It's in the Code ep 146: “Empathy is…What, Exactly?”
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Those on the American political and religious right increasingly warn against the dangers of excessive empathy. The problem with America, they assert, stems from empathy run amok. One such voice on the right is that of Allie Beth Stuckey, who warns us of the supposed dangers of “toxic empathy.” But what is empathy? Why is it perceived to be such a threat? What is “toxic” empathy? And why are Christian conservatives so threatened by empathy? In this first episode in a series devoted to Stuckey’s book, Dan takes on these and other questions. Listen in to join the conversation!
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As always, I want to say welcome to It's in the Code.
The series is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Pleased to be with you as always.
As always, welcome your thoughts, insights, comments, feedback, disagreements, anything you have to share.
Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
And as always, I want to thank everybody who supports us in so many ways.
If you're listening to this right now, you could be doing something else.
And so thank you for listening.
To all of our subscribers out there in particular, thank you.
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So this week, as I said in the last episode, just concluded a series and starting something new.
And really a couple series.
I'm kind of calling this like the overarching thing.
I read it so you don't have to.
I've had some folks.
Colleagues in particular, and you know who you are if you're listening, so thank you, reach out and recommend a couple books to discuss.
They feel like would be worth the time on It's in the Code, and I took a look at those and I'm like, oh my god, yeah, those are like perfect for the kind of work we do on this series.
And so starting one of those today, and it's going to explore a topic that is becoming increasingly prominent right-wing Christian circles.
It's a topic that Brad has spent some time on, and it is the topic of empathy.
Which, again, if you've followed what we've talked about, if you've followed some sort of popular discourses among Christian nationalists, conservative Christian commentators, what have you, you know that empathy is now a bad thing.
And we are going to look at Allie Beth Stuckey's book, Toxic Empathy, How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.
And again, to say it, I am reading this book so you don't have to.
Don't recommend going out and buying a copy.
If you want to do that, you can do that.
I feel guilty enough about the fact that I bought a copy, which means Allie Beth Stuckey gets a little, you know, a little money from that.
You can look her up yourself.
You may know who she is.
But as just as the back jacket of the book will say, Allie Beth Stuckey is the author of You're Not Enough and That's Okay and the host of the podcast Relatable.
Where she analyzes culture, news, and politics from a Christian perspective, and that Christian perspective is what we're looking at.
Christian here, of course, translates into everything we talk about under the nomenclature of high-control religion, contemporary Christian nationalism, and so forth.
And again, I want to say thank you to the colleague who recommended this, who wants to remain nameless.
You know who you are, so thanks.
I guess things isn't the right word.
Like I was talking to somebody else, they're like, why do you spend all your time reading stuff that you disagree with that makes you mad?
And I'm like, I don't know.
So thank you, colleague, for giving me something else to get worked up about.
We're just going to move our way through this book.
That's how this series is going to work.
And I am reading it for the first time weekly.
You know, if you're reading it, we can be reading it together.
If you're just waiting to check in, just know that every week I'm reading it.
I have only read in detail the introduction to this book, and that's what we're going to kind of start with.
And I don't know how long this will take.
The same colleague that recommended it likes to tease me about saying, like, you know, some idea of how long a series is going to be, and they always end up being longer.
I will say this from the book.
Every paragraph of this book is just infuriating to me, and when I get infuriated, I could do an episode on, like, almost every paragraph in the book.
I'm not going to do that because I don't want to spend, like, six months on just this book.
But we will spend some time, and I don't know exactly how long that will be, but we'll start on the introductory, some introductory stuff this week and next week, and then just dive into the chapters.
But what I want to do, again, is kind of today clear the ground for the discussions to come.
And so again, the title is Toxic Empathy, How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.
And what I want to do this week in this episode is really try to gain a little clarity about what exactly empathy is.
Or what she thinks it is.
I'm also going to share what I think empathy is and so forth.
And I think this is going to be important because it's going to structure her discussion.
Everything she has to say moving forward is going to hinge on this.
But my reactions to her work are also going to hinge on this.
So really what I want to do today is get a little bit into what she says empathy is, how she understands it in this introductory way, why she opposes it.
I want to contrast it with my understanding.
That's really going to set the stage to kind of go deeper as we move along.
The book is organized.
A lot of books are.
She's got an introductory chapter that kind of lays some things out, and then five chapters where she addresses what she thinks are the lies that toxic empathy tells us.
And we'll go through those chapters in due course, which means that she'll go into deeper discussions and detail through the book of things that she introduces here in the early stages of the book.
So we'll talk about that, okay?
So I want to start by just like defining empathy.
Like the title of this week's episode is Empathy is What Exactly?
This is a term that I think everybody's familiar with.
I think everybody has a sense of what empathy is, what it might mean or feel like to empathize with somebody.
But defining or explaining it can be difficult.
And this isn't true just for those of us who use the word in like an everyday sense.
People who study empathy, mental health professionals and philosophers and others also disagree about the definition.
So there is no, especially within popular usage, no single agreed-upon definition of empathy.
And even Christian authors who write about it, like Stuckey or another book that has been mentioned in the podcast, a more sort of rigorous book—I still disagree with it, but it's more rigorous—is Joe Rigney's The Sin of Empathy, which has really sort of, I think, launched a lot of this discussion into popular awareness.
Even the Christian authors who write about it usually note this.
They usually then say that there's no agreed-upon definition, it's hard to define, and so forth.
But then they go on to build an entire theology off of rejecting it, which is its own thing.
But a particular point of confusion that comes up is that empathy is often used in these discourses and by some of these authors, including Stuckey, in my view, is often used as a synonym with sympathy.
So when a lot of people use the word empathy, they would use empathy and sympathy pretty interchangeably.
And if you ask them to define the distinction between the two, they probably wouldn't be able to do that.
And that's going to be important for me for reasons that we'll get to.
But let's take a look at what Stucky says.
Again, I'm working through parts of her introduction to the book.
And for her, she says, empathy is not inherently bad.
She says it's actually good.
And she goes so far as to say, this is on page 11 of the introduction, she goes so far as to say that, quote, in a way, Jesus embodied empathy when he took on flesh, suffered the human experience, and bore the burden of our sins by enduring a gruesome death, end quote.
So she says empathy is not inherently bad.
The problem isn't empathy as such, it's toxic empathy.
And what is toxic empathy?
Toxic empathy is essentially empathy run amok.
For her, it is what happens when we are governed by empathy alone.
And of course, this is what the left, this is what progressives, as she says in the subtitle, this is what progressives and people on the left are trying to do.
They're trying to get you to live your life only according to empathy.
And so what's the problem with that?
Like, what's the problem with living according to empathy?
That brings us into her definition of what empathy is.
And here's how she defines empathy.
She even has a note for it and so forth.
Again, it's in the introduction.
She defines empathy as, quote, the ability to place yourself in another person's shoes with or without having had a similar experience.
End quote.
And so far, so good.
Stated this way, empathy essentially names a form of what other scholars and authors will describe as perspective taking.
The ability to understand.
Another's perspective on some issue.
And I agree that's a good conception of empathy.
That's a conception of empathy I essentially agree with.
But this is where her discussion goes off the rails.
This is where she's going to start saying, here's why empathy alone is not enough.
Here's why empathy is essentially a threat.
It's a good thing, but it's a threat.
And her discussion is typical of the Christian discussions I've seen.
I'm not going to pretend that I have read every conservative Christian discourse.
I grew up in a context where it wasn't in the language of empathy, but the threat that is thought to harbor here was essentially the threat that I grew up being warned against in high-control religious circles and so forth.
So it's pretty typical.
And the problem that she tells us, the problem is, as she tells us, it's a few pages later, is that, quote, empathy literally means to be in the feelings of another person.
End quote.
And she highlights in the feelings of, hold on to that.
That language literally means this.
Okay?
So what?
So what she's saying is that, you know, a proper degree of empathy, empathy in the right measure, can motivate us to do all kinds of good things.
But, she says, toxic empathy, this is her words again, says we must not only share their feelings, that is other people's feelings, but affirm their feelings and choices as valid.
In other words, for her, empathy means that we don't just understand another person's feelings, but we have to affirm those feelings.
We have to take them as valid.
We have to take them as justified.
We have to accept them as valid and justified and good.
And so she goes on to say that empathy is just an emotion, and that as such, it can be hijacked and co-opted by the progressive wing of American society to lead us astray.
A progressive wing of American society, that's not me.
So, empathy is an emotion that can be hijacked by others to lead us astray.
And just, again, moving forward, hold on to that theme.
That's going to run through the entire book.
Because her claim is going to be in this book that she is teaching us, good conservative Christians, how not to have our empathy hijacked by progressives.
So, the danger of empathy, as she sums it up, again, quoting her, is she says, What is she saying?
She's saying, and again, this is typical of this discourse, that the problem with America, what's leading America down the path away from Christian righteousness, is that we just care too much.
And we're going to see as we go through the book what this caring too much looks like, how it leads us astray.
For now, I want to stick with the issue that she's raising here of just how to make sure that good, Christian, conservative Americans don't fall prey to caring too much because they want to be good people.
So that's what she says empathy is.
That's why it's a risk.
That's why it's a threat.
What I want to do here is I want to clarify what I think empathy is.
I want to distinguish it from sympathy.
And what Stuckey does is basically conflates empathy and sympathy.
And I want to suggest that empathy is not, even at this early stage, what Stuckey thinks it is.
And again, I think that this is important because it's going to dictate what she says moving forward.
So she said, I said this a minute ago, that empathy literally means to be in the feelings of another person.
And when she says literally means, she probably is thinking about the linguistic roots of the word.
And empathy does come from two Greek roots.
It comes from the word em, the prefix, which means in, and pathos, which means, you know, emotion, deep feeling, what have you.
So it comes from the, you know, em, pathy, to be in the feelings of another.
But here's the thing.
This is a broader issue.
This is an issue, again, I could do a whole episode on.
It doesn't mean that it literally means that.
It's a fallacy to assume that the linguistic roots or origins of a word determine its current meaning or use.
Words mean what people do with them.
So people do this all the time, and I think it's because she's a Biblicist.
For those who are not maybe familiar with that term, it means that she understands the Bible in a certain way.
She's going to appeal to the Bible as a certain kind of authority.
She is going to be an inerrantist, and we did a whole series on that.
She's going to claim that the Bible is inspired an inerrant word of God.
It is without any kind of error, and every word in the Bible comes from God.
It's what God wanted it to be.
And so you get this habit in conservative Christian circles—I grew up in this in church, and you still see it—of, like, looking at, okay, what did this word mean in its context, in this text, and so forth?
Here's what it meant.
Well, that was God's word for it.
So, like, that's what that word always means.
It becomes this, like, authoritative meaning.
And this understanding of language that's a really superficial, naive understanding of how language works.
It bleeds out into other things.
And so she's looking at the origin of the word and saying, this is what it literally means.
It means to be in the feelings of others.
Okay?
That's what she means.
Okay?
That's a mistake.
Empathy means whatever it is that people mean when they use the word empathy, which may or may not line up with some original ancient Greek usage.
Just a thing to know, a thing to be aware of.
If you read other books on empathy, this will come up.
It's just important to know that understanding the origins of a word don't necessarily tell you what it means now.
But, having said all of that, the origins can be a useful place to start.
So let's contrast empathy with the word sympathy.
Because for me, these are importantly different words.
The word sympathy, it comes to English through French, which came from Latin, which came from Greek.
And it comes from a related prefix, sim, in Greek it was sin, S-Y-N, and pathos.
And it means literally sort of feeling with somebody.
So one was like in the feelings of another, one is with the feelings of another.
And the reason I think that that's useful is I just think that empathy and sympathy have distinctive meanings which shouldn't be collapsed.
I've already said I think that empathy does refer to perspective taking or the ability to identify.
Recognize and understand the feelings or perspectives of others.
As Stucky said it, to put ourselves in their shoes.
I think that's a great definition of empathy.
So if we want, we could say that this is what it means to be, quote unquote, in the feelings of others.
To understand what they feel or what we would feel if we were in their place.
But this is where I diverge from Stucky.
And here I'm following somebody else.
I wanted to make sure I wasn't just off base on this.
And so I went to the Encyclopedia of Human Emotions.
If you didn't know that's a thing, it's a thing.
And there's a great article in there on sympathy by a scholar named Candace Clark.
And so I want to give some credit.
It was written a long time ago, so I don't know if Candace Clark is still around or listening or interested.
But my understanding of sympathy and empathy lines up a lot with what was in this article.
And it means that empathy does allow us to understand the emotions of others.
It does allow us...
It does allow us to be in their emotions in that sense, but it does not mean, and this is really crucial for me, it does not mean that we have to uncritically affirm or identify with their feelings.
That's what I reserve the term sympathy for.
If empathy is to understand the perspective of somebody else, sympathy is to fully identify with.
The feelings of somebody else.
Not just to understand them, but to take them on as one's own.
To feel what they feel with them.
And Stucky collapses these two senses into one.
So what she is, what she's highlighting as the shortcomings or the risks of empathy, I think it's actually a rejection of sympathy, as I understand the terms.
Her concern, so throughout the book, when she talks about empathy, she really means sympathy.
Not just I can recognize and understand what somebody else thinks and why and so forth, but I fully accept, as she said, as valid and legitimate.
I affirm what they feel.
I feel it with them, so to speak.
So I think there's an important distinction between these, and it's just it's absent in her book.
And why does it matter?
Like, why am I talking about this?
Why am I not just saying more about what she says?
Why?
If we could argue endlessly about the definitions of words, that's not ultimately what this is about.
Why does this distinction matter?
Who cares if Stucky and I define empathy and sympathy differently?
I think it matters because it brings into view what's really going on in this Christian discourse about the evils of unbridled empathy, beyond Stucky, within this broader discourse.
And so here's the first thing that it does, this collapsing of distinctions that she does, is it masks the real value of empathy.
And Candace Clark says it this way, okay, the person who wrote the article in the Encyclopedia of Emotion, she points out that empathy does not necessarily lead to sympathy.
It's a precondition for it.
Before we can sympathize with somebody, before we can identify fully with their emotions, we would have to understand what their emotions are.
So empathy is a precondition for sympathy, but sympathy does not automatically follow from that.
A whole range of different emotional responses can open up from there.
It can lead to sympathy, but it can also lead to critique.
It can lead to rejection.
It can lead to judgment.
Once we understand and can identify what somebody feels and maybe why, and imagine if I was in their perspective, yes, maybe I would feel these things, it doesn't mean that we automatically sympathize.
And this is why, for me, this is why this matters, because empathy is an absolutely crucial, critical capacity that we have.
It is what allows us to understand and render intelligible emotions and responses that may be completely foreign to us.
Because they're not ours.
We're not in that position.
It's what allows us to make sense of somebody's perspective and emotions.
And this is a capacity that I work to exercise all the time in the work I do here on the podcast and in other contexts.
We spend a lot of time in this series.
On Straight White American Jesus, Brad and I have done this for years now, trying to do what?
To essentially inhabit and understand the space of conservative American Christianity, high-control Christianity, Christian nationalism, and understand the perspective that's put forward there?
We do not accept that perspective.
We do not sympathize with that perspective.
But we have to work to understand it.
And this is something that I say to students all the time.
I say, you know, A precondition for critiquing or evaluating somebody's position is an accurate understanding of it, and I think that requires empathy.
But I do not sympathize with many of the positions I understand.
Empathy does not mean sympathy, as Stucky presupposes.
So, how does she benefit from masking the true value of empathy?
How does collapsing these two distinctions together, these two definitions, what's the benefit of that?
I think it's this.
If we can deaden people's capacity to experience empathy, we ensure that they never sympathize with somebody.
And so what I think Stucky and others do is they are working to just cut off that ability to even empathize so that it can't lead us into the sin of sympathy, which is the real thing they're after.
So when we define those who are different from us as enemies of the people or as evil, As fallen, as sinners, as demon-possessed, as enemies of America, etc.
All the things that the conservative right does, we deaden that empathetic capacity.
We ensure, then, that people will never feel sympathy for others who aren't like us because they can't even understand their perspective.
They're just evil.
They're just bad.
They're just crazy.
They're just insane.
They're just irrational.
Those are all ways of not empathizing with somebody.
And that this is a mechanism, I want to be clear, to be really clear, this is a mechanism that isn't limited to those on the political or religious right, but it is a mechanism that is central to the functioning of both high-control religion and Christian nationalism.
So that's the first reason why it matters that she collapses this distinction.
The second is that understanding the way that she conflates empathy and sympathy...
It's going to help us bring into view the real issues that motivate this discourse, and we're going to see this throughout the book.
Those who study emotions have for a long time recognized that emotions are not just universal phenomena that happen quote-unquote naturally.
All humans have emotions, but there's more to emotion than just nature or the essence of being human or something like that.
Emotions are culturally coded and conditioned.
Culture conditions us.
With regard to how we feel emotions, in what context we feel those emotions, toward whom we should feel those emotions, how to express those emotions, etc.
I've talked about this with religion, I don't know, a million times when I say that it's not just about belief, it's about a lot of other things, including all of that stuff about how we're to feel emotions and express it and so forth.
That's all part of what emotions are.
And what that means is, and here's the key, as culture changes, Emotions change with it.
And this applies to sympathy.
And this is why Stucky masks sympathy under the name of empathy.
We do, in fact, live in a culture where large segments of the population, in many cases majorities of the population, have extended sympathy beyond the bounds that were once culturally dominant.
So to take the issues that Stucky's going to be looking at, the issues that matter to her, We live in a society where large swaths of the population, certainly larger than in the past, and again, sometimes majorities, do feel sympathy toward women seeking abortion care.
They do feel sympathy toward those who identify as queer.
They experience sympathy toward immigrants and the undocumented.
They experience sympathy toward those demanding social justice and so forth.
We live in a society in which the culture has shifted and that has changed the range and focus and expression of sympathy.
And so the anxiety that high-control Christians like Stuckey feel about too much empathy or sympathy or whatever, what it really stems from is the fact that society is changing and challenging their understanding of traditional morality.
And in addition to that, as society changes, as their understandings and definitions of morality have come under fire, their position of social and cultural power and prestige...
Have been displaced.
They have been knocked off of their perch of holding this kind of unquestioned social and cultural power and prestige.
And that anxiety is what provokes this discourse.
So to be clear, as is always the case with high control religion, the central and fundamental issue here is power and control.
That's the issue.
So all of that is at work.
In Stuckey's conflation of sympathy and empathy, that's why the distinction matters.
And that's what we're going to pick up as we go.
Now, I'm running out of time here.
I've got to wrap this up.
There's a lot more to say.
We're going to pick up some more things next episode, obviously.
But here's the big takeaway to this episode, if there is one.
It is this.
The conservative Christian opposition to empathy, it's not really about empathy.
It's about maintaining the coercion.
And the social and cultural authority traditionally experienced by high-control Christianity within American society.
That's what it's really about.
It's not a concern that people actually care too much.
It's a concern that they sympathize with broader segments of society and that that sympathy threatens the control of traditional white Christians.
That's the issue at play.
And next episode, we're going to pick up, we're going to stay in the introduction because Stuckey is going to tell us...
What contrasts with empathy?
If the danger is toxic empathy, what is the Christian solution?
She's going to tell us that.
And she's also going to highlight several of what she identifies as the red flags of toxic empathy.
We're going to pick those up and we're going to see her alternative.
What stands in contrast to toxic empathy?
How do we spot toxic empathy?
We're going to look at those, and then that's going to set us up to go into the five chapters of the book where she actually tackles what she sees as the big lies of toxic empathy.
So, please, check those out.
As always, thank you for listening.
As always, welcome your thoughts on this.
We have, again, I've got another book in mind for when we're done with this.
I haven't done the kind of, like, examining books before.
If you've got other texts or books or things that you think are worth the time and effort to consider, let me know.
DanielMillerSwag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
I mean, the subject line put in, like, another book idea or something like that, so I kind of know to take a look at that.
I'm always building out this series in the future, and I know that sometimes that means that it's going to be a while before I get to some of the topics that you propose.
But this is and always has been a pretty listener-directed series, and I want that to continue.
So I welcome your thoughts, comments, reflections on the topic from today.
Other thoughts on empathy or sympathy, these are things that I address.
I try to respond to as many emails as I can.
We also talk about these in the supplemental episodes, so I would love to hear your thoughts on that.
And if you've got ideas for where we need to go in the future, whether it's books or other topics, please let me know.
