Is Empathy Dangerous? The Survey Everyone Is Fighting About
Stop letting a survey tell you what Christians believe about empathy.
A new PRRI survey released Tuesday says 54% of white evangelicals believe empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from a society guided by God’s truth. Only 42% called empathy a foundational moral value. Every headline writer in America is about to use that to paint evangelicals as cold and heartless. Do not buy it.
Here is what they will not tell you: that survey forced people to pick between two loaded statements. It was not a simple question, and even critics like Michael Wear called the wording manipulative. Feelings were never supposed to outrank truth, and naming that is not a lack of love.
Joe Rigney warned about this years ago. Allie Beth Stuckey named it plain in “Toxic Empathy.” Empathy that demands you affirm sin, excuse evil, and call it compassion is not biblical love. It is manipulation wearing a church dress.
The other guardrail
But hear me clearly on the other side too: Jesus was moved with compassion. He stopped for the broken. He told the story of the Good Samaritan crossing the road everybody else walked past. A Christian who feels nothing for his neighbor is not standing on truth. He is just hard-hearted.
Wake up: love without truth is a lie, and truth without love is a weapon. Scripture commands both. Guard your heart from toxic empathy, and guard it just as hard from a cold heart that hides behind doctrine.
So where do you land: is empathy a virtue Christians must protect, or a danger Christians must watch? Say it plain in the comments.
See y’all later,
John