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In this episode of Straight White American Jesus, we explore the troubling idea—promoted in some evangelical circles—that empathy is a sin. The conversation centers around Joe Rigney’s book The Sin of Empathy, unpacking its flawed biblical and theological claims. We examine how this perspective targets women in particular, framing empathy as a weakness that leads believers astray.
The episode also connects this mindset to broader cultural issues such as feminism, emotional intelligence, and traditional gender roles within Christian communities. Finally, we discuss the implications of this view on topics like transgender rights and abortion—and point out the striking absence of New Testament support in Rigney’s arguments.
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Axis Mundi The mental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.
Empathy almost needs to be struck from the Christian vocabulary.
It does, yes.
Empathy is dangerous.
Empathy is toxic.
Empathy will align you with hell.
Absolutely. Sympathy, compassion, yes.
Empathy, compassion.
Deadly and dangerous.
And this will be controversial.
Women are especially vulnerable to this.
Absolutely. In our churches, women will have empathy for the sinner.
They'll have empathy for the rebel.
They'll have empathy for the toxic sixth person who's gossiping and slandering and being bullied by the spiritual authority of the church.
And in their empathy, they'll...
Align with those who are misaligned with God.
One of the patterns that we've seen in 25 years of church ministry, the most divisive households are those households where there is a loud, aggressive Jezebel spirit wife paired with a weak, passive Ahab beta male.
Not ungodly.
For a man to speak into who his wife is friends with.
Absolutely. Who she can hang out with.
Who she's following.
Who she listens to.
Because a husband and wife have to be united.
Now, I'm not chasing Sharon around policing her friends because my wife is godly and she wants nothing to do with the ungodly.
But I'm telling you, women can be vulnerable.
*music*
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Good to be with you on this Monday.
And today we are going to continue our discussion about the quote-unquote sin of empathy.
Last week I spoke about Joe Rigney and his new book, The Sin of Empathy.
I also played a clip from Elon Musk who says that empathy is the fundamental weakness or bug in Western civilization.
I want to continue that discussion.
It struck a nerve, a lot of discussion in our discord and a lot of outreach from folks, and there's just a lot more to say.
And so I want to jump into that and then go into some other things later in the episode about evangelical culture and what is happening in this moment.
Let's do it.
I want to continue my discussion of the biblical basis of Rigney's case in The Sin of Empathy.
And how it is so, not only specious, but also revealing.
Last week, I reflected on the fact that for Rigney, the biblical case for thinking of empathy as a bad thing is really based in Old Testament slash Hebrew Bible passages.
And the passages that he chose, those from Deuteronomy, where God commands killing or talks about killing, and...
Ezekiel, where God is the wife of Israel, and they're in a monogamous relationship, and Yahweh, in essence, ends up punishing and abusing Israel in public as an adulterous wife who is shamed in front of all those she has prostituted herself for and with.
These are interesting choices biblically.
So, A. As I said last week, you couldn't find anything from Jesus.
No New Testament.
You're the Christian.
You're the person who is dedicated to being Christ-like.
And the only Bible passages you could think of to defend your case are Deuteronomy and Ezekiel.
To me, that's telling.
How can you make a Christian case for something with no Christ?
Enough said.
But let's get theological, right?
I trained in theology.
I don't get to do theology that often anymore, but I spent a lot of my 20s reading theology, becoming a theologian.
And so, you know, let's dust off those books.
Let's stretch those muscles and talk about it.
Deuteronomy and the passage that Rigney quotes is a place where Rigney...
Is putting the Christian believer in the place of God.
With Ezekiel, we have a situation where God, Yahweh, is explaining Yahweh's relationship to Israel or to humankind more generally.
This is a Yahweh in relationship to humans setting.
Yahweh thinking about and articulating the way to get the wayward, adulterous Israel back in line as his wife.
Theologically speaking, you're asking human action and ethics to correspond to God's unique relationship to the world.
You're basically saying, this is how God relates to Israel.
So this is how I, an individual American man or whoever living in 2025, should relate to all other human beings.
That is not apples to apples.
That is not oranges to oranges.
He would have a better case.
If he appealed to Jesus and said, this is how Jesus, the representative of humanity, the second Adam, the Savior, Redeemer, who became human in every sense, this is how Jesus asked us to do this, this, or this.
His biblical case is weak, but his theological case is telling.
It's telling because he's saying that you And he's specifically talking about men who are leaders in churches.
You need to guard against empathy, especially as it comes to women, as Yahweh guards against his wife, Israel.
The correspondents in that analogy are two male authorities overlooking a weak partner prone to waywardness, empathy, and other sins.
He's putting The male pastor in the place of God, the father.
There's no mention of Jesus and his human experience in a case where we're talking about human emotion, human relationships, human nature.
Now, just to remind you, when it comes to the Deuteronomy passage, the Deuteronomy passage goes like this.
If anyone in your family tries to get you to worship other gods, don't do it.
Kill them.
So, you know, that's there.
It's in the Bible.
But Deuteronomy, just one of those books that you only quote as a Christian leader like Rigney if you're really in need.
Because Deuteronomy, Leviticus, they're full of so many laws and directives from God and commands that are so foreign to the modern world that if you followed every one of them, if you just said, hey, we're going to follow these.
You would end up with this idea that if someone tried to get me to go, you know, become a Hindu or an atheist, I would kill them.
Now, the common response from the Christian theologian and leader and pastor is, well, we have a new covenant.
So we don't do that.
That was then.
This is now.
Jesus has changed everything.
Yep, you're right.
Okay. I mean, at least as it goes with the Christian theological story for the most part.
Rigney doesn't have anything in the New Testament to quote.
He doesn't have any new covenant evidence.
He doesn't have any new covenant guidelines for this.
So he has to go back to Deuteronomy and make his case and say, yeah, you know, there's times in the Bible where God's not in empathy, like in Deuteronomy, where he's like, if someone tries to worship other gods or get you to do that, kill them.
All right.
So the theological case is weak.
He either is asking you to go back to a covenant that...
It tells Christians not to eat certain foods, to keep kosher.
I mean, it tells Israel, and then by extension Christians, all of these commands, not to cut the sides of your hair, all that stuff.
So Rigney, does he want you to follow all of that too?
Usually the answer from the Christian theologian is no, new covenant, great.
That means this is not great proof, Rigney, for your case.
Ezekiel, we've talked about it.
You have to play the role of God, who's...
Punishing a wayward wife.
Theologically, you are asking the human to be God in the story and to relate as God does, and that doesn't make sense.
What would make more sense, according to Christian biblical ethics and Christian theology, is if you said Jesus was fully human.
This is the fight that the theologians fought in the first two and three centuries of Christianity and the Christian tradition.
Is Jesus fully human or is he fully divine?
Is he both?
Can he be both?
Is he God?
Is he created?
Is he not created?
Any of you who know your Christian theological history, you know about the formation of the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of Christology, Christ's nature.
We have the Council of Nicaea that leads to the Nicene Creed.
We have the Council of Chalcedon and both of those in the 300s and the 400s.
323 and 451, they lead us to a place in Christian history where the orthodox position is that Jesus was fully human, meaning he went through the full gamut of the human experience.
Why? Because if he didn't, he couldn't be the redeemer.
He couldn't redeem humanity unless he was human in every sense.
In Romans, Paul says Jesus is the new Adam.
So, if Rigny could make the case through Jesus, That empathy was bad.
He might have a stronger theological case.
He's not doing that.
He doesn't do that at all.
It's telling.
It's a weak biblical argument, and it's a bad theological approach, which perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by.
Now, switching gears, in chapter 3, he makes some claims that are truly repugnant, and I think just at least worth mentioning here.
He says, We noted the way that weaponized pity or empathy can be used to manipulate others.
At the extreme end, we can think of the way that the transgender movement uses the prospect of suicide to manipulate parents into, quote, affirming their child's gender identity.
Would you rather have a dead son or alive daughter?
This is gross, and I don't think I need to explain that.
He calls this, quoting John Piper, one of his mentors, emotional blackmail.
And there's a complete disregard for the idea that the person who is experiencing gender dysphoria may feel as if their life and their experience with their body and with themselves is so misaligned.
That it would lead them to thoughts that are suicidal.
Instead, it is simply a movement that blackmails people.
Well, you better let us do this.
Otherwise, you know, you'll see the consequences.
He goes on to say the same thing when it comes to abortion.
He says there's empathy myopia because the politics of abortion is one that advocates frequently.
For poor and endangered women to sanction the murder of unborn children.
And he makes this case that, look, the only empathy that is employed in the abortion movement is for women, living women.
And like, this is some of the most shallow material, right?
Because there's no engagement with anything deep when it comes to reproduction, with...
All of the politics and social dynamics of abortion and reproductive rights.
But he really shows his car.
I mean, I think what's more interesting here is him showing his cards because he in one sense is saying, well, no empathy.
That's that's not allowed.
On the other hand, he's saying.
It's not OK to murder an unborn baby.
And the argument for.
Thinking of abortion as murder has always depended on the idea that the fetus is a human being.
That a clump of cells, a clump of cells that is developed for a week or six weeks is a human.
Their status, human.
There's this really funny clip of somebody showing Charlie Kirk an image of a cell or two.
They say, do you think this is human?
And Charlie Kirk's like, of course I do.
And the person's like, this is a porpoise.
It's, you know, it's a porpoise in development.
And that example sort of makes the case of, like, there's no actual discussion about the idea that a clump of cells would have the same status as a human being as a 32-year-old woman who is pregnant or any other human being walking among us.
But stick with me.
The point is that the whole movement has relied on this.
This is an unborn baby.
This baby cannot defend itself.
It is the most vulnerable.
To end the fetus, the clump of cells, whatever, to determine a pregnancy, is to attack the most vulnerable in a vicious way.
Rigney's signal of myopia here is really one that says, I want to disregard women, which he, obviously, we've talked about at length here, does throughout the book.
I want to disregard women so that I can regard a clump of cells.
That I am calling a baby and have the moral high ground always when it comes to this debate.
I've made the case for a long time on this show.
I've made the case in print.
I've made the case everywhere about how this view that life begins at conception is not a historical Christian view.
It's one that is, for the most part, not completely, but for the most part, a modern invention that really came to be a political cudgel for the religious right.
Let me move on.
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chapter four something that I think is really interesting.
He talks about how the logic of empathy goes like this, and you can really see a window into Rigney the pastor, Rigney the guy who is deeply, deeply, deeply, Pastoring a congregation on an everyday basis.
Christians came to implicitly adopt the subjective logic of victimhood.
I'm hurt, therefore you sinned.
And thereby succumbed to the tyranny of the sensitive.
The tyranny of the sensitive.
The idea that I'm hurt, therefore you sinned.
This story played out, Rigney says, in hundreds of churches and ministries in various ways over the last decade.
Through a mix of empathy, faux justice, and credibility, the world discovered a powerful steering wheel for the church, one that progressive billionaires exploited to neutralize and co-opt God's people for their own.
Now, I'm always just going to be a stickler for this.
There's no evidence.
I don't know what faux justice is here.
I'm sure that this is just in-person, like, in-group talk.
He knows that the people reading this book will understand his reference and get his gist, and they can picture...
Whoever that is, the Black Lives Matter protester, the person marching in Portland, whatever may be.
But here's the kernel of the thing.
I'm hurt, therefore you sinned.
And to him, this is really what has led to so many problems in the Christian churches.
He says in the next paragraph, and in some cases, there may have been real sin involved on the part of leaders.
Now, this is where I'm going to stop.
Because once again, he just goes really quick.
There may have been some real sin involved.
And like, if you've listened to this show, if you followed my work, you know we have documented this stuff.
We've interviewed the people who've documented this stuff.
I have interviewed so many survivors of sexual abuse from within the church.
I have interviewed Robert Downen, who, as a journalist, covered the Southern Baptist Convention and the hundreds and hundreds and thousands of sexual abuse and assault and...
And other cases within that denomination.
I mean, the entire denomination had a reckoning.
If you follow the right accounts on Instagram that document every time a pastor or somebody in ministry is arrested for sexual assault, for rape, for child pornography, it is in the thousands every year.
So he just skips over this.
In some cases, there may have been real sin involved on the part of the leaders.
And I want to stop here and go to a year, 2016.
2016 to me is a year that obviously people remember because of Donald Trump getting elected.
But it's also the year, if you asked me, that the ex-evangelical movement really kind of took shape.
Like, ex-evangelicals started to get press in the years after that, 2017, 2018.
You saw, some of you are old enough to remember, Chrissy Stroop, And Blake Chastain and Julie Ingersoll on a documentary by my friend Liz Kinecke talking about ex-evangelical.
And this was like the first time you started to see ex-evangelicals on TV talking about it.
And since then, there's been all of these lives of ex-evangelical, all of the different iterations and leaders and influencers and controversies and whatever.
But what remains important to me is this.
Ex-evangelicals on the whole are people who were people of deep faith, who gave their faith so much.
I have a whole episode called We Were the Duns, Not the Never Wers, that we gave everything.
I gave everything.
If you know my story, I gave everything to my evangelical faith.
I was in two feet, whole heart, clear eyes.
If you read my book, you know I was in.
Did see you at the, at the poll every week, not once a year.
And it's a lot of times I prayed in front of the flagpole by myself.
What's the point?
In 2016, ex-evangelical starts to take shape because so many folks saw in their churches, the hypocrisy and abuse, the things ethically they'd been warned against.
They saw them up close and personal in their church.
People who voted for Trump, who wanted a bully.
Who wanted violence, who wanted cruelty.
And then you got Church2 along with MeToo.
And you got all of the stories of sexual abuse.
All the stories of how purity culture led to rape culture.
We've had, and we could document these for the next 10 years.
And there's people out there just doing amazing work.
People who have been so brave.
Krista Brown, who wrote Baptist Land.
People like Sarah Stankorb, who I've interviewed on this show, who wrote a book about disobedient women, women who told their stories of being abused in church.
So when he says in this throwaway sentence, and in some cases there may have been real sin involved in the part of leaders.
A couple of them.
Might have found a few.
Every ex-evangelical, every person who's aware of everything I just talked about is like, nope, got to stop there.
Sorry. So much hypocrisy.
So much abuse.
So much cruelty.
So much cover-up.
So much scandal.
We could go through them all.
Ravi Zacharias.
Jerry Falwell Jr.
What happened at IHOP with Mike Bickel?
Carl Lentz.
The list goes on and on and on and on.
In some cases, there may have been real sin involved in the part of the leaders, but in many cases, beneath the accusations was the empathetic logic of, I'm hurt, therefore you sinned.
No evidence.
None. Just says it.
No evidence.
No statistics.
No nothing.
No long example of a church where this happened.
A pastor who resisted such logic, Rigney said, would undoubtedly be accused of deflection and denial.
Any defense was tantamount to a confession of guilt.
There's this real sense here for Rigney that when people bring to light scandal and abuse, when they bring to light things that have hurt them, they're doing so to blackmail others and to take control.
That it's just about power.
He says on the next page, there's a subtle bait and switch enabled by untethered empathy.
Are you supposed to orient someone as a distressed sufferer who just needs to be heard?
Or as a sober-minded co-laborer working to make wise and biblical decisions in the pursuit of ethnic harmony?
You can do both.
Both are possible.
This is what I was trying to say last week.
Empathy is not a one or done.
It's not an either or.
You can do this.
I'm going to orient myself to you as a distress sufferer.
Tell me about what happened.
Tell me why you are traumatized.
Tell me why you are hurt.
Tell me about what went on in this inappropriate relationship or someone making advances or something, whatever it is.
Talk to me.
Tell me about it.
You can also be a co-laborer.
Who wants to make wise and biblical decisions in the pursuit of harmony?
You can be somebody who says, okay, I want you to know, like, I've listened and I understand and I'm here and I see it.
You can also be somebody who's like, as a community, we have to find a way to make changes or move forward in a manner that leads to healing and trust that sheds hypocrisy.
He keeps going.
The same dynamics often manifest in discussions of abuse.
A meeting is called to hear from victims of domestic abuse.
You listen with compassion as women tell stories of violence and assault.
Then a proposal is made to form a task force to address the issue.
You have questions, so I guess you is Rigney, the pastor.
What will the scope of the task force be?
Who will they report to?
What kind of authority will they have?
Again, the mood shifts.
Why are you opposing efforts to address abuse?
There's no evidence here.
He's just replaying, like, fictional scenarios.
Like, sure, let's have a task force.
It's probably okay to, like, figure out the alignment around that.
But he's like, whoa, I was just, I'm getting in trouble because I'm trying to, like, have details here.
And then he says, so then certain things are off limits.
You just can't talk about sensitive things around people because the sensitive police will...
We'll talk about trauma and then it's all over.
Like, there's this real...
Like, when you read this chapter, there's this real sense of somebody who just has the hardest time listening to others, taking in with what they're saying, and then working with them and with others in the community to form a way forward that does justice to every stakeholder there.
Like, there's this real sense of, like, well, I'm supposed to be in charge, but you guys are saying you're hurt and you want to, like...
You know, have some changes in the structure, but like, I'm supposed to be in charge.
So what should we do here?
I don't know.
Okay. We shouldn't talk about it.
Oh, I'm in trouble again.
Oh God.
Okay. This is hard.
All right.
Well, empathy police got me that the tyranny of the sensitive once again.
Oh man.
All right.
Okay. I'm going to finish today with, I think one of the most infuriating quotes from this book.
There's a lot of them, but it's in, it's in the latter chop.
It's in the very latter parts of the book and, and Rigney.
He has a chapter that's titled, Feminism, Queen of the Woke.
And it all comes out here, right?
He just thinks feminism is the devil.
I mean, all of his links up to here, going from empathy to women, it's now feminism.
Feminism is the enemy, and wokeness is the enemy, and here we have arrived.
Let me just focus on one quote, because I'm going to get carried away, I'm going to get angry, I'm going to get irritated, and who knows where my thoughts will go.
He quotes a man named Calvin Robinson, who is an Anglo-Catholic leader from the UK.
Here's the quote.
Generally speaking, men tend to be more theologically rigid, whereas women tend to be more theologically flexible.
That is because men do not have the emotional intelligence of women.
We are more black and white, meaning we tend to be logic-based when it comes to problem solving.
Women tend to be more inclusive.
Okay, let's just stop.
Let's just get it right.
Men tend to be more theologically rigid.
Women tend to be more theologically flexible.
Why? Women are more emotional intelligent.
That's what Robinson starts with.
What is the biblical proof of that?
This is just armchair social psychology.
Give me a biblical text.
Make the case from the life of Jesus.
I want St. Paul to tell me this.
Men are less theologically flexible.
Women are more emotionally intelligent.
This is you doing everything you hate about what supposed Christian liberals do.
You always say they're sneaking stuff into the Bible.
They're sneaking woke.
They're sneaking LGBT rights.
They're sneaking stuff into the Bible.
You just got to let the Bible speak for itself.
Listen. Where is this anthropology?
I want to see this theological anthropology in the biblical case.
You're not making it.
You just give us these armchair social psychologist assumptions.
Men also, you say, are not emotionally intelligent.
Then why are they the only leaders?
Like in a vocation that involves counseling.
Marriage counseling.
Life counseling, working with people from all walks of life who are hurt.
If your anthropology says that men are not emotionally intelligent as a whole, why?
Why do they get to be the only leaders?
And I know what you're going to say.
I'm not dumb.
You're going to talk about biblical authority and all this.
You're going to make the case for complementarianism and male authority, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But if your anthropology is not based on the Bible, then my response is, Why, from a social, anthropological perspective, would you choose the non-intelligent ones to be the leaders of your community?
Interesting. Robinson goes on.
We are more black and white, meaning we tend to be logic-based when it comes to problem solving.
Okay. Now we're doing this, right?
We're doing the men.
Logical. Yeah.
Women. Emotional.
That means they're more inclusive.
Quote, they are more empathetic and tend to be more emotion-based when solving problems.
You can see how that might be a problem when a group is claiming to be an oppressed minority and the thing preventing them from attending church is the cruel doctrines and the regressive scriptures we follow.
There's also like a lot of other problems in your anthropology.
The fact that like men think in black and white.
You know who thinks in black and white developmentally?
Teenagers. Adolescents.
So you just told me that, like, men who are not emotionally intelligent and have the critical thinking skills of a 15-year-old are the ones who are in charge, but yet it's the women who are supposedly too inclusive, too emotionally sensitive, that are ruining the community by siding with the oppressed minority.
Now, Rigney's like, I got to make my case biblically, right?
I just smuggled in some social anthropology.
All right.
And he says, you know, women, it's great that they're empathetic, but that can be a curse too, because, you know, that can be a liability when it comes to, quote, guarding the doctrine and worship of the church.
So then he's like, let me remind you of some biblical passages that make my case for me.
And again, it is God saying in Deuteronomy, don't listen.
So again, this is a place where God is not talking about, don't side with those who are the oppressed minority.
It's God saying, don't listen to those who want you to worship for false gods.
It's not women walking into the church being like, hey, should we get out of here and go be Hindu?
It's women who are siding with the oppressed minority in our congregation.
That's not apples to apples.
So he quotes the same passage in Deuteronomy where God's like, if someone tries to get you to worship another God, Kill them.
Cool. Good one.
What's his other ones?
Next pages.
I don't have time to go through all these.
Exodus 32. Numbers 25. No Jesus?
No New Testament still?
You just took an armchair theology and biblical law from the books that say don't cut the sides of your hair?
Don't eat pork?
Do you listen to those instructions too, Joe Rigney?
so.
Now, here in a minute, I'm just too excited.
This is going to be like a two-hour episode.
Rigney's like, men, you better be careful because female distress activates male agitation.
So if the women are upset, the men are going to get upset.
And then the whole congregation is going to be, it's just going to be a big mess.
You can't have a Jezebel woman and an Ahab man.
It'll just ruin the whole thing.
It undermines everything in a congregation.
He even says at one point, this completely undermines the manly code that formerly held, whereby anyone entering onto the field of discourse did so at their own risk.
He basically says that all of the, he's quoting Alistair Roberts, but he's basically saying that discourse should be battle.
That when you're in church, the emotionally unintelligent men with the critical thinking skills of an adolescent should approach counseling, listening to their congregants, being attuned to their flock.
They should approach that as combatants.
Argue for the ideas as somebody on a battlefield.
That is what it means to be a man and a leader and a minister.
And if anybody claims to be hurt, they're just blackmailing you with victimhood.
It's the tyranny of the sensitive.
This is dehumanizing.
It is no way to have a community.
And it explains why so many people.
Have found their way out of these kinds of churches.
Not all kinds of churches.
Not all Christianity.
But out of these kinds of churches.
Many of you already know this, but Rigney was discipled and mentored by Mark Driscoll and John Piper.
So if you know about them, you know that none of this is surprising.
I'm going to do one more episode on this because I want to focus on why empathy is under the gun now.
I'll move away from Rigney.
I promise I'm done with this book.
But I'll move to Elon Musk and I'll move to others.
As always, friends, we'll be back Wednesday with It's in the Code.
We'll be back Friday with the Weekly Roundup.
If you haven't already, go subscribe to Andrew Seidel's One Nation Indivisible.
And also look out here for Leah Payne's Spirit and Power, all about charismatic Christianity and American public life, talking about prosperity, gospel, immigration, ICE, and so many other topics that are Front and center in our public square right now.
Thanks for listening.
We'll catch you next time.
conjures images of old-time religion and conservative Christianities.
But what if I told you...
That the Bible Belt is more than holy rollers and holy judgment.
What if I told you that like any other belt, the Bible Belt is filled with holes that lead to unexpected places, where pastors and deacons and volunteer ministers demand equality and representation for gay couples, single moms, and anyone trying to get to the ballot box.
My name is Dr. Gillian Frank.
And my new limited series podcast, Red State Religions, explores the persistence of liberal religious values and progressive politics in so-called red states by telling the stories of faith leaders, lay people, and congregations, and how they put faith into action.
