The Sin of Empathy
That's cool, but have you considered... black fragility?
“Do not fear being on the wrong side of history; Fear being on the wrong side of eternity.” It was 2019, and I was listening to the evening sermon at an evangelical conference in rural Wales. This declaration came at the crescendo of a well-known London pastor’s sermon to a massive conference hall filled with students and ministry workers — who else has a week to throw away in rural Wales? “Wake up!” he glowered through his glasses, “We are at war!” His military-grey jumper emphasised the point. We were at war. We didn’t have time to waste debating ‘unbiblical’ ideas. It was an excellent sermon.
A few days later at the evening talk, the same pastor was interviewing a couple from Nigeria who had set up an orphanage for children who had lost parents in the civil war. To explain their decision to build an orphanage, the couple were setting the scene of their life during the war: Their neighbour was murdered by Boko Haram when he heard the slaughter of the couple’s goats and stepped outside of his house to investigate. “I would hate to be one of your goats,” the pastor responded. Mouths fell open. We expected more from a man who, apparently, had experienced war himself. Needless to say, I was not surprised when I read that the same pastor was stopped from taking services after, allegedly, failing to disclose information about an historic abuse scandal. He didn’t seem to have much empathy for victims.
The rise of Christian Nationalism in America has caused the market to flood with books claiming empathy as a dangerous and sinful weapon of progressives. Pastor Joe Rigney’s book, The Sin of Empathy, was published in February of this year, less than a year after his resignation as president of Bethlehem Seminary in Minnesota. According to Bethlehem Seminary’s board, ‘divergence of personal vision’ lead to this mutual decision. Part of this ‘divergence’ was Rigney’s advocacy for Christian Nationalism. Rigney instead joined Doug Wilson’s seminary, New Saint Andrews College in Idaho. Doug Wilson is notorious for claiming that slavery in America was not sinful since ‘the vast majority of the slaves had already been enslaved in Africa by other blacks’, and therefore American slavers didn’t enslave slaves. He also claimed that the American Civil War was sinful because it resulted in the loss of life. Instead, abolitionists should have focused on spreading the gospel, since ‘the gospel over time necessarily subverts the institution of slavery generally’.
It’s difficult to overstate how important words and their meanings are to evangelicals. Evangelicals believe that the Bible is the final authority on any spiritual or moral issue. So our views on immigration policy, for example, shouldn’t be swayed by how we feel about migrants drowning in the English Channel; it should be decided by what the Bible says.
But the Bible directs Christians to welcome the stranger, love your enemies, treat everyone as a neighbour. How can anyone find Bible verses against immigration? Writers, like Joe Rigney, need to convince their readers that a verse has an alternative meaning to what they think, as the ‘real’ definition of a word might be hidden by context or the original Greek. The evangelical obsession with words becomes their Achilles’ Heel, as their search for the most accurate bliblical interpretation can cause them to follow leaders who disguise their extreme opinions with claims of a biblical worldview.
Rigney leverages the evangelical fixation with words and spends a whole chapter reworking the dictionary definition of ‘empathy’ so it can be defined as a sin. Empathy, according to Rigney, is a sin because empaths lose all sense of proportion, even empathising with sinners — Jesus would be shocked. Empathy ‘makes their suffering their own in a more universal and totalizing way’. Quoting Edwin Friedman’s book, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, Rigney claims that empathy is ‘a disguise for anxiety … and a power tool in the hands of the sensitive’ because empathy can trigger progressive change. With no sense of irony, Rigney declares that ‘Mainline Christian denominations baptized these progressive values, loosely attaching Bible verses to them (while studiously ignoring or denying the rest of the biblical witness)’.
Rigney can’t expect his readers to just abandon their humanity. Even if his readers agree with his views on race, women, LGBT rights, and immigration, they still need to feel like good people. It’s easier to feel like a good person if you believe bigotry is God-ordained. Rigney needs to find a substitute for empathy to make his message more palatable. Enter pity.
Pity and sympathy, according to Rigney, are interchangable with compassion. Empathy is a outlier to his arbitary definitions, so Rigney complains about the New Internation Version’s (NIV) translation of Hebrews 4:15: ‘We do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who was tempted in every way, just as we are - yet he did not sin’ (bold mine). This might seem like an inconsequential difference to ‘sympathize’ in other translations but Rigney assures us that what is ‘At stake is the difference between virtue and vice, goodness and sin’. But surely ‘empathize’ captures the feeling of this verse more? If Jesus was fully human and also experienced weakness, then he doesn’t just sympathise with or pity us, kind but disconnected, might send flowers. Jesus feels our suffering. Either way, both translations are fine, but Rigney needs to convince his readers that God doesn’t empathise. Not only that, but ‘there are times when [even] pity and compassion are absolutely forbidden’.
Rigney gives his readers, with a focus on church leaders, a script to follow (flashback to UCCF) when offering comfort because ‘Compassion is one of those trained emotions’. His script is summarised by four sentences: “This is hard. I know you feel that way. I’m with you in this. I have hope.” There’s nothing obviously two-faced about this until Rigney breaks down his steps. “I know you feel that way” and “I’m with you in this” communicates ‘that we see and recognize their emotions’, but ‘without necessarily endorsing or affirming all that they are experiencing’.
For church leaders, it’s very important that they are careful not to affirm their congregants’ experiences if they are alleging abuse from another church leader. Rigney assures his readers that ‘there may have been some real sin involved on the part of leaders. But […] beneath the accusations was the empathic logic of “I’m hurt, therefore, you sinned”’ because ‘now criticism, rebuke, correction, and even disagreement could be regarded as abuse’. Bizarrely, he alleges that victims are having marriage trouble and are using their ‘new victimhood narrative’ to strengthen their marriage with ‘a shared enemy’. He also dismisses Christians who move away from unhealthy churches which practise ‘gaslighting’, where ‘Behavior [they] had been taught was normal they “now realised” was psychological abuse’. This is an example of gaslighting by Rigney’s own definition: ‘psychological manipulation in which the abuser sows self-doubt and confusion in their victim’s mind such that they question their perception of reality’.
Black people and other racial minorities face the brunt of Rigney’s ‘victimhood’ accusations. He warns pastors about what they might face when ‘allowing minorities the chance to share their experiences’. When ‘the conversation moves to a discussion of what the church must do going forward […] the tone shifts.’ The ungrateful minorities will turn on the native pastor saying, “Why do you have to insist on imposing your white perspective on everything?” Rigney shakes his head at the pastor’s innocence. ‘This is a subtle bait and switch, enabled by untethered empathy’. This ‘hostage situation’, Rigney complains, means that discussions about ‘the issues is clearly out of the question’. One example he gives is a discussion about race where ‘someone brought up “white fragility,” the notion that white people find the entire discussion of race so uncomfortable that they reactively shut it down or blow up in the face of it. “Yes,” you say, […] But are we allowed to talk about black fragility?’ White fragility is a legitimate term in race theory, unlike black fragility which is not a thing.
This is not the only time Rigney distorts terminology used by black people to describe their experience. Rigney takes novelist and activist Toni Morrison’s concept of the ‘White Gaze’, where black authors feel compelled to adapt their writing for the normative white reader. ‘The progressive gaze’, Rigney announces, ‘is my modification of the concept of “the white gaze.”’ Rigney is trying hard to monopolise ‘victimhood’, for someone apparently against it. The progressive gaze is the ‘imaginary progressive in their head’ who causes us to ‘write and speak in such a way (we think) will have maximum persuasive power to them’.
The White Gaze causes black writers to diminish their experiences for the comfort of white people. Rigney’s so-called ‘progressive gaze’ is just being someone who writes to persuade. Speaking from experience, when I write Fundie Book Club, I have two people I’m writing to in my head. The first is a person who has no experience with Christian fundamentalism, to whom I need to explain alien terms. The second is a conservative evangelical that I need to persuade by breaking down arguments and offering a different perspective. These imaginary people might also shape my ‘rhetoric, orientation, and framing of various issues’. Good! What I’m writing should be accurate, measured, and fair. Even faced with facts ‘such as “1 in 4 women are the victims of sexual assult,” or “Blacks are imprisoned at a disproportionate rate”’, Rigney objects that these are ‘skewed narratives based on specious statistics’.
Pastor Joe Rigney is not an outlier. The ‘Sin of Empathy’ has been preached from the pulpit in conservative evangelical churches for a long time. Warnings about the Sin of Empathy have always increased when the heterosexual white male norm is under threat. We’re seeing it today, both in the UK and US, as women’s and LGBT+ rights make headway, just as we saw warnings increase during the US Civil Rights movements in the 60s. Lerone Martin writes that Republicans hoping to win over white evangelical voters in the 60s ‘employed a language of morality and decency, law and order […] discourse white evangelicals understood as explicitly evangelical religious values’. Or as Rigney writes, ‘the difference between virtue and vice, goodness and sin’.
Rigney, and other pastors like him, sell a false dichotomy. Empathy is not the opposite of holiness, just as pity is not the equivalent of love. Pity allows for judgement, battle lines, and dogma. Love doesn’t. Check what is being said by your church leaders by asking, ‘Is this the same argument that racists used in the 60s?’ and are you okay with that. Pleading ‘biblical values’ for our bigotry won’t cut it. We need to wake up. We are on the wrong side of eternity.