The dangerous fad of calling empathy a sin

Perhaps you were as startled as I was to see one of the recent examples of popular, far-right pastors proclaiming that the latest enemy to be stamped out of the church is this evil demon called “empathy.” After a few instances now of leaders repeating that “empathy is a sin,” without qualification, many readers are confused. They are right to be confused. In this article, I will address the sources of that confusion and hopefully provide a clear path forward.

I will start with the objection as it has been lodged. Then we will discuss definitions of the word. Then we will look at the context of the arguments being made. Then I will offer some analysis.

For those who wish for a condensed version, here is a bare outline that will get you close:

First, James White of Alpha & Omega and Apologia Church (and a couple others) has categorically and without qualification defined empathy as a sinful act. (The claim is not that empathy can be used sinfully, but that it is sinful absolutely. This requires a wholesale redefinition of the term.)

Second, in reality, empathy is simply defined as sharing and understanding the emotions of others. (While there is marginal disagreement on various points, the main element in all modern English dictionaries goes against James’s claim.)

Third, no one has ever defined empathy the way James and co. have done. (There is no support in either secular or church history, common or technical usage.)

Fourth, while these guys do give voice to a valid problem (emotional manipulation for cultural influence), we can easily address that problem without totally redefining empathy and throwing it out the window. (The cultural problem of which they speak is not logically connected in any way with the actual definition of empathy, or the proper practice of it. The cultural issue therefore does not warrant, or even suggest, a need for redefining the term.)

Fifth, we are not allowed to make up definitions on our own authority to suit our own desires. To do this, as James has done, is to act like the very relativistic liberals he is always criticizing. Oops.

Sixth, there is an issue of leadership, and perhaps underlying emotional maturity, in how James has reacted to reasonable pushback. When the whole world tells you you’re wrong, you should probably listen before immediately doubling down on your error and insulting your whole readership. The contra mundum ethos in a very few instances in history has produced great heroes, and I empathize with it. But when the whole world can see a simple truth you cannot, it is better to listen than to be defensive. Defensiveness is often a product of narcissism and pride. A person beset by pride is disqualified for leadership (1 Tim. 3:6).

With that truncated overview, I would encourage you to take the time to read through this longer article. I apologize for writing such long articles, but the subject of empathy deserves a lot of our time, and we have given it very little until now, to be honest.

So let’s begin by looking at James’s actual claims.

The claim that “empathy is sinful”?

First, the claims about “empathy” have been stark. While some people trying to defend the claims made by softening “what they probably really meant,” there is no mistaking what they really meant. Most recently, James R. White stated,

When you start with man as image-bearing creature of God, you can understand why sympathy is good, but empathy is sinful.

Do not surrender your mind to the sinful emotional responses of others.

When you make a bare, categorical claim like, “sympathy is good, but empathy is sinful,” there is not much that any context can change. As we will see, the context does not change James’s claim that “empathy is sin.”

Likewise, Douglas Wilson and Bethlehem Seminary teacher Joe Rigney (a former student of Doug Wilson’s), have likewise presented the unqualified statement that empathy is sin.

James’s tweets help clarify why these men all believe empathy is a sin. In this tweet alone, he parallels “empathy is sinful” with the idea that we must not “surrender your mind to the sinful emotional responses of others.”

We don’t need any further context to realize that James thinks empathy, in its totality, and as opposed to sympathy, is a sinful act. It is a sin that we commit when we ourselves adopt and thereby approve of other people’s sinful emotions.

In a subsequent series of tweets, James confirmed this view when he doubled down:

From the OED: usage: People often confuse the words empathy and sympathy. Empathy means ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’ (as in both authors have the skill to make you feel empathy with their heroines), whereas sympathy means ‘feelings of pity and ...

.. sorrow for someone else’s misfortune’ (as in they had great sympathy for the flood victims). Compare German: Einfühlung vs. Zuneigung

Many confused “weep with those who weep” with the idea of “adopting the emotions of others as your own, thus validating those emotions, even if those emotions are sinful, rebellious, or based upon false, anti-Scriptural narratives.”

For those who have never considered the issue, today in our culture we are told we must *empathize* with everyone's traumas and experiences. We are to “enter into” their emotional life. Every pastor worth his salt knows what lies down that road.

Let the reader be assured that James sees empathy in and of itself, and as a whole, as committing this specific sin.

A couple things before we move on. First, it is important to get clear that James’ claim is, as I have said, unqualified. James did not say, “Empathy can be a sin,” or, “Empathy is sinful sometimes,” or, “Empathy is sinful when misused.” There is nothing like that. This is just a straightforward claim that you have a good category of emotional relations, “sympathy,” and then you have a sinful category of emotional relations, “empathy.”

This means that for James (as well as the others he follows here), empathy is by definition always a sinful act. James is therefore defining “empathy” up front as not merely understanding someone else’s emotions, but specifically a sinful act in which we surrender our minds to the sinful emotions of others and tacitly, if not openly, approve of them.

Second, James thinks the core reason for pushback against his view on the internet is that everyone else has refused to think, and instead reacted only emotionally to his post. No one allegedly thought through it rationally. In a subsequent post, he asked cynically, “Who really makes the effort to think before responding with emotion?” The only acceptable answer, it is made clear, is “Only James White.”

Further, this alleged emotive reaction came from an “angry mob” (Summer Jaeger’s claim), or as James himself less-than-charitably put it, because “the majority who read the tweet either lacked the capacity, or willingness, to listen to it and think about it.”

While I know that most readers already know this, I want to give voice to it. This statement is a graceless and shameful insult to probably a few thousand readers—none of whom deserve it. I have no doubt that most of White’s reader base is intelligent and perfectly capable and willing of understanding everything he has to say on empathy and well beyond. I don’t doubt that most will agree with me than most of the readers probably surpass him in emotional intelligence—probably by a lot. Let’s be clear:

The real problem here is not that most who read White’s tweet lacked the capacity or willingness to think about it. On the contrary, the problem is just the opposite! We all understood it perfectly and willingly grasped James’s point. It was not a lack of capacity or willingness to listen or think. It was instead a profound, logical, rational, and righteous, lack of agreement with his novel interpretation of empathy. In other words, we all get what you said; most of us just think you’re dead wrong.

To understand that a little better, let’s review the common and historical definitions of the word in comparison to the novel White-Wilson-Rigney construal of it.

Defining empathy

What is “empathy”? Merriam-Webster’s supplies the vast majority contemporary usage:

the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner

This common definition comports with what White himself gleaned (though he didn’t seem to see it) from the Oxford English Dictionary:

‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’ (as in both authors have the skill to make you feel empathy with their heroines), whereas sympathy means ‘feelings of pity and ...

.. sorrow for someone else’s misfortune’ (as in they had great sympathy for the flood victims). Compare German: Einfühlung vs. Zuneigung

Note the slight contrast with “sympathy” in the latter part. You should know also that those sources are wildly inconsistent on this.

For example, the OED source tweeted by White says empathy means sharing others’ emotions while sympathy means more like merely reflecting pity from a distance (I can’t gather much more difference in them than that). However, the Merriam-Webster source shows them as exactly the opposite: “sympathy implies sharing (or having the capacity to share) the feelings of another, while empathy tends to be used to mean imagining, or having the capacity to imagine, feelings that one does not actually have.” Wiktionary seems to share the OED’s perspective, but also adds that when used in common parlance, the two terms are virtually interchangeable.

What does the Bible say? Koine Greek doesn’t help much. The Bible does not use the Greek root empatheia, but does use sympatheia a couple times. Yet it uses sympatheo (verb form) to refer to fully entering into the feelings of another, being in emotional/intellectual harmony with another, or being moved emotionally enough to help someone in their plight (see. Heb. 4:15; 10:34; 1 Pet. 3:8). These usages seem to be more what most would classify as empathy today, including sharing someone else’s emotional state.

If we really wanted to get deeply involved with this, we would also pursue the various words in Greek used more frequently to translate as “passion,” “affection,” “bowels,” “mercy,” “compassion,” etc. We’ll just have to save that for another time.

Just to muddy the waters yet a bit more, empatheia appeared in classical Greek and in non-biblical sources in the biblical era. It has a wide range of possible meanings. Sometimes it simply means passion or emotion in general. Other times it means rage or sexual passion, or penchant for violence.

Ironically, in modern Greek, it has very negative connotations. It means something like malicious pretense, malevolence, or strong prejudice against someone!

In modern English, the word began with German philosophers (Rudolph Lotze, 1858) and other scholars, especially around the turn of the last century. The online etymology dictionary notes that empathy was used in art theory to refer to exactly the opposite phenomenon James describes. It referred to the emotional influence that a viewer brought into a work of art as they viewed it. It did later come also to denote how artists could invoke emotional reactions from their viewers or readers; but originally it focused on the emotion read into the work by the viewer.

This stands to reason as the basic meaning of the word is “in-feeling.” This is taken here to mean brining your own feeling into the work, rather than being dominated or “surrendering” to the emotion of others as James surmised.

Now, I hope from all of this you get a couple things absolutely clear. While empathy in both Greek and English has endured various shades of meaning, two things are clear:

First, the vast majority usage defines empathy as simply understanding and sharing in the emotions someone else feels, and,

Second, and most importantly, no one in the history of the world anywhere has ever defined empathy to mean a wholesale and indefinite surrendering of your mind to the emotions of others, the wholesale approval of their emotions, surrendering your own value system under the influence of someone else’s emotions, or anything like that. Not once. Ever. Until Wilson-Rigney-White showed up.

If White et al expect us to agree with their novel definition, against the witness of the rest of the world, they are going to have to give us one heck of an argument. They are going to have to prove their case that empathy requires us to adopt and approve of the sinful attitudes of others, and they are going to have to show why their reasons for thinking so are logically necessitated by the definition of empathy. (Spoiler alert: they can do neither.)

The “context”

James wrote quite a bit trying after the fact to defend his position that empathy is de facto sinful.

Along those lines, James seems to think that the presupposition of man as the Image of God backs up his claim that while sympathy is good, empathy is sinful. This is because, he says, the Image of God is required to submit all its emotional responses to the objective criteria of God’s ethical requirements, and not to surrender the mind and values to the sinful emotions of others. We are not even to sympathize with sin at all, for example, with drug dealers who lose their stash, etc.

James then adds a cultural element. This argument reduces to the fact that leftists in the current culture wars have weaponized empathy. They demand that everyone empathize with their views, even if it means destroying or suppressing our own values. Through the crowbar of empathy, things like the LGBTQ+ agenda, homosexual marriages, or a host of other unbiblical values, leftists gradually exploit people’s emotions and wedge themselves into acceptance and approval.

Regarding this acceptance and approval aspect, James refers to empathy as requiring us not to judge the sins of others with whom we empathize, but instead to validate those sinful emotions. The process of expanding this practice over time has led to the gradual decline and dechristianization of culture.

Before I give a brief analysis of these remaining points, let’s note the obvious: even if we grant that leftists are exploiting empathy in this way, it does not logically, i.e. necessarily, follow from the true nature of empathy. For anyone who understands empathy, therefore, not a bit of this “context” to James White’s claim (that empathy in sinful) changes it a bit. It certainly does not justify the claim.

Going back to what we said earlier, the problem is not that people did not understand, or willingly ignored, James’s claim. It’s precisely that they did understand what he said, and they simply disagree—because it is wrong. No appeal to “the context” changes any of that here.

A brief analysis

In James’s redefinition, the acceptance and approval part he attributes to culture-warring liberals is by definition a part of empathy itself. This is simply not true. Even taking empathy to an extreme degree of sharing and feeling what others feel does not require denying your own values or approving of sin in the other. It never has, and no modern definition requires that, or even suggests that.

Anyone who tries to practice or demand that kind of thing (and some do) is not advocating empathy, but rather the abuse of it. The weaponization of empathy is just that: it is an abuse and offense.

In his double-down tweets, James demonstrates just how badly one has to stretch in order to maintain his distorted redefinition in the face of what the dictionaries actually say. He says,

This means he expects us to agree with him when he equates the OED’s definition, “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another,” with his rendering: “adopting the emotions of others as your own, thus validating those emotions, even if those emotions are sinful.”

I was, of course, not in the room with him when he wrote this, so I could not see how straight he was able to keep his face. I cannot imagine anyone with a conscience would actually try to pull this off. I am certain that most readers will have no problem realizing that “weep with those who weep” corresponds nicely with “the ability to understand and share the emotions of others,” and in no way requires us to adopt sinful attitudes in the process. James cannot be serious here, expect the only thing more impossible than being serious seems for James to admit to making a mistake. So, we have this absurdity. Simply put, “weep with those who weep” is simply “understanding and sharing,” and far from “adopting as your own even if sinful.”

This basic assumptive error on James’ part has been well explained and handled by John Reasnor already. Suffice it to say that Christians generally do affirm that the Imago Dei doctrine entails that we submit our reason and emotion to God’s thoughts as an objective standard which transcends both our desires and those of others. Yet we do not impinge upon this truth at all even when we listen to and feel the sorrow of some other person, even if that person is suffering due to sinful choices.

This gets to another important error in James’s post. He referred to validating sinful emotions. The assumption here is that validating means approving of. But emotional validation does not mean approving of someone’s life choices or experiences. It simply means acknowledging that the feelings themselves are real feelings. That is a fine distinction for some people, but it is crucial.

So, for example, consider James’ example that we are not to empathize with the drug dealer who lost his drug supply in an accident, or the bank robber who gets caught and imprisoned. Does “empathy” actually mean that if we feel the sorrow of the imprisoned criminal, we automatically approve of bank robbing? If we validate the sorrow, does it mean we approve of the desire to steal and commit violence? Of course not. Emotional validation would simply mean acknowledging that the sorrow of the punishment is indeed itself a real sorrow. Empathizing with that sorrow and speaking or listening in those terms does not entail approval for the sins that brought it all forth. But it does create a powerful—indeed, the most powerful—pathway of human connection through which healing and restoration can begin. Lives are changed through empathy, because oftentimes truly damaged souls experience love for the first time. And love changes people.

This is what Scripture means in part when it tells us that the goodness of God is meant to lead us to repentance (Rom. 2:4). Even while we were vile sinners, God loved us in the most powerful way possible by literally becoming one of us in his Son, being in all points tempted as we are. Yet by feeling what we feel and suffering what we suffer, he in no way approved of our sin. But he did create the pathway of union with him and healing by his stripes—which were our stripes. It is through this practice of realized and actualized empathy that we can understand the truth that we, too, are able to love him and one another because he first loved us (1 John 4:19).

It is for this reason we are called to a love that is not stoic, but also actualized in emotional relations, having brotherly affection (Rom. 12:10; 2 Pet. 1:7). It is for this reason that God expects us to draw from our sufferings and sorrow as a way to comfort others who are experiencing sorrow:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too (2 Cor. 1:3–5; see ff.).

The exegete will have to go to great lengths to say the “comfort” spoken of here is purely objective and emotionless. No, it includes what we call empathy with the emotional situation, and it applies to literally “any” or “every” affliction—not just the ones of which James would have us approve.

But James White seems especially sensitive to the fact that some liberal may manipulate people through emotions. Well, yes, many people manipulate others this way. Conservatives do it too just as much as liberals. Christian leaders do it to with fearmongering and guilt-tripping as well. We don’t, however, cancel something or call something sinful just because some other people abuse it.

For example, people abuse sex all the time, and it has been used as a very divisive force in the culture wars. Is James going to tell us sex is sinful? People abuse guns, as the media reminds us during every gun-related tragedy. Is James therefore going to fight to abolish the Second Amendment? The logic here would be exactly the same. Instead of maintaining proper distinctions between the goodness of the thing in proper context, and the abuse of the thing, the liberal war on guns tries to abolish the distinction: guns are evil and they destroy lives. I.e., guns are sinful. James is using the same tactic on empathy. If James is so fiercely opposed to liberalism, why does he argue like a liberal?

Simply put: the abuse of empathy is no reason to abolish empathy. On the contrary, it should be a call for Christians more seriously and more intensely to engage in the doctrines of emotional understanding, sharing, validation, and redemption. Instead of the knee-jerk, reactionary wagon-circling demonstrated by James and others, we should follow the example of writers and counselors like Diane Langberg, whose book Suffering and the Heart of God: How Trauma Destroys and Christ Restores is a very good start on the subject. I personally still have a lot to read and learn on the subject.

If some liberals’ abuse of empathy is your concern, then the antidote is not to fight empathy, but to engage in it more intensely, more frequently, and more righteously than your opponents do. This is the path forward, and conservative Christians’ failure in doing so for decades now is part of the reason we have done so poorly in the culture war. Liberals don’t really need to feign empathy; they could just sit back and watch us fail at it.

Conclusion

The root problem here is that James and co. have redefined “empathy” to be something it is not. This redefinition of empathy, used only by him and a couple other people over and against the whole rest of the world and history, is the thing that is the problem here, not empathy.

Why can’t these guys, though, righteously manhandle language and redefine the term as they see most fit? Maybe, you know, they’re right? Who is the rest of the world to disagree? I certainly would not, except perhaps to remind James that you can’t, you know, just make up definitions of words willy-nilly to suit your own purposes. That is the rankest kind of moral relativism of which people like James spend all their time accusing the liberals. It is a shame to see him acting that way himself.

But I digress. Too many Christians, including me, have used doctrine and claims of logical reason as a tool of legalistic control and manipulation in the same way others use emotion as a manipulative tool. I say “claims of” because the truth is, many who have entrenched themselves within a fortress of doctrinal armament and conquest of others are actually just as emotionally frail, triggered, and weak as those they would criticize for being “snowflakes” or an emotional “mob.” What it often boils down to is that they blast “emotionalism” because they themselves are terrified of having emotional union, and thereby emotional vulnerability, with others.

But that’s completely unchristian. The whole of the Christian faith is about relationships. While I have blasted this idea in the past (and still hold to my own point in general), I need to acknowledge that the old saying, “Christianity is not a religion but a relationship,” has a lot of truth in the latter half of it. It is not just a relationship, but many. It is a primary relationship with Christ, which calls for rational and emotional, and total union with Him. But the whole point of covenant life is that we are body of believers who also are all connected with each other through him. The call of the Christian life is in large part how we can exemplify that union in real life through our relationships with each other as well. This includes again total rational and emotional oneness.

But we are also a body that is in the midst of a larger world, and Christ expects us to be able to have genuine relationships with our neighbors as well—those not within the body.

In short, to deny empathy is to deny a vital aspect of our created humanity and a large and vital part of our faith. We have emotional sharing we must do on multiple levels: with Christ, with our family (especially spouses), our brothers and sisters in Christ, as well as our neighbors and the larger community, even humanity as a whole. Wherever we lack empathy in any of those levels, we fail the love of Christ to that degree.

(There is an exception to be made to that last statement for people suffering from forms of mental illness which impair or almost entirely eradicate the individual’s ability to empathize. This does not mean people suffering from these conditions cannot be believers or in union with Christ and his body. His grace and mercy and ability to save are far beyond our comprehension. I speak merely of the generalized ideal of the healthy Christian life. I would add, however, that individuals experiencing or exhibiting the symptom of a severe lack of empathy should probably be tested for forms of emotional impairment. If such individuals in positions of Christian leadership are diagnosed, they may need to rethink their role.)

Joel McDurmonMarch 14, 2021