason—to justify cruelty or neglect toward another (Luke 10:29, ESV throughout).
Behind the rejection of empathy is a problem with the mechanism of empathy: imagination. This is how the anti-empathy argument ends up not just coddling the sins of those who wish to justify themselves but also evaporating the very way the Bible teaches us to recognize sin at all, whether in others or in ourselves.
When David killed Uriah after taking Uriah’s wife into his bed, the prophet Nathan confronted the king with a story. The story—that of a rich man who took his poor neighbor’s only ewe lamb—put David empathetically into someone else’s story. He could imagine what it would be like to be the robbed peasant, even down to Nathan’s evocation of the way the lamb ate from the poor man’s cup and grew up with his children.
Nathan knew that accusing David straight-on with the facts of his sin would be impeded by the king’s intellectual self-justifications. To get David to see his sin, Nathan had to prompt David to feel it, to kindle the king’s anger against the injustice by having him identify with the one sinned against (2 Sam. 12:1–5).
Upon ascending to the throne, David’s son Solomon asked God for wisdom. This was not a request for algorithmic knowledge or algebraic expertise. Solomon specifically asked to be able “to govern your people, that I may discern between good and evil” (1 Kings 3:9).
Scripture describes Solomon displaying this wisdom in judging a dispute with empathy. Two women came before Solomon, with one accusing the other of having stolen her baby after she accidentally smothered her own child in the night. Wise Solomon suggested that the baby be cut in two.
Solomon knew human nature well enough, in his God-given wisdom, to be able to imagine the perspective of a grief-stricken mother—who would rather lose her child to another than to allow the baby to be killed (1 Kings 3:27).
A church severed from empathy is a church lacking the compassion of Jesus, but it is also a church unable to call people to repentance of sin.
The lawyer questioning Jesus believed himself to be in the right—loving God and his neighbor as himself—but only in the abstract. Jesus put aside the abstractions and put the man imaginatively in the flow of a story, where he had to visualize a specific scenario.
Jesus forced him to sense the callousness of the priest and the Levite who left the beaten man on the road, to feel the compassion with which the Samaritan saw the wounded man, to move mentally through the specific acts of generosity the Samaritan showed. Then Jesus asked him, “Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” (Luke 10:36).
Jesus did this all the time with his parables. He evoked the sense of rejoicing one might feel when recovering a lost coin or a lost sheep or discovering a hidden treasure in a field. He prompted people’s imagination to feel the outrage of a worker finding out he is paid the same for working all day as one who came along at the end.
The parables were not just “illustrations” of abstractions. They required people to have “ears to hear and eyes to see” in order to understand them (Mark 4:10–13).
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It is one thing for me to agree that I should forgive. It’s another for me to listen to a story where I feel the perturbation of the older brother who sees a party thrown for the one who wrecked the family—only to then see that that feeling, as justified as it seems, is the very problem the kingdom of God confronts (Luke 15:11–32).
Without empathy, the problem is not simply that we will deny the humanity and created goodness of other people (although that’s certainly a problem). It’s that we will have a superficial view of sin—seeing it in the cartoonish terms of a person who sets out to be a villain. Jesus, though, said that a time is coming when whoever kills his disciples “will think he is offering service to God” (John 16:2).
Anyone who has ever had to confront someone leaving a spouse for someone else knows that this requires empathy—not to excuse the sin, but just the opposite. It requires knowing human nature and the situation well enough to imagine all the stories the sinning spouse is telling themselves in order to believe that what they are doing is okay.
Preaching a call to repentance requires having the kind of empathy that can imagine all the strategies a person might use to evade the call to repentance—even if they are the opposite strategies the preacher himself might use. A preacher confronting drunkenness had better be able to imagine what it would feel like to say, “I deserve this bottle because I’ve worked hard this week,” as well as what it would feel like to say, “I am so terrible a person that I’ll never be anything other than a drunk.”
It’s hard to imagine a biblical figure less empathetic than John the Baptist, who cried out, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come!” But it’s precisely through empathy that he was able to do this. He had already imagined how these religious people would tell a story that exempted them from condemnation: “And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham” (Matt. 3:9).
Without empathy, it’s easy to see people as categories, as types, as worldview-holding rationalists who can repent by trading in one set of propositions for another. It’s hard to get a more “progressive” and less biblical view of humanity than that.
Data doesn’t sin. People do. A religion without empathy doesn’t only lead to forgoing the sweetness and light of the gospel. It rids itself of the hellfire and brimstone too. People used to call that “liberal.”
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
