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Allie Beth Stuckey and the opponents of “toxic empathy” tell us that the remedy to excessive empathy is love. But what does this mean? What is “love,” as they understand it? How is different from emotions like empathy or sympathy? And how does it license practices of abuse and coercion that empower high-control Christianity? Why, in other words, is their understanding of love so dangerous and damaging? Check out this week’s episode as Dan explains.
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Welcome, as always, to It's In The Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am, of course, your host, Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Thrilled, as always, to be here with you.
Love doing this.
It's a highlight of my week, getting to think about things and share them with you and hear from you.
And to that end, this is a series, probably more than anything we do, on Straight White American Jesus that is driven by you and seeks to be informed by you.
Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Please keep the ideas coming, feedback, thoughts, comments.
We are continuing to look at the theme of so-called toxic empathy, and we're specifically looking at the book by that title, by Allie Beth Stuckey.
As I said, starting a series on this, basically, I'm reading it so you don't have to.
And just had one episode come out, but I've already gotten feedback from a number of people on that.
It strikes a nerve.
Allie Beth does.
So yeah, keep the feedback coming.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
And I'm going to throw this out there.
I'm going to give up on trying to make any estimate of how long, I don't know, how long it's going to take to get through this book.
As I say, I'm reading it as we go through it, sort of by design.
Folks.
There's a lot in here that is worth talking about.
There is so much misinformation, so much gaslighting, such a window into the operation, intentional and unintentional, of high-control Christianity.
Literally every paragraph, I think, could be an episode.
I'm not going to do that.
We're not going to spend years on this book or anything, but I don't know.
I don't know how long it's going to take, because every time I start taking notes...
I get through less than I think that I will.
So let's dive in.
Last episode, first episode looking at this book, I basically looked at what I think empathy is, how it relates to sympathy, how I think they're the distinct concepts.
And some of you have given some feedback on that that I'm sort of mulling over and thinking over, might address some of that in the supplemental episode as well as in responses to you.
So thank you for that.
But laid that out.
And I think more importantly, Then the nuances of like which word means what and which has priority and so forth.
I also talked about why I think the interests of conservative Christians like Stuckey are served by collapsing empathy and sympathy into one thing that has to be rejected or guarded against.
I talked about that last episode.
Go back, take a listen.
That sets us up for this week's discussion, which basically is looking at sort of, okay, what comes next?
Stuckey warns us against falling prey to excessive, uncritical empathy, which she calls toxic empathy.
And for her, toxic empathy, or empathy becomes toxic, toxic empathy occurs when we so identify with the feelings and experiences and perspectives of others that we uncritically accept those feelings and experiences and perspectives without question.
We are essentially just washed away in the flood of what they're feeling.
And for her, again, that's the significance of the words that make up empathy, the words that mean sort of being in someone else's feelings.
That's the danger, she says.
The image I have is just being caught up in just a tidal wave, and you just lose your footing, and you're just sort of swept away in somebody else's emotions.
What we didn't get into in that last episode...
And I said we would this episode.
This is where we're going.
Is this question.
If feeling empathy is so dangerous, what are we supposed to feel?
In other words, what is the alternative?
Because remember, Stucky doesn't say empathy is bad.
She thinks it's good sort of in right measure.
What's problematic is when we have sort of too much of it and it turns into toxic empathy.
So what's the alternative?
And if Christians, as Stucky understands them, the kinds of Christians that she is interested in, the kinds of Christians she speaks for, if Christians run the risk of falling prey to toxic enemy, what's the solution?
How are good Christians, again, as she understands them, as she would define them, how are good Christians supposed to relate to other people?
And her answer can be summed up in one word, love.
Now, that's actually a misstatement.
It actually can't be summed up in one word.
But she and high-control Christians like her, they want you to think that it can be summed up in one word.
It's really, really simple.
Folks, it's simple.
Love.
It's not as simple.
And they smuggle a lot into that word love, and we're going to come back to that momentarily.
The first thing to note, though, is that when she says, you know, the alternative is love, like on one hand, you can't get more stereotypically Christian than this.
Of course, the Christian says that our relationship with other people should be governed by love.
And in a sense, there's nothing more expected, almost cliche, than a Christian appealing to love.
Like, it's probably the most basic concept or emotional word or whatever in the Christian lexicon is love.
But here is where you might get confused.
If you aren't familiar with how Stucky's kind of high-control Christianity works, if you haven't grown up with it, if you haven't encountered it, And you just hear the word love.
You say, okay, instead of empathy, we're supposed to experience love.
You might get confused.
Why?
Well, you might think, and I think you'd be excused for this, you might think that if you love someone, that means that you also empathize and sympathize with them.
This is kind of like baked into the concept.
A philosopher might say that one could think that empathy and sympathy are analytically included within the concept of love.
In other words...
How is it possible to say that you love somebody if you don't empathize and sympathize with them?
And I think high-control Christians trade on that popular conception of love.
In other words, they know that regular people, uninitiated people, even some of the people in their own churches and communities, when they hear the word love, they are thinking that that means empathy and sympathy and deep care and compassion and all those things.
So when they appeal to love, when somebody likes Stuckey, and again, I'm talking about Stuckey, but Stuckey for me is emblematic of so much of high-control Christianity.
When they appeal to love, when they place it at the center of what they say they affirm, what it communicates to the uninitiated, again, is care and compassion and acceptance and advocacy.
Basically all the things that come with sympathy and compassion.
A little bit of a callback here.
If you listen to the last series I did, looking at how high-control Christians respond to so-called faith deconstruction, giving this impression of love, it's a part of what I call there the bait-and-switch tactic of high-control religionists that they use, putting forward this very positive conception of something, sort of drawing you in, and then switching it with something else in the actual operation of their practices and their beliefs and so forth.
This conception of love is part of that bait-and-switch tactic.
So again, to the uninitiated, you might think that, oh, well, love, love's the central thing.
That must mean compassion and acceptance and all of those kinds of things.
But that's where you can't be confused.
So, just to make sure that we're not confused, just to make sure that we don't fall into the trap of thinking that love and sympathy or empathy, as she defines it, that they overlap.
Let's take a look at what she has to tell us.
What does she say love means?
And here's the difference for her.
She says that empathy is just an emotion.
I just want to throw out there a little bit of debate about whether empathy is an emotion or sort of a precondition for emotions like sympathy and so forth.
Sort of wrapped up in the topics I talked about last episode.
But she says empathy is just an emotion.
And that stands in contrast to love, which she says is, quote, and I'm quoting her here.
I'm going to quote her a fair amount today.
She says she defines love as a conscious choice to seek good for another person, end quote.
So love, as she understands, love is not an emotion.
It's a choice that one makes to seek the good of another person.
Okay, that's a key point.
It's a key point I don't completely disagree with.
I think that loving to a certain extent is a choice.
I would not say it's not an emotion.
But I think that we can choose to orient ourselves to people in particular ways, and love could be one of those.
But that's what she says.
Love is a conscious choice to seek good for another person.
Okay, so far so good, but what does that mean?
Or if you're listening and saying, okay, Dan, I'm waiting for the shoe to drop.
That doesn't sound so bad.
Got no problem with the notion of making a conscious choice to seek good for another person.
That sounds pretty good.
Well, on the next page, we get to the real issue with Christian love.
As Stuckey defines it.
So I'm reading for anybody who wants to follow along or take notes or heaven help you, you decide to read the book, whatever.
It's in the introduction, page Roman numeral 14, page XIV, says this, right?
This is the paragraph she writes.
She says, Christians are called to love, not just empathy.
While empathy may help us love, it is not love itself.
Empathy feels pain, but love always, quote, rejoices with the truth, end quote, 1 Corinthians 13, 6. We must seek and speak the truth in love, Ephesians 4, 15. Because God is love and is the source of truth, we can only embody this truth and love dichotomy.
Folks, truth and love is like hyphenated there.
It's like one word.
We can only embody this truth and love dichotomy to which we're committed by defining love and truth as he defines them.
1 John 4, 8. We look to his word, not our feelings, as our guide in all things, including the hot-button cultural and political issues of our day.
Folks, I could spend the entire episode just tearing into that paragraph, okay?
Here are some high points for me.
And if you want to go back, listen to that a couple times, you can.
There's actually a fair amount in there.
But in typical conservative Christian fashion, and this is a typical dynamic of high-control Christianity, Christian love is tied here to the idea of truth.
So, quote-unquote, seeking the good for someone else involves speaking truth to them.
And the key idea here is that this is what love is, and here's the idea, even if they do not recognize or accept your truth as their own.
And that's the key.
So love is speaking the truth to somebody else, even if they don't accept that.
That's what the good is.
We define, the Christians define what is good for everybody else, and then speak it to them.
And that is the truth, whether they recognize or accept it or want it or not.
And why?
I mean, again, if you're on an issue, you say, how pretentious is that?
This notion that I am going to go out into the world and tell other people what their good is.
I am going to tell them what they should want.
I am going to tell them what is good for them.
I am going to, even in the cases of Christian nationalism, Stucky's a part of that camp.
I'm going to enforce what is good for them on them, even if they don't like it and don't think that it is, in fact, good.
What license is that?
Why should I be okay with that?
Well, it's because, for them, the claim is that when they speak the truth, it's not just their truth.
It's God's truth.
That's what Stuckey means when she says that in speaking the quote-unquote truth to others, and I'm quoting her again, we look to his word, not our feelings as our guide in all things, including the hot-button cultural and political issues of our day, end quote.
That's what she means.
We, as Christians, we get to tell you what the good is.
We get to speak truth to you because it's not our truth.
It's God's truth.
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So, in contrast to conservative Christian positions, the claim is that progressive, quote-unquote progressive positions, and Stuckey explicitly affirms or, excuse me, appeals to progressive positions.
She's like explicitly political here.
Routinely calls them progressive positions, not even unchristian.
She says progressive positions are inherently unloving.
No matter how sympathetic they might be, no matter how empathetic they might be, they are inherently unloving.
Why?
Because they are, quote, untruthful and unbiblical, end quote.
So notice the rhetoric here.
No matter how well-intentioned a, quote-unquote, progressive is, they can't speak the truth because what they want...
is untruthful and unbiblical.
And Christians can enforce the good on others and tell others what is good for them because they are speaking quote-unquote truth.
Well, what does that mean?
It means that to affirm LGBTQ plus individuals, to advocate for social justice, to affirm access for abortion care, all the kinds of quote-unquote progressive positions Stuckey opposes.
To do any of those things, those are all unloving positions.
You don't love LGBTQ people.
You don't love people who experience injustice.
You don't love those who need abortion care.
No, no, no.
Those are all actually unloving positions because they are, quote-unquote, untruthful and unbiblical.
So what Stuckey wants to do, and again, this is in just good...
Conservative, high-control Christian fashion.
She wants to argue that Christian love is not a mere emotion because it is connected to truth.
It means that it's a matter of knowledge and therefore reason and not mere emotion.
And that is what separates it from the rest of us who are acting in ignorance.
So no matter how much it might seem unloving, no matter how much it might feel unloving, To be told, for example, that you are reprobate and fallen because your sense of gender is different than what you were assigned at birth.
To give just one example.
That might seem unloving, it might feel unloving, but Christians really are loving when they condemn you because they're speaking the truth.
Folks, this is first-order gaslighting, and that's not even what I want to talk about.
What I want to highlight is that this expression of love As articulated by Stuckey, and again, as such a defining feature of high-control Christianity, that this expression of love always involves power and authority.
The claim to knowledge, tying love to this claim to knowledge, ties it to power and authority.
And this is implicit when she claims the status of divine truth.
That's, of course, what she means when she claims the authority of the Bible as, quote-unquote, God's word.
The claim is that Christian conservatives are not guessing at the truth or sharing what they believe is the truth.
That's why they're not acting in good faith if they want to enter into some debate about what might be good for society, what might be good for different people, because they know the truth.
They don't have anything to debate.
They don't have anything to learn.
They are speaking from the position of God's truth.
And this means that they are speaking with divine authority.
And that, folks, means this is a matter of power, a claim to power.
Which means that Christian love, as Stuckey is defining it, is also wrapped up in a demand for and an entitled to obedience.
If one claims to love God, one must obey God.
And likewise, if we're speaking the love of divine truth, we are demanding obedience.
And if we are claiming to be the spokespersons for God, as Stucky is, right?
She's going to tell us over and over and over in this book that she's being biblical.
She's reading the Bible.
She's speaking out of the word.
If we are the spokespersons for God, we are claiming that we are entitled to obedience.
And I want to pause on this.
It's a really chilling thing to think about.
Why?
Because this is what enables cruelty in the name of love.
If you don't acquiesce to high-control Christians' demands, to their preferences, to their vision of society, they have license to bring you into submission against your will, all in the name of love, all in the name of seeking your good.
This is the logic of, hey, I'm doing this.
What?
I'm punishing you.
I'm hurting you.
I'm targeting you.
I'm condemning you.
What have you.
I'm doing this because I really love you.
This is that logic at its absolute worst.
Now, I've discussed before that people sometimes ask for guidance about how to spot high-control religion.
We critique high-control religion a lot.
People sometimes ask, like, how do you know?
How can you be sure?
What are the markers of this?
And a rule of thumb that I've noted before, and I think it absolutely applies here, Is that the same principles that would hold for interpersonal relationships also hold for religious communities?
So let's think about this claim to express love, this kind of love, this kind of behavior defined as love when we experience it within an interpersonal relationship.
So just imagine these statements.
If you really love me, you'll do what I say.
You'll obey me.
Or...
You know I love you because I exercise authority over you.
Or the person who says, I'm punishing you or I'm hurting you right now because I really love you.
It's basically the idea of, oh, look what you made me do.
It's the logic of this hurts you more than it hurts me or I'm punishing you for your own good.
You get the idea.
The point is that we would recognize this as abusive and coercive in an interpersonal context.
We have other people in our lives who relate to us in these ways and call it love.
We know that that's toxic.
We know it's abusive.
We know it's coercive.
And we need to recognize it in the same way in a religious or institutional context.
And we also need to recognize that situating these claims to authority and demands for obedience as divine in origin doesn't make them less abusive.
And this is what you hear in the religious, you know, but the Bible says, or but God kind of response.
I've talked about this before.
I've talked about engaging with people.
I've heard this, I don't know how many times, who advocate some position.
They say, look, I get that it might sound bad.
And like, maybe, you know, you think that, but it's the Bible speaking.
It's God speaking.
It's not my position.
And the idea is that because it's coming from God or the Bible, it somehow becomes non-coercive or non-abusive.
That just doesn't follow.
And we have to reject that logic.
And I think this is especially true because, and I've discussed this a lot of times, we never actually get to the Bible or God or God's Word in those arguments, right?
When the person says, but God says this, the Bible says, it's not God or the Bible saying it, it's them.
It's their understanding of God.
It's their interpretation of the Bible.
The appeals to God or the Bible are always mediated by the partisans of high-control religion who claim to speak for God, or to have the proper understanding of the Bible, or to uniquely hear God's word.
And this is the same thing as, like, Stuckey says this.
She says, quote, I analyze culture and politics through a biblical lens, end quote.
This is not just Allie Beth Stuckey telling us what to think or saying, here's how I understand these things.
Let's debate this or have a conversation.
No, this is her claiming to speak for God.
This is her appealing to the Bible as an absolute authority.
And I've talked about this a lot of times.
If you listen to me, you know this.
If you're new to this, I invite you to go back, listen in particular to the series on biblical inerrancy, and that's my effort to say all the reasons why, not all the reasons, but a lot of the reasons why I reject this notion of the Bible as a kind of absolute authority.
Okay?
So when somebody says, well, you know, it's not abusive or bad or coercive because, you know, the Bible says it or God says it, I think the opposite is true.
So, to be clear, To elevate what we know from experience as abusive, that is, when we experience it in other people, we recognize it as coercive and abusive, we know what it feels like.
To elevate that abusive or coercive experience to the level of ultimate authority, and then to define it as maximally good, as good as an expression of a divinely...
A perfect divine being as a form of divine perfection to elevate it to the level of absolute authority and moral goodness is abhorrent.
It doesn't make these conceptions less problematic or more acceptable.
It makes them worse.
When you take something that we know is coercive and abusive and you elevate it to a moral good, that doesn't make it morally good.
That makes it even just morally worse.
It makes it more abhorrent.
And it's not enough to say, as Stuckey does, quoting her again, that, quote, to love means to want what is best for a person as God defines best.
End quote.
The high-control religionist always means as we define what is best.
They'll appeal to divine authority, but you've got to remember it's always them speaking.
It's always them telling you what that claim is.
We're only scratching the surface of how these points are going to play out as we move through this book.
We're going to make our way through it, and we're going to see Stucky apply this logic over and over and over again to a different set of issues.
We are going to see her apply her divine lens, biblical lens, to these topics.
And I think throughout this text, we're going to get a taste of how this, what I would call the abuse in the name of God dynamic, works.
Here, I've just wanted to register the coded language of love within this discourse of high-control Christianity, how that works.
And sort of a concluding thought here, I've often had people come to me, clients who are recovering from religious trauma, People who grew up in church, maybe people who encountered somebody in their life, what have you.
They come to me and they'll say things like this, say like, you know, I remember hearing about unconditional love all the time in church, but like, I never felt it.
Like, why was there that gap?
Why didn't I feel what I heard about all the time?
And for me, folks, this is why.
It is because love is persistently coded in terms of authority and obedience.
And the corollary of obedience is punishment.
It's negative consequence.
So the contrast that Stuckey draws between love and empathy as she defines him, it rehearses a move that is completely typical within high-control Christianity.
It's the move where coercion and control are masked under the rhetoric of care and concern and love, and it becomes positively Orwellian in its effect.
It encodes as love the kinds of behaviors and attitudes and treatment that we would never accept.
As loving in other contexts.
Which is also kind of a side issue.
It's also why high-control Christians emphasize the need not to listen, not to trust our own fundamental intuitions.
This all fits together.
This is what the language of quote-unquote love does within her discourse, within high-control Christianity.
We're going to see this as we move through the book.
Next episode.
We're going to get into what she defines as the red flags to ensure that we're not seduced by toxic empathy.
We've seen how she understands empathy, how she tries to dismiss it.
We've now looked at her conception of love as a contrast.
So she's then going to wind down her conclusion and sort of get ready to dive into her topics by giving us some red flags to look at so we good conservative Christians can make sure that we don't fall into the morass of toxic empathy, that we're not seduced into that way of thinking.
We're going to take a look at that next episode.
For now, I need to call it a day.
We're out of time.
I want to thank you for listening, as always.
I want to, in particular, thank our subscribers.
You keep us going in so many different ways.
If you're not a subscriber and you like what you hear, you're interested in what we do, we put out a lot of content, we want to keep doing that, we want to keep doing new things, you are the ones that help us do that.
So if you're not a subscriber and that's something that you'd be in a position to consider doing, I'd ask you to do that.
Otherwise, again, love to hear from anybody.
DanielMillerSwag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
As always, I'm behind on the emails.
I don't get to respond to them all as fast as I would like, but I do read them.
