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Does Allie Beth Stuckey struggle with the temptation to exercise “toxic empathy?” In this episode, considering her opposition to marriage equality, Dan suggests that she does. How does she respond to this temptation? What does this response show us not only about her, but about high-control American Christianity? How does it illustrate the ways in which high-control religion invariably masks exercises of power and authority as “love”? Check out this week’s episode to find out.
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Axis Mundi The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End Welcome to It's in the Code, a series that's part of the podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
I am Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought of Landmark College.
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Want to dive in here?
We are continuing our exploration, our deep dive into our deconstruction of whatever you want to call it, our exploration of the attack on empathy that currently defines part of the cultural discourse on the right, the religious right, political right, what have you.
And we've been doing this for a while.
We've been doing so by taking a deep dive into Ali Beth Stuckey's book, Toxic Empathy, where she argues that everything that's wrong with American society coming from the woke left boils down to toxic levels of empathy.
The problem is we just care too much and too uncritically.
And again, we're looking at Stuckey because she is in so many ways indicative of broader patterns and impulses and arguments on the culturally conservative right.
And so her arguments, they're bad arguments and they're not good and they tell us a lot about her, but they tell us a lot about more than her because of what they represent more broadly.
And that's why we're taking a look at her and what she says.
And we are in the third chapter of her book.
We've been going chapter by chapter and each chapter is built around what she considers to be a lie, the lie in chapter three being love is love.
This is her chapter where she just gets to defend her homophobia and put her arguments forward arguing against marriage equality and sort of, I guess, gay love, broadly speaking.
And so this is the last episode where we're going to be looking at this chapter before we get into the next awful chapter that she writes.
But I want to consider things, something a little more amorphous maybe than we've considered in the past couple episodes, because what I want to sort of attend to here is her overall tone, the tone in this chapter.
And I want to consider what it demonstrates about not just the way that her thought works, but again, high control American Christianity more broadly.
So like not even just a current discourse, but a deeper functioning of those structures.
And the reason I'm approaching this chapter in these terms is that for me, when I read it, and if people have suffered through reading this book, I'd be interested in your thoughts on this.
As I read it, it feels different in a significant way from the first two chapters.
And as I've sat with this material, I've had a hard time putting my finger on precisely why that is, right?
As I've read it and just sort of, again, is sort of sitting with it and wondering what this is.
Here's what I think I've realized.
I think that in this chapter, Stuckey is tempted to empathize with the topic she's talking about in a way that wasn't the case with the first two chapters.
In other words, she's writing this book about opposition to what she calls toxic empathy and making sure that empathy stays in right measure and all this stuff.
I think she is tempted by empathy with this material and this topic in a way that she hasn't been in what we've seen before.
So in the abortion chapter, for example, the chapter where she argues against abortion access, she demonstrates some willingness to identify with the difficult realities that lead individuals to seek out abortion care.
But in the end, she can decisively dismiss this articulation of empathy.
And again, as a reminder, instead, she does so by suggesting that our real focus should be, you know, empathy for the unborn children.
So she's able to just sort of categorically dismiss anybody who would seek an abortion.
In her transphobic chapter, the last chapter that we talked about, the one where she is taking on notions of gender identity and gender care for minors and so forth, there's simply no empathy of any kind in her discussion for trans or gender nonconforming individuals.
None.
They are simply castigated and vilified.
But this chapter feels different to me in a really important way.
She opens her chapter with a discussion of a woman named Glennon Doyle Melton.
And some of you might be familiar with this person.
She tells the story of how Glennon rose to prominence as a quote-unquote, you know, Christian mom blogger outlining the challenges of Christian motherhood and marriage.
And in 2016, she published a memoir detailing the difficulties of her marriage.
And the same year, she announced her divorce.
So she's already like within those circles, a big figure by this point in time.
In 2016, she publishes this memoir.
She announces her divorce from her husband.
And she announces her relationship with U.S. women's soccer player Abby Wombach.
And a lot of people are familiar with Abby Wombach.
And she discusses how, despite some pushbacks, of course, there's some pushback to this, a lot of followers of Glennon were largely affirming of her.
So she sort of lays out this story, and then she summarizes the takeaways like this.
And I am reading from her book.
I'm reading from Stuckey herself.
And I'm going to read a bit here.
She says, while some longtime Christian followers expressed their shock and disappointment at the announcement of her new relationship, the overwhelming majority celebrated Glennon and Abby.
The pair has now grown an audience of millions of female fans, readers, and podcast listeners with their message of self-love and authenticity.
Glennon's most recent memoir, Untamed, which chronicles her love story with Abby and urges readers to similarly pursue their desires, has sold over 2 million copies.
The couple's social media pages are characterized by joy and laughter.
Their love is obvious.
I want to just hold on to that phrase for me.
I want you to hold on to that.
Their love is obvious.
The relationship they've maintained with Glennon's ex-husband is commendable.
Abby is a doting, supportive partner, and Glennon remains unapologetically honest and endearing.
Their joint lives seem to embody the motto, love wins.
Glennon followed her truth, embraced her authentic self, and pursued the life she wanted to live.
She insisted that love is just that love and it's not limited to any gender or type of family.
And now, finally, she's happy.
After years of struggle, doubt, addiction, rejection, and pain, she's found peace.
End quote.
That's how she summarizes this.
This doesn't sound like the kind of disapproval that we encounter when Stuckey talks about abortion and where she talks about trans individuals.
And she goes on and she continues.
She says, who wouldn't want to celebrate a story like Glennon's?
No, she doesn't say that about trans people.
She doesn't say that about somebody who's in need of abortion access.
We don't get any sense of that anywhere in those first two chapters, but here we do.
And she summarizes again the way that this is.
She says, Glennon's evolution feels liberating.
She's found her true self after years of painful self-denial, having been stuck in a miserable marriage with an unfaithful husband.
She carried the burden of insecurity and sought to numb her pain through substance and self-harm.
Then salvation showed up in an unexpected moment in an unlikely person, Abby.
All of a sudden, it seemed everything made sense.
Here's the significance of this for me, okay?
To be clear, she's going to push back on the narrative about love between these two women.
Of course she is, and we'll get to that, okay?
But here, right, in the immediacy of her description of the relationship, she doesn't push back.
There's none of that dismissiveness and repulsion and disdain or open judgment that drips off of every page in the first two chapters of this book, especially the anti-trans chapter.
You cannot read that chapter without feeling the moral condemnation and disgust and anger that she feels toward everything that has to do with gender nonconformity.
In contrast to this, it feels like she really wants to affirm this love story.
When she says that evolution feels liberating, when she says, who wouldn't want to celebrate a story like Glennon's, I think she means it.
I think that that rhetorical question is the answer is we all want to affirm this.
When she says their love is obvious, I think she means it.
It feels like she means it.
She is tempted, I think, by the desire to affirm.
I think that she is drawn in in this chapter by the power of emphany, excuse me, of empathy, because she does think that their love is obvious.
She does want to celebrate this story.
She recognized it does feel liberating.
I think she feels the liberation that these women feel.
That's the temptation.
I think that that is something that makes the tone of this chapter feel different to me.
Now, of course, she doesn't give into that temptation.
She's going to resist it.
And we're going to get to the reason why she's going to say, you know, we can't give in to empathy here.
But I just want to highlight that I feel like that temptation is real here.
And what's really telling for me is going to be the reason she gives for not giving into that temptation.
The reason that she gives for not simply affirming that their love is obvious, for not simply celebrating their story, for not simply sort of leaning into the fact that it feels liberating.
And the reason that she gives for this, I think it tells us again, not just about her, but it tells us a lot about high control American Christianity more broadly.
Okay.
So what is this?
How does this fit?
What is this pattern?
Here it is.
I've noted previously that Stuckey argues repeatedly that Christian love means love tempered and directed by truth.
Links love and truth.
Christians are called to love, but to love in the truth.
And I've suggested that this means that for her, and again, this is typical of high control American Christianity.
And those of you who are listening, who have been a part of that world, you know this, you feel this.
That this means for her that love and authority are intertwined, or more properly stated, love is defined by authority and power.
The primary attribute of divinity as understood within high control Christianity, it is not love.
I don't care what the high control Christians tell you.
It is not love.
That is not the defining feature of God and therefore the church and everything that flows out of knowledge of God.
It is authority.
And it is authority that is defined by power and will.
God has authority because God is the highest power.
And what is authorized, that is whatever is backed by authority, it is whatever God wills.
So love is always directed by what Friedrich Nietzsche would call the will to power.
That's the definition of love within high control Christianity.
So when Stuckey is confronted with what feels like her own temptation to give in to empathy for Glennon and Wombach, she plays her authority Trump's love card.
And here's what she has to say.
So this is, this is that same page where she was just talking about, you know, wanting to celebrate this story, how it feels liberating.
She goes on and she says this.
And I'm just going to read the paragraph.
She says, but for Christians, it's not so simple.
The inconvenient reality is that we have a priority that's higher than our own or others' momentary happiness, and that's truth.
While we can understand Glennon's struggle, our sympathy must submit to our belief in a God who is real and authoritative and who therefore defines sins, relationships, proper sexuality, and marriage.
These definitions all matter and they matter much more than a person's seeming happiness or authenticity.
What's more, only by submitting to the truth as God defines it, only, excuse me, only by submitting to the truth as God defines it can we and those we love be truly and eternally happy.
But saying as much is hard.
There's a lot in there.
This is the core for me, this link in this card, when she, or in this chapter, rather, when she needs to fight against the temptation to empathy, what does she do?
She leans on this notion of authority.
And so I want to just kind of go through this line by line and highlight a few points.
And the first thing is when she says, for the Christian, it's not so simple.
I want to hold on to this idea of simplicity.
We're going to come back around to this, but just note here where she says this isn't so simple.
Okay.
You could also note when she says, for Christians, it's not so simple.
Just for Christians, the notion that you can't be Christian and affirm this kind of love, this kind of relationship, and so forth.
All the stuff that goes in with high control Christianity of defining themselves as the only kind of Christian, the only authentic Christian, all of that sort of stuff.
Okay.
This is also where we start getting the qualifiers that we might expect when she talks about happiness.
So she talks about how that authority has priority over ours or others' quote unquote momentary happiness.
Now, this is not an issue of healing or authenticity.
It's momentary happiness.
It's passing happiness.
All the stuff she experienced before, turns out that wasn't passing to be sort of superseded by this.
She's affirming her momentary happiness.
Happiness is not an ultimate authority here.
And what I think this plays into when she qualifies this relationship and what they experience as momentary happiness.
It's the Christian myth that non-Christians are all secretly not happy, even if they can't recognize that for themselves.
When I was within high control Christianity, you hear this all the time.
We'd say, well, you know, all the lost folks, they seem happy, but they're deluded.
They don't realize what they're really feeling.
This notion that everybody is secretly miserable or if they're not miserable, they're supposed to be miserable and they're just lying to themselves.
And then you really get this with the final sentence in the paragraph when she says, only by submitting to the truth as God defines it, can we be truly and eternally happy?
Notice this.
This is another move and this is not unique to contemporary Christianity.
Somebody like Karl Marx was critical of this and his critiques of religion.
Friedrich Nietzsche, classical, you know, opponents of Christianity going back hundreds and in some cases, a millennium or more, hundreds of years and millennium or more, have made this criticism where basically she's like, yeah, it's not about earthly happiness, about eternal happiness.
So even if you're called to be unhappy and to suffer for this, you know, this, this mortal life that we have, you can trust that you'll have eternal happiness.
So finding a way to dismiss everything that is tempting her about this, it's just passing.
It's apparent happiness.
It's just earthly, worldly happiness.
It's not eternal happiness.
She goes on to say in this paragraph, she says our sympathy, sympathy, she feels sympathy for this.
It must submit to belief in a God who is real and authoritative.
And that those themes, those themes of submission and authority, that it is about submitting and to what?
Submitting to authority.
This tells us the core of the Christian vision for Ali Beth Stuckey.
She says it's God who defines sin and relationships and proper sexuality and marriage.
And she says these definitions all matter and they matter much more than a person's seeming happiness and authenticity.
Even if we are drawn into empathy and sympathy, we have to submit those to the authority of God who tells us that what we're feeling is wrong.
Okay.
So as I say, I feel like this chapter opens a window into something that Stuckey is really struggling with in a way that wasn't apparent in the first two chapters.
And I think it shows us a lot.
I think it shows how personal interactions or awareness of these issues impacts us.
If we think back to the abortion chapter, the only people she discussed in her chapter were those who opposed abortion.
Even people in bad situations who, you know, could have sought abortion or did and then didn't follow through or whatever.
It's always somebody who came out opposed to abortion.
In her chapter, opposing trans rights, she doesn't highlight anyone who affirms trans identity or actively identifies as trans, not a single person.
But in this chapter, she's talking about a person to whom she obviously looks up to.
Like she obviously has looked up to this person, respects this person.
And I think that that personal respect and affirmation makes it harder for her to simply dismiss what she's experienced.
And it is always harder to condemn a lifestyle or an identity or a belief when we're not just doing it in the abstract, when it's actually somebody we know and care about.
It is always harder to do that when it's somebody that we look up to.
And I think all of this is in play in Stuckey's discussion.
So we could dig more deeply or speculate.
It's speculation for me on why she feels the temptation in this chapter that she does, right?
But I think she does.
And it's her response when we see in that one paragraph where she really lays it out and says, we have to deny our sympathy.
We have to deny our empathy.
And we have to submit to authority, to an authoritative, authoritative and authoritarian God who defines these things.
We have to submit.
And the reason I think that that response is so telling is that she is leaning there on one of the primary pillars supporting high control Christianity in America.
I mean, that's the reason we describe it as high control is that control is the point.
And people often ask me, well, how do we recognize high control religion?
Because part of what I think the nomenclature of high control religion gives us is a tool and a resource for recognizing how widespread that is.
How within American culture, these are not, and I've talked about this a lot.
I realize this.
These are not fringe or really crazy, quote unquote, kinds of religions that we're talking about with high control religion.
These are factors within just typical, very, very mainstream conservative articulations of Christianity and other religious traditions as well.
So people often ask me, well, how do you recognize high control religion?
And one of the clearest markers for me is this appeal to authority and the admonition to submit.
And that structure, it can get dressed up in a lot of pretty ways.
It can be articulated as care.
I'm exercising my authority over you and telling you what you need to do because I care about you.
It can be presented as the sort of kinder, gentler articulation of the faith.
I've talked about that in the past in this series, these kinds of notions of affirming very traditional, conservative theological positions or social views or whatever, but doing it in a way that just seems sort of friendlier.
It can be presented, and I think Stuckey is doing that here as the kind of, well, you know, ah, shucks.
I sure wish I could affirm something else, but what are you going to do version?
And that's, that's very much Stuckey, man.
I wish I could affirm you.
I wish I could just say love wins out.
I wish I could just say that your happiness is what matters, but oh, gee whiz, I can't because I have to submit to the God who tells me that this is sinful and bad.
But no matter how it's dressed up, it always comes down to authority, often licensed by so-called love.
I am exercising authority over you.
I am demanding that you submit to me because I love you.
This is an expression of love.
And we know how messed up and dangerous defining love as submission and authority can be.
You need to submit to patriarchy and, you know, so-called male headship because I love you.
You need to submit to the authority of the pastor or the church elders because they care for you.
You need to submit to the authority of those who are more steeped in the faith because they know what's best for you.
That's how it works.
And high control Christianity will talk a lot about love, a lot, but at the end of the day, it is always subsumed under authority.
And that authority in turn is licensed through claims to knowledge.
Why should I listen to you?
Why should I submit to you?
Why should I recognize your authority?
Because I, the pastor, or I, the podcaster, Ali Beth Stuckey, or I, the husband, the father, because I have knowledge of the truth.
I know what God's will is.
I have this magic book that I get to read.
And so I have that knowledge, and that is why you submit to me.
And of course, this becomes circular because if you challenge that knowledge, If you say, actually, I don't think that it makes sense to read the Bible that way.
I don't think that verse means what you think it means, or I think you're ignoring the historical context or what have you.
Then, of course, they will appeal to their authority and tell you that you need to submit or else there'll be some consequence that follows from that.
Of course, it's circular, but most of the time when that structure is working, they will appeal to their authority.
They will ground that authority in knowledge and they will say that that authority is justified and the submission is justified and that it is justified for them to exercise authority over you because they love you.
And I see all of that in this chapter.
And again, to just get to this notion of tone, it's like I hear it or feel it in a way that I haven't in the previous two chapters.
When push comes to shove for Stuckey, when she's confronted with a real pull to empathize with, to even identify with another person, she shows us what game is really being played by appealing to authority and submission.
That at the end of the day, it is not about love.
It is about authority and submission and obedience to power.
And again, I think that, you know, when folks say sometimes, oh, like, like, is that bad?
I would just say, hey, look around the relationships in your life, the relationships that matter, relationships that are more than transactional.
And just tell me how often you want them to be defined in terms of authority or submission or will or command.
Makes our skin crawl.
Red flags pop up everywhere.
They should pop up when we're talking about religion as well.
We recognize with other human beings that these are not relationships that are really structured in love or concern or care.
That shouldn't change just because we're talking about religion.
So that's the tone that I think is different in this chapter.
There's one more piece I want to circle back around to in this chapter that I think is really significant.
Okay.
It's another tent, another tension, maybe another temptation on display in this chapter.
I mentioned earlier that in response to that temptation, even empathy, Stuckey insists that things are, you know, they're not so simple for the Christian.
For Christians, it's just not that simple.
Being a Christian here is presented as something complex and difficult.
The easy thing she seems to say would be to just affirm that love wins in this situation, but for Christians, it's not so simple.
And that difficulty confronts us.
But what I find is interesting here is that in the same chapter, when she talks about the Bible, and I realize I've kind of pulled this chapter out sort of out of order, we've talked about the Bible stuff.
She gets to the Bible stuff after she lays out this stuff about submission and authority and all of this.
But when she talks about the Bible, when she outlines what I've suggested last episode is a really, really simplistic understanding of the Bible, she says the quiet part out loud.
She offers her reading of the Bible because she says this.
She says she, quote, realized just how desperate we all are for clarity, end quote.
She couches her whole discussion of the Bible in a need for clarity.
Again, people sometimes ask, how do you recognize high control religion?
They also ask oftentimes, what in the world is the draw to high control religion?
And I say all the time that one of it is clarity.
And she says that part out loud.
She says, we want clarity.
So here's how we're going to read the Bible.
We're going to lean on the Bible and have this whole interpretation of the Bible because it gives us clarity.
So on one hand, when she's confronted with the temptation to empathize, she says, for a Christian, it's not so simple.
And I feel her then pushing back against that just a few pages later when she has to say, well, actually, it is simple.
It is clear.
We do have clarity.
And that's why she reads the Bible the way that she does.
So she resists the temptation to empathy, but she does so by giving into another temptation that I think lies at the heart of conservative Christianity and everything related to it.
And that is the temptation to clarity, to simplicity, to certitude.
It is the temptation we encounter, all of us.
This is not limited to Christian folks.
I talk to people all the time struggling with this.
I struggle with this.
It is a temptation we encounter when we confront a world that is complex, when we confront a world where answers aren't easy and we're authentically encountering others can challenge many of our most deeply held assumptions.
That's what I think Stuckey's experiencing.
She has these deeply held assumptions and here is somebody that she values and looks up to and respects living her life the way that she is.
And she's confronted with this.
And what high control religion does is it draws people in in large measure by promising to reduce complexity to simplicity and to provide certitude in an uncertain world.
And she says it when she says that she started reading the Bible the way she did because she realized just how desperate we all are for clarity.
She gives in to that desperation.
She gives into that temptation for clarity.
That is what allows her to resist the temptation to empathy.
And it's only after she says all this that she lays out her reading of the Bible and all that sort of stuff.
So I find it interesting that Stuckey can only avoid one temptation, one thing she identifies as a temptation, the temptation to empathy, by having to give in to another.
And we see this, this inconsistency.
We saw it in the abortion chapter when she opposes any empathy with those who seek abortion access, but she does so on the grounds that we need to empathize with unborn children.
There, she's not really opposed to empathy.
It just needs to be directed the right way.
Here, she's not really just fighting temptation in a good Christian way.
Her Christian identity is wrapped up in giving into the temptation for certainty and clarity.
And again, she says that out loud.
Covering a lot here, sort of, I feel like it's a little bit scattered, a little bit amorphous when you start talking about something like a tone.
Hope that's coming through.
Welcome, really welcome insights and feedback on this from you.
But to tie this together, the Bible says a lot of things about God.
But among other things, it says God is love.
And that's a central affirmation of every kind of Christianity.
I don't think you'll find anybody who is a self-identified, affirming Christian who views themselves as a Christian who would, who would deny that passage.
The inerrantists can't.
It's in the Bible.
It says God is love.
But within high control American Christianity, again, love is always subsumed and subordinated under authority.
And they will work hard to hide that.
They will work hard to mask that.
They will work hard to try to buff down the rough edges of that.
They will work hard to try to make that more palatable, to make it look better, to make it more presentable, but it's there.
Love always involves the interplay of authority and submission to authority.
And cloaking that, hiding that, masking that so that authority can be passed off as love, I think that licenses everything pernicious within high control religion.
So this chapter where Stuckey comes the closest to giving into empathy, closest so far.
Again, I'm reading this book as we go.
I haven't read the last two chapters yet.
We'll get into those.
We'll see where it goes.
But so far, this is the closest she's come to giving in to empathy.
What does she do?
She falls back on authority.
She falls back on the supposed clarity that an authoritative view of the Bible is supposed to provide.
She falls back on authority and she explicitly appeals to submission, to an external power and authority who can just reduce everything and make it simple and tell us what to believe and tell us what to feel.
And I think it shows us everything, not just about Ali Beth Stuckey and her vision of the world and her Christianity, but it is such a window into the operation of high control religion.
And for those who also ask, why do people stay within it?
They stay within it because they are like Alibeth Stuckey.
Because they confront a world that is complex.
They confront a world where that complexity calls into question some of their assumptions.
And among other things, high control religion offers clear answers and it makes it easy.
There is a submission to authority is its own temptation to just hand over the reins and give away our responsibility and pass it off to somebody else and make it up to them and just say, please, you tell me what to do.
I'll do it.
Probably all of us at some point in our life have felt the desire to do that.
Some of us might have done it.
That's the draw of high control religion.
That is what we see on display in this chapter.
I found this element of this chapter to be really fascinating.
Gone long again.
I want to thank you for listening.
I want to thank you for the thoughts.
I want to thank you for the support.
Again, as a reminder, I've got some things lined up for upcoming episodes and sort of series of episodes, but always, always looking for more, trying to keep sort of planning these things out.
So if you've got thoughts, you've got ideas, please, Daniel Miller Swadge, Daniel Miller, S-W-A-J at gmail.com, put it in the Discord.
Would love to hear from you.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this and anything else.
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