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Allie Beth Stuckey highlights five “red flags” to help us make sure we don’t fall into the trap of “toxic empathy.” What are these “red flags?” Why does she highlight the ones she does? What do they tell us about the rhetoric around “toxic empathy” and what we can expect from the rest of her book? And how do they illustrate that (once again) high-control Christians are often not acting in good faith why they claim to be interested in debate and discussion? Join Dan for this week’s episode to find out!
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axis mundi what's up y'all Brad here with a big announcement we are hosting a straight white American Jesus seminar starting in June June 5th June 12th June 19th and June 26th we'll be hosting purity culture race and embodiment this will be led by dr. Sarah Malziner who is an absolute expert on
Purity culture, white supremacy, and the history of white Christian womanhood in the United States.
She'll be talking about the racist origins of evangelical purity culture, white body supremacy, purity culture and racial formation, and the ways this all links up with white Christian nationalism.
You can check out all the details at straightwhiteamericanjesus.com and click the seminars tab.
You won't want to miss this.
We've done this in the past and it has sold out.
If you are looking for a new way, To dig in critically to these issues, this is the perfect opportunity.
Check it out now.
*music*
As always, I want to begin by saying welcome to It's In The Code, series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
Again, as always, my name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought, your host.
And again, as always, I want to thank everybody for listening, for doing all the things to support this series, to support the work of Straight White American Jesus, especially our subscribers, everybody who helps us do so many things that we do.
As I say often, if you're listening to this right now, there's other stuff you could be doing.
And so thank you for that.
I invite you again, as always, to share any thoughts, insights, concerns, pushback, ideas for new episodes, whatever you might have to me.
Always value the insights.
As you know, if you listen to this series, it is driven by you in ways that a lot of the other stuff that we do is not, or at least not as immediately.
So always welcome those insights.
I have a few things on deck for our supplemental episode coming up where I get to respond to some of those.
I'm interested in your thoughts, especially as we continue today getting into Allie Beth Stuckey's book, Toxic Empathy.
And again, I'm reading this book so you don't have to.
And believe me, the further I get into it, the more true I think that that is, that I'm reading it so that you don't have to.
As you know, as we've talked about, if you've listened to the first couple episodes in this series, this is part of the, her book is, And this is the third episode in this series.
And if you haven't had a chance to check out the previous couple, I invite you to go back, maybe take a listen to those.
And we still haven't made it very far into the book.
And we've been living in the introduction where Stucky gives us kind of an overview of some of her thoughts, which she will then develop in more detail as we go through.
But there's, folks, there's just, there's a lot.
There's a lot of stuff.
Here to talk about, and so we're going to do that.
So today we're looking at the last section of the introduction.
I promise, next episode we're getting out of the introduction.
And in this section, she very helpfully identifies five what she calls red flags that we can be on the lookout for.
That is, these are signs that we can look for to make sure that our properly measured empathy doesn't become excessive, that it doesn't let us fall prey to the toxic empathy.
Of everyone on the left, which is to say, in her view, everybody who isn't part of that edifice of high-control American Christianity.
I've noted before, it's interesting to me that she specifically labels them usually as progressives, like there's an explicitly political dimension to this.
She doesn't call them all sort of non-Christians and so forth, but progressives.
And often this kind of Christian discourse masquerades as non-political, and it's...
She's explicitly citing progressives.
Maybe that's a theme we'll pick up as we go.
Maybe it's not.
I don't know.
But it stands out to me here.
What I want to do today is I want to take a look at these red flags, these five red flags that she gives us.
And here is how she sets up her discussion of these red flags.
She says, and I'm quoting her now, Is always misguided.
How can we tell when empathy has become toxic?
That's the quote.
So empathy is okay in the right measure, but if it affirms sin or lies, it's always misguided.
I just want to say from her perspective, we're going to be affirming a lot of sin in this series.
So, you know, buckle up if that sounds like a good time.
We'll affirm sin for the next, you know, however many episodes.
How can we tell when empathy has become toxic?
How do we know when empathy is affirming sin or lying to us and so forth?
And so in that context, she gives us these five guidelines to follow.
And we're just going to move through these.
And I think they're all really telling for a number of reasons, one of the least of which is that they're all about how we encode social meaning.
You're listening to a series called It's in the Code.
We spend all this time sort of decoding popular culture and texts and the rhetoric that people use.
Things like this.
And this is all about, these red flags are all about encoding meeting.
And so we're going to go through those.
Every one of them could demand more time.
As I said before, if I spent as much time as we could on this book, we'd still be here a year from now, and that's a bit much.
So I'm just going to march through them, and I just want to highlight the way that I think they work and what she's doing.
And I'm hoping this sort of sets the stage for us to keep an eye on these same kinds of rhetorical mechanisms that she's using in this discussion.
I think they're going to drive the entire book.
They're going to appear over and over and over again, and I want us to see these.
So, red flag one for her.
Sounds like a call sign for somebody in one of the Star Wars movies, like red flag one.
Red flag one, this is her term, the use of euphemisms.
Now, we know what euphemisms are.
I think we all have a sense when somebody says that's just a euphemism.
But just in case, here's a dictionary definition.
It's from the New Oxford American Dictionary.
And yes, to be clear, I am a weird, nerdy guy who has a big dictionary laying around.
That's what I do.
So yes, I literally went to a big paper and hardcover dictionary to look this up.
But here's a dictionary definition of euphemism.
It is a mild or indirect word or expression.
Substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing.
Okay?
Simple example is when people use the language of somebody sleeping together instead of saying that somebody had sex.
They slept together instead of they had sex.
And why do I bring that up?
I bring it up because it's telling to me with that definition to look at how Stuckey defines euphemism.
And this is what she says.
Okay?
In the introduction, I'm quoting her again.
She says euphemisms obscure the truth to make a position seem more palatable.
They obscure the truth to make a position seem more palatable.
Did you catch the difference there between, like, the dictionary definition that people might use or even the language of, you know, they slept together, said they slept instead of they had sex?
To her language, euphemisms obscure the truth.
What she does is she introduces the dynamic of truth and falsity as the central components of euphemism.
And that's completely lacking in the standard definition and use of the term.
There's nothing about true or false.
So when we say that people slept together, we're not claiming that they literally slept together as opposed to having sex.
There's not a lie or a falsehood there.
We know what we're talking about.
It's not intended to deceive.
But that's what she introduces.
She essentially presents euphemisms as lies.
And we can see why this matters if we look at the example she gives.
And again, this is what I'm interested in.
Why does she make the moves that she makes?
And the example she gives, and this anticipates the first chapter of her book, we'll get into that next episode, but the example she gives is the use of quote-unquote reproductive rights, end quote, for killing an unborn child.
Do you see what this does?
Rhetorically, in other words, she says it's a euphemism.
When people talk about killing an unborn child, that's what it really is, and they use the euphemism of reproductive rights.
Do we see what this does rhetorically?
So by one, defining euphemism as a form of lying.
Two, defining reproductive rights as a euphemism.
And then three, contrasting this with killing an unborn child.
She has already positioned anyone who disagrees with her premise.
What is her premise?
Her premise is that abortion is the murder of a human being.
She's already positioned anyone who disagrees with that premise as a liar, while her position is presented as simply the truth.
So it's not about a disagreement.
It's not about a differing definition of life.
It's not about really substantive issues.
No, it's just truth and falsity.
So as she defines it in her formulation, when somebody comes along and says, well, I actually, I don't think that maybe abortion is immoral.
I think maybe it's a health care issue or whatever.
There can't be a real debate about that because it's just truth and falsehood.
She forecloses the possibility of any real engagement.
And positions anyone who disagrees with her as a liar before they've said anything.
And she also gives herself and anybody who agrees with her the assurance that they are just speaking the truth.
Somebody else is speaking euphemisms and falsehoods.
We're speaking the truth.
So that's how this works.
So that's red flag number one is euphemisms.
Red flag number two, you knew this was coming, contradictions to God's word.
The second one, contradictions of God's word.
This is the one that we should absolutely expect by now.
And to be honest, given her orientation philosophically and religiously and so forth, I would have expected this to be the first thing that she would have come up with.
Contradicting God's word.
And this is wrapped up with everything we've spent a ton of time discussing here in other contexts.
The idea that the Bible is the inspired word of God, meaning that it is an account of inerrant divine revelation, and that because of that, it holds absolute authority.
I have spent a lot of time pulling those ideas apart in other contexts.
I did an entire series on inerrancy.
I've talked about the concept of being biblical and biblicism and the way that the Bible works in these contexts and lots of other episodes.
I don't want to repeat that here.
What I want to look at here is how this appeal to being biblical works rhetorically for Stuckey.
And again, I'm not just interested in Allie Beth Stuckey or her book.
It's because she's typical of the broader discourse within high control.
She says, and I'm quoting her again.
I don't want anybody to come at me and say that, like, I'm misrepresenting what she says.
She says, and I quote, it's crucial that we know our Bible and train ourselves to think critically.
End quote.
Folks, biblicist high-control Christianity is the ultimate example of the appeal to authority fallacy, and this is a great illustration of this.
Okay?
Now, Appealing to authority is not inherently fallacious.
That is, I don't know, if you're debating with somebody about a medical issue and you go look up what, I don't know, the American Medical Association says, or you go and talk to your doctor and find out what their advice is or whatever, you are making reference to an authority.
You are drawing on somebody who's authoritative on a subject.
There's nothing fallacious about that.
But the appeal to authority fallacy, the technical word is very.
That just because somebody holds a position of authority, what they say is actually valid, aside from issues of evidence or expertise or qualification, etc.
Okay?
And this is what happens when high-control Christians and Biblicist Christians like Ali Beth Stuckey appeal to the Bible.
They simply define the Bible as an absolute authority.
It's a position that I've argued is actually incoherent, and even if one thinks that it's coherent in principle, there are a million reasons to question or to doubt that this is how the Bible should be understood or can be understood in any plausible way.
But they simply define it as an absolute authority, which then makes it so that any appeal to the Bible is, by definition, irrefutable.
It is valid only because the Bible says it.
Not because the Bible says it and evidence supports it or anything else, but just because the Bible says it.
And that's, again, setting aside the issue I highlight all the time, that we never actually get to the Bible in these formulations.
We only get to the people reading it.
Okay?
It's an inherently fallacious line of reasoning.
Why does that matter here?
Because when she says, again, it's crucial that we know our Bible and train ourselves to think critically, it's an inherently fallacious line of reading.
That she presents as the height of critical thinking.
So those of us who just appeal to this magic book, this magical understanding of this book that tells us everything we need to know about literally everything that will happen ever, all we have to do is appeal to that book.
Argument settled, solved, done.
Used to be an old bumper sticker and, you know, that probably had the t-shirt that said, the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it, right?
Period.
Bible said it.
It's done.
But that's not enough.
They have to say this is the height of critical thinking.
And again, we've seen this before in the pattern of logic within high-control Christianity.
This positions anybody who disagrees with them or questions their positions as inherently unreasonable and uncritical in their thinking.
You can come at somebody who's a biblicist and say, wait, I think the uncritical thing is to just assume on faith and by dogmatic assertion that everything this book says is true, That doesn't feel very critical.
And not only will they say, no, no, no, no, that's what the Bible is, but we're the ones who are thinking critically, those of you who question it or not.
And folks, we are here once again in the territory of first-order gaslighting.
Those whose entire rationale and worldview are based on fallacious reasoning, they place themselves in the position of being the critical thinkers.
It's like somebody who believes in a conspiracy theory.
And talks about, like, all the research that they've done.
And you're like, dude, you just read, like, a bunch of weird, like, stuff that somebody in their basement put on the internet.
That's not research.
It's the same thing.
So those who do question, those who do critique, those who do demand evidence, those who value expertise, we become the ones who are too naive and uncritical not to fall to false opinions.
We are the ones who will fall prey to toxic empathy while the biblicists are thinking critically and resisting.
So that was red flag number two.
Let's press on.
Red flag number three, exclusively political ends.
Here's how Stuckey sets this one up.
When calling for empathy, inclusivity, and love, are they talking about how we treat those people as individuals, or are they actually speaking of achieving certain political ends?
End quote.
She's setting up an either-or contrast here, right?
That those who are telling you that you should empathize with, I don't know, LGBTQ kids or people who need abortion care or those who are advocating for social justice, all topics that we'll get to in the book.
She sets up a contrast about people who are expressing real care for people as individuals.
That's its own thing.
Are they talking about how they treat those people?
As individuals, there's always this false dichotomy between individual and group or individual and class within this way of thinking.
And maybe we'll have a chance to talk about that more.
I don't know.
But there's this either or contrast.
The one that matters here is between caring for real people or just trying to bring about political ends.
It contrasts politics with care for people.
So those of us who advocate what she would call toxic empathy, we're advocating political ends, and she's advocating care for people.
It's an either-or option.
And here's the thing.
It's a false choice.
And this is a topic that drives me nuts.
There's nothing on the right.
It's not limited to the right.
The right has no lock of accusing those with whom they disagree of quote unquote playing politics and that distinction between playing politics.
And here's why.
What we call politics just is the enacted debate about how to order our shared political life.
That's what politics is.
And I often illustrate this when I'm trying to make this point to students and others by noting that the word politics in English originates after a long path from someone who is part of the Greek city-state or polis.
That word polis is Where the term politic comes from.
The point is just that politics has always been about ordering shared political life.
That's what the polis was, the space of shared social and political life within the kind of ancient Greek imaginary.
All kinds of problems with the polis, it was inequitable, all of that.
The point is, it just illustrates that that's what politics is.
It's about the ordering of social life, which means that the social is political inherently.
It's a false distinction between the two.
So even when there are people who advocate political positions that you despise, it's often because it represents a different ordering of social space or valuing of different people within society in ways that we don't value them or that we value them differently and so forth.
So when Stuckey offers this false alternative, you either care about people or it's just politics.
She masks this.
It's also noting that she's also...
Yeah.
And...
Playing politics.
When she offers this false alternative, she masks this, and she's again making this rhetorical move.
If you propose or advance policy positions that are different from hers, policy positions that are different from those of high-control Christians, maybe they're different from your parents.
Maybe they're different from the folks on Fox News.
Maybe they're different from your pastor.
If you advance or propose policy positions that are different from theirs, it's not a sign that you have a different understanding of society or how it should be ordered or how resources should be allocated or who should get those resources and so forth.
Those are all the questions that politics, in my view, is fundamentally about.
No, none of that.
If you disagree with her, it's not because you have substantive disagreements about the good or about society or any of that.
No, it's because she cares about people.
And you are just playing politics.
Do you notice how this flips it on its head?
This is turning around and saying, those people out there who want you to exercise toxic empathy, they tell you they care about people, but they actually don't.
They're just playing politics.
Those of us who are warning you against the excesses of empathy, those of us who are highlighting these red flags, we're the ones who really care.
We really care by making sure that people don't get sucked into caring too much.
Because those folks are just playing politics.
And once again, if you're sensing a pattern here, we're going to find it again.
It allows for an easy dismissal of anything we might have to say without engagement of any kind.
Before any conversation ever happens, now you're just playing politics.
Okay?
Got to move on.
Red flag number four.
Christian-sounding words with unchristian meanings.
This is like just bad organization on the part of Stucky and her editor.
I don't know why this one is here.
You'd think like maybe she put the Bible things together, you know, the Bible and Christian words thing.
But also Red Flag 4 isn't really a new red flag.
It's really just a mashup of the first one using euphemisms and the second one, which is contradicting God's word.
So basically she's just saying this happens when progressives or non-Christians, that is anybody who disagrees with her.
Use unchristian terms as euphemisms for Christian words to lead otherwise well-intentioned Christians astray.
Okay?
That's all that is.
It's a mash-up.
There's not a lot of new stuff to add here, but it does illustrate an incredibly rhetorical, frustrating move.
And if you have ever engaged in these discussions, not like in a book or this kind of how we talked about love last episode, they will tell you that the words don't mean what you think they mean.
It is the ultimate rhetorical bait and switch.
And it is incredibly frustrating because they'll use a word like justice.
You'd be like, well, yeah, surely justice means this and that.
No, no, no, no, no.
It doesn't mean that.
Or a word like love.
Well, you're called to love your neighbor and the stranger and the orphan and the widow.
No, no, no, no, no.
Love doesn't mean that.
They just kind of swap it around and it puts them in the position of never having to accept anything you say because they can just redefine words as they see fit.
You can't even have an agreed upon vocabulary.
Again, This is the irony of this.
I'm sure irony is the right word.
Of this claim to be the ones who are logical and rational and so forth is that so many of these rhetorical moves are aimed at ensuring that they never have to employ logic or rationality.
It simply removes anything they say from the realm of rational shared debate.
And that's by design.
They can just redefine words as they see fit.
And, of course, they'll appeal to the Bible to do it, and they'll call themselves critical thinkers when they do it.
Again, this is kind of a mashup of all the other red flags we've talked about.
This is also one of the reasons why, and I think this emerges as we get through all of these, why I insist frequently, and again, if you've listened to my episodes, you know this, that Biblicist Christians are typically not acting in good faith when they quote-unquote debate various positions.
And it is because they always have All these kind of core presuppositions and fundamental moves in their pocket that they won't set aside or bring into view or publicly acknowledge, and there's just no way to engage in a goodwill fashion with somebody who's operating that way.
Okay?
All right, last one.
Red flag five.
Emotional language.
We've already seen that Stuckey trades on a distinction between emotion and rationality.
If you listened a couple episodes back, The whole problem with empathy for her is that it is an emotion that leads us astray from rational thought.
This is also why she connects, going back to last episode, love with truth.
It's why in this episode, the material we're talking about, she links euphemism with lies, appeals to the Bible with critical thinking, and so forth.
Here's the concern as she presents it.
And again, I'm quoting from her.
She says, manipulative rhetoric lacks substantive, logical arguments and replaces them with demands that you feel a certain way, end quote.
Is that they don't have substantive illogical arguments, they use emotion instead.
And all I can really say is like, really?
Gay?
Really?
Why?
First, dismissing somebody's concern or arguments on the grounds that they're too emotional is like a rhetoric 101 move.
Everybody has encountered somebody who disregards what you say on the grounds that you are, quote-unquote, too emotional when you say it.
Anybody who's female-identified listening, you especially know this because this has been a trope that has been used against women for, I think, as long as there have been debates about anything.
So just get a new move, Stucky.
Second, and I know that all of you are probably screaming at your speakers or their screens by now anyways, but the second is, to go back to her first example, what is the description of abortion as killing an unborn child if not a way of trying to play to your emotions?
Or she also in that same section describes gender-affirming care as, quote, bodily mutilation.
How is that not an effort to play to the emotions?
Of course she is using quote-unquote emotional language intended to make you quote feel a certain way.
Of course she's doing that.
Of course she's doing that.
And we get the rest of Stucky's nonsense in here as well.
The high-control Christian positions are substantive and logical as opposed to the emotional, euphemistic, false, and ultimately illogical arguments of anyone who disagrees with them.
There's no reason we should even have to read the book.
She should just be able to list all the things that she's opposed to, and we should just understand the clear logic of it and where we'd be done.
So this red flag, which is a common rhetorical move, again, there's nothing, you know, the people on the right don't have a lock on this dismissal of other positions on the grounds that are quote-unquote emotional.
It's maybe the most vacuous of all of these red flags.
Why?
Because first, any issues that really matter provoke strong emotions.
Anything that is worth debating, anything that is worth arguing about, anything that is worth trying to persuade others about, it's going to evoke strong emotions.
That's the sign that people care deeply about them, despite what the Stuckys of the world will tell you.
Those liberals and progressives are not out arguing for the things they're arguing for because they're, quote-unquote, just playing politics.
They're arguing for them because they matter to them deeply.
They're very emotional to them, just as the issues that Stucky is putting forward and the position she's putting forward matter to her.
The second thing is that the distinction between reason and emotion is not absolute.
It's impossible to fully distinguish them.
This is, in my view, a pretty fallacious kind of distinction that goes way back in the Western intellectual tradition, and I just don't buy it.
For example, I would say that often ideas that strike us as reasonable, that seem reasonable to us, They seem reasonable precisely because their emotional impact upon us.
It's like when somebody says, well, it has to be true that this and this and this, or like, no, no, no, no, so-and-so.
It can't be the case that this or this or this actually happened.
The emotional impact of the claim upon us actually starts counting as evidence for or against its acceptance.
So it's just a distinction that doesn't work.
So what?
Of course, Calling abortion murder is supposed to appeal to emotions.
And yes, calling it healthcare is supposed to appeal to emotions.
That's not the issue.
Let's just call that an irreducible fact and figure out how we go about adjudicating which of those emotions is maybe right, the one we ought to feel.
Bigger, deeper discussions.
But once again, she's going to gaslight us into thinking that we need to reconsider or reformulate our positions.
Especially if we feel strongly about them.
That's the irony of this.
The more, the stronger you feel, the more strongly you feel about a position, the more it really gets to kind of the core of how you feel and how you understand things, the more suspect it is because it's quote-unquote emotional.
Again, it's just a way of rhetorically positioning you in a place before any discussion ever starts where you can't win.
It's not an act in good faith.
We need to wind this up.
Stucky says she's offering these five red flags so we can be on the alert so that we don't fall into the toxic empathy trap.
And these are her five red flags.
I'm trying to show that I think that they're all just rhetorical moves.
They don't get into anything substantive.
They often mask exactly the dynamics that she's using in her own work.
They're built on faulty premises and so forth.
I'm trying to show how these supposed red flags really operate to rhetorically privilege everything else she's going to say in the book before we even get to them.
Let me know if I did that or not.
Let me know if that makes sense.
Drop me a line.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com would love your feedback on this.
Those are her red flags to how to avoid toxic empathy.
I do not accept them.
But now, with all the ground-clearing done, we have looked at how she defines empathy.
We've looked at how she contrasts it with so-called love.
We've looked at her red flags of how to avoid toxic empathy.
We're ready for the real game.
We're ready for the real thing.
So next week, we are going to start with the first chapter of her book, and that deals with what she has to say about abortion access and the myth that toxic empathy would teach us that abortion is about health care.
So please, tune in.
Again, I want to thank everybody for listening.
Thank you for your support in so many different ways.
