“Toxic Empathy” and the Myth of Facts Over Feelings

Challenging a modern fable

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

(A seven-minute read.)

Over the last six months, a couple books have been published, written by Christians, which have seemingly identified one of the greatest existential threats to the future of Christian civilization: empathy.

The first one, released in October, is called Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, and was written by Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey. The second one, published just last month, is entitled The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits, and was written by theologian Joe Rigney.

I’ve not read either of them—nor do I plan to. But I’ve heard a number of quotes by both authors and have frequently encountered the general sentiment both personally and via other avenues.

Another recent example comes from Elon Musk, who, on Joe Rogan’s podcast two weeks ago, said that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Though he clarified that he thought there was a place for empathy, he also said that it was a “bug” of Western civilization that was easily exploited, and referred to it as “suicidal empathy.”

The basic argument goes like this: one of the problems with contemporary Western society is a type of religious and political approach that prioritizes empathy and compassion, making decisions based on feelings rather than facts. This is deeply problematic because, among other things, it moves us away from truth and sometimes into affirming sin (and ultimately the deterioration of society).

I could provide numerous examples of this, but this distinction especially became more pronounced in the wake of George Floyd in 2020. One of the common charges, in response to the calls for social justice, was that people of color—and their allies—were demanding that the lived experience of Black people should supersede the hard, raw, objective data of racial equality.

If people just looked at the facts, it was frequently explained, we’d clearly see that racial equality was something achieved long ago in America (and we had statistics and polices and Supreme Court decisions to back up such claims).

We therefore couldn’t and shouldn’t trust the feelings of Black people to shape policy, since those are subjective and fickle (and besides, we were told, there were plenty of Black people—like this person and that person—who didn’t feel the same way), but we must instead make decisions based on “facts.”

This is actually a charge that has been leveled at me a few times by people I know and love. I’ve been told, when discussing various topics related to politics or religion, that my problem is that I make decisions based on my feelings, while the person speaking arrives at their convictions based on facts.

And, they remind me, “the facts don’t care about your feelings.”

So what do we make of all this?

As you can imagine, I have a few disjointed thoughts, and I want to share them with you.

So here goes.

1. The fallaciousness of an Enlightenment anthropology.

For starters, it’s rather interesting to me that when the “facts” over “feelings” charge is leveled, it’s presented as obvious and self-evident that this is a bad thing. It’s pretty much a given, presented as a “trump” card, that “facts” are superior to “feelings.”

But who says this is so?

Such a perspective results from a distorted anthropology (that is, a view of human beings), influenced by the fallacious view of the Enlightenment which maintains that logic, reason, and thinking are superior to emotion, passion, and feeling.

There’s a lot that could be said about this, but, simply put, I reject that sort of anthropology.

As I’ve noted many times before, we’re not simply, as René Descartes proposed, “thinking things.” We are feeling things and physical things and social things—and that’s not a bad thing.

To be clear, I’m not proposing that feeling is superior to thinking, nor that we should prioritize “feelings” over “facts.” I’m simply saying that we shouldn’t implicitly maintain, as though it’s obvious, that “facts” are superior to “feelings.”

We are wholistic creatures who must engage all aspects of our personhood, paying attention to each part of our being.

As this relates to Christianity specifically, especially its American iteration, there are definitely pockets of American Christianity—like the charismatic movement—that place a lot of emphasis on emotionality and feeling.

But there are also lots of Christians who are very skeptical of emotions, pointing to places in the Bible, like Jeremiah, which says that the “heart is deceitful,” and insisting that we must therefore be very suspicious of our feelings and emotions.

I get it—and appreciate the words of caution.

But without belaboring the point (I could write a lot more on this), I simply want to say that insisting that “thinking” is superior to “feeling” is very much the product of a particular historical and epistemological moment, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the biblical worldview.

The bottom line here: being accused of “feelings” over “facts” isn’t necessarily the burn people think it is.

And sometimes—though not always­—we can trust our hearts.

2. The absence of epistemic self-awareness.

To be candid, fewer things frustrate me more than encountering people—either historical figures in my academic research or people in my personal life—who seem blinded to their own subjectivity, especially when they accuse other people of being subjective (e.g., when someone accuses “those Presbyterians” of reading the Bible through their “creed,” while not realizing or acknowledging that they’re doing the same thing).

I don’t get dogmatic about much, but this is one thing I’m willing to get pretty dogmatic about: simply put, no one is completely “objective.” No one has a “view from nowhere.” No one grasps “just the facts, ma’am.”

We all engage in the world outside ourselves through the lens of our experiences, our traumas, our biases, our presuppositions, the pizza we ate last night.

This isn’t to slide into pure relativism (I’m a “critical realist,” not a postmodernist).

It’s simply to say that it’s a myth that somehow, some way, one person—or group of persons—has figured out how to rely simply on “facts,” while other groups of people have relied chiefly on “feelings.”

Our feelings are always a factor in our convictions, beliefs, and worldviews—no matter how “objective” we claim to be. All of us are subjects, and it’s impossible not to be. Achieving complete “objectivity” is seemingly an illusion, and that’s actually fine (this perhaps deserves another piece, but I think we should probably aim for “fairness” rather than “objectivity”).

Again, we are wholistic, multi-dimensional people who all make decisions based on a myriad of factors—some rational, some emotional, some experiential, some relational, some social. It’s a complicated process that can’t be unscrambled.

The best we can do is to be aware of our own biases, pre-commitments, and experiences—and seek to be as fair as possible.

Again, this doesn’t mean we surrender to an extreme relativism. I still believe in the existence of “objective truth” and that we can ever move closer to grasping it. I just want to constantly interrogate my own apprehension of it.

Thus, a little self-awareness and humility on this account would go a long way.

Otherwise, it just seems like we’re trying to make a Nietzschean “power play.”

3. Facts are facts?

The late Patrick Moynihan, US Senator from New York, famously once said that “everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.”

I won’t say much about this point, but I think it’s rather dubious anyway to assume that the “facts” are always on one side of an argument.

Each particular issue deserves its own discussion and examination, but the bottom line for me in this is that just because a person appeals to a certain set of “facts,” “statistics” or “data,” it doesn’t mean that the “facts” are truly on their side—no matter how much they thump their chests, claiming they are.

4. Jesus’ life and death was the greatest expression of empathy.

Lastly, of all people, Christians should be the most committed to empathy. The center of our worldview—the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus—is the epitome of empathy.

So committed was God to identifying with the human experience—full of pain, suffering, and death—that he willingly chose to become human and die the eternal death we deserve. Truly, there, on the cross, we affirm that Jesus bore “our sins” in his body and “carried our sorrows” (see Isaiah 53:4).

We might even say that Jesus was so committed to empathy that it cost him his life. Indeed, it wasn’t the nails that killed him; it was his identification with our condition that crushed his soul and broke his heart.

You can’t get more empathic than that! But that’s part of the “scandal” of the cross.

With all of the above said, I’m not at all saying that we should travel through life making decisions based on an unfettered empathy. Of course I think we should also interrogate our empathy, recognizing that there are also boundaries in God’s kingdom.

But I also feel like much of society in general and Christianity specifically suffers from too little empathy rather than too much of it. And we should recognize that we are multi-dimensional people who need to pay attention not only to our thoughts but also our feelings.

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Shawn is a pastor in Portland, Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational and embodied expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.