I am very excited to talk to my next guest.
His name is doctor Joe Rigney.
He serves as a Fellow of Theology at the New Saint Andrew's College. He's also a pastor at Christ Church in Moscow in Idaho. He is the author of eight books, including Leadership and Emotional Sabotage and the book we're talking about today, The Sin of Empathy, Compassion and Its Counterfeits, Doctor Ridney.
Welcome to the show. First of all, Hey, thanks for having me, Mandy.
I loved this book. I just told him off the air. It took me maybe an hour and a half to read. It's not War and Peace. It's a very simple, slim book, but boy does it pack a punch. And I want to just allow you to give what you must have at this point, an elevator speech, a version of what you're talking about that is easy to understand for my listeners if.
You would, Yeah, absolutely, I would say.
The basic premise is that, like all good things, passion is capable of being corrupted, and when it does, it becomes highly destructive.
So maybe one of the simplest.
Way into it is if you have someone who's drowning in quicksand there's sort of physics analogy using the book. There's basically three ways that you could try to do something about that. The first way would be to kind of walk by on the other side of the road, sort of the parable the good Samaritan the bad guys in that story who just walk by, And we would call that apathy.
So you could be apathetic.
Someone's drowning, someone's suffering, and you just completely ignore it. But the other two responses are a little more interesting. So one would be I'm going to reach in and grab you as you're drowning, and I'm gonna have one hand grabbing a branch on the side, and I'm going to embrace in order to help pull you out. And the word I would use for that is sympathy or compassion. So I'm I'm joining you at some level in the pit,
but I've I'm still remaining anchored to the shore. And I think that's kind of the historic Christian response to pain and suffering is to say, that's what pity, that's compassion, that sympathy tether to the shore, but reaching in joining people in their suffering and pain in order to.
Help them get out of it.
But in the modern world, there's kind of been this movement to upgrade that that sympathetic, that compassionate response, and they've build empathy as compassion two point zero. And the upgrade is you jump all the way in, You just dive in with them. And this is presented as a kind of improvement on the old version because it's a more total immersion in the feelings and experiences and suffering or whatever of other people.
And so that's better.
But the problem I have with it, the reason that I call it a corruption of compassion, is that in losing touch jumping in with both feet, you lose touch with the shore, you lose touch. And then this analogy, it's that's losing touch with reality, with what's true, with what's good, with what's good for someone in the long run, and focuses mainly on the immediate validation affirmation of what everyone is feeling in the moment.
And so that's what I call the sin of empathy.
It's when empathy is untethered and when it does that, it actually because the destruction comes when it's a tool of emotional blackmail, of emotional manipulation, and you can do a whole lot of destruction and.
Evil in the name of empathy.
Now, in the book, this is not a book about politics, I want to be clear, but I am going to take it in a political direction and you can respond in kind if you'd like. This feels very much like what we're dealing with on some of the biggest social issues that we're dealing with right now. And you know, the trans situation that we've been dealing with in the country for a long time, I think is the best example of this. And you know, I am one of those people that at my core, I'm a small l
libertarian type. So when you are an adult, if you want to do whatever you want, I really don't care. As long as you bear the responsibility for those actions and have those consequences on your own, I don't care what you do. You can have all the plastic surgery that you want, you can take all the hormones that
you want, and go about your business. But when we started talking about children, if you said this is not a good idea, you were not argued with on the merits of whether or not this was a good idea.
You were told you were transphobic, you were hateful, you wanted these people to die, and that for me is the clearest definition of how can we help someone who is struggling and suffering, but also recognize that perhaps thrusting them into a path of medicalization is not the way to go, And that for me, compassion is how can we help them. Empathy is we're going to just go along with whatever they want to do, whether or not it's going to damage them in the long run or not.
That's right.
And I mean you're right that you know at some level the phenomenon I'm trying to unpack is as old as dirt. Right, So you know, Adam and Eve came out of the garden and we're trying to emotionally manipulate each other. So and so in anybody who's ever been on the receiving end of a pity party or a guilt trip by a family member knows the phenomenon where we're describing where they're they're taking advantage of the fact that.
You care about them, right in order to steer you to get their way. So this is not a new thing.
This is a human thing, deeply human way of manipulating people's pity and compassion. What is a little bit unique perhaps about the last twenty thirty forty fifty years is the institutionalization and of that phenomenon throughout all sort of sectors of society where it became it became like the entire society became hijacked in this way by appeals to compassion. And the trans said one is the law is the latest. It's in a long line of.
This kind of manipulation.
I think that the LGBT stuff was advanced in precisely.
The same way.
Here's people who just want to have the same rights as you do. They just want to get quote unquote married just like you do. And isn't it so sad that they can't get married because we're such a bigoted and hateful country. And so it was an appeal to compassion in order to mute any resistance to the redefinition of the most fundamental.
Institution of society.
So this radical move of redefining marriage and trying to unmoor it from its biological covenantal realities was made on the basis of compassion and appeal to compassion and empathy for same sex couples.
And then but it doesn't stay in place.
It was just extended out as we're seeing with the trans movement, where would you rather have a dead son or a live daughter?
When the medical.
Community makes that statement to parents who have children who have, somehow or other through their smartphone or internet access, have been catechized and indoctrinated into gender ideology and are now saying, I even though I was born a boy, I feel like I'm a girl, and I want to get surgery and get on puberty walkers and everything else. When parents would put up any resistance, it was an appeal to their natural human compassion for their child. Don't you love them?
Don't you care for them? Do you want them to die? That was used to short circuit any resistance, And that's a great example of that manipulation of our normal, good human response to suffering and pain and hardship, which is to share and identify with people. But it can get easily get hijacked, and when it does it it does become highly destructive.
A lot of the criticisms that I've read quite a few scorchers of columns that have people that really don't care for your opinion on this. How does this square because you're a pastor of a church, how does this square with Jesus's commandment to love thy neighbor. And you know we've all heard, you know, love the sin or hate the sin. Where does all this sort of fit into that overall dogma?
Yeah?
Absolutely so well. I mean, Christ is the model for Christian compassion. And we're told that he's a sympathetic high priest, which means he was tempted in every way that we are, yet without sin. The one thing that Jesus would not do is join us in our sin. Now, he died for our sins, but he himself would not celebrate, validate, and affirm us in our sins.
He came to rescue us from it.
And so Christ is a great example of what I would call tethered compassion. He's anchored to his father, he's anchored to Oh, I'm gonna love God first, and then because I love God, I'm able to love human beings in their weakness, their brokenness, their sinfulness and try to pull them out of the pit that they've put themselves in.
That's tethered compassion.
What he didn't do was put our emotions in the driver in his driver's seat and say take me wherever you want to go. In fact, the Bible tells us repeatedly Jesus would never entrust himself to man because he knew what was in the heart of man. He actually when people tried to hijack and steer him, like his disciples did at times, like no, you can't go to
the cross, get behind me, Satan, right. So there's a number of places where Jesus absolutely refuses to do what his followers or his enemies want him to do because he's more committed to the mission that God has sent him on than he is to whatever their desires might be. And I think the larger biblical picture of compassion always anchors our love for neighbor, in love for God and
what's ultimately good for them. And the challenge with this untethered empathy is it frequently prioritizes the immediate feelings of a person over their long term good. So I'll do something that I think will relieve their immediate feelings.
Of distress or pain. Transisu is a great example.
They feel this way, so we'll castraate or mutilate, or give them puberty blockers in order to try to alleviate these feelings that they have, rather than their long term good, which would be Let's try to bring their psychological identity in line with biological reality. Let's remain anchored to what is true and what is good, not get untethered by their emotions.
So how do you prevent someone And I guess you probably can't prevent this. But my thinking is is, like I read your book, I absolutely understood what you were saying. I am of the sort that I want to solve the problems. In Denver, we have a huge issue with homelessness, and our mayor has chosen to just shove you know, people who suffered great trauma who are now addicted to drugs or alcohol or mentally ill, has just shoved them into old hotels, which doesn't solve any of the underlying problems.
But to your point, this is exactly what you just talked about, which is solve this immediate need without solving any of the longer issues. So how do you prevent people from saying, well, you know, the sin of empathy says, I don't have to be concerned about that, you know, I mean, this could be a double edged sword. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I mean?
Yeah?
Sure, it's certainly possible for someone to see the abuse of compassion and empathy in our society and to actually fall off on the other side and become heartless and apathetic, indifferent to human suffering. And part of the reason that I wrote the book, you know, it's passion and its counterfeits, and the final chapter is commending real compassion in the face of the counterfeits, because I don't want that to happen.
But the surest way to keep to, the surest way to.
Get the cruelty and apathy that people are afraid of, is to continue allow to allow people to manipulate us by empathy into doing things that are destructive and harmful. So in the cases like homelessness or rampant criminality in urban centers, or legal immigration for that matter, and these kind of hot button issues, we are running the risk of a kind of callous indifference to human suffering because people are tired of being manipulated by the suffering of
others by advocates. So this is like, this is how the setup often works, where you have here's real human suffering, and then you have activists who are victims, and they may be victims of real things or have real hardship not of their own doing. But then you have activists and advocates who come along as representatives, who speak on their behalf, and they view the victims as a as a tool to power and they know that they can reorganize society however they want in the name of compassion.
So we will well reorganized. They'll set the agenda for what everybody else has to do. They'll be the ones in charge. And they discovered this was a very effective way to hijack institutions, colleges, churches, schools, and it was very effective.
And so now we've got more of that.
So then you have a backlash against it as people go, well, if that's what compassion gets me, no, thank you. And what I want to say is no, we actually need to think in terms of what's good for people in the long run, like what is actually going to get down to root issues, So whether it's homelessness or immigration, we want to actually think what's going to be good
for everyone, not just myopically focused. One of the things empathy does is it acts as a spotlight and it focuses on certain suffering and not other suffering.
Others, certain suffering gets totally whitewashed.
It's just totally gone, but other people at certain suffering is elevated, so that we fixate on that, and I want to say, no, we need to have a broader perspective, rooted in justice, in what's true and what's good for people and long run, what's good for society in the long run, and out of that then you can make wise decisions because you're not governed by the immediate passions of the moment.
I'm talking with Pastor Joe Rigney about his book The Sin of Empathy, and to that point, Pastor, you know, one of the things that has been irritating for me for a really long time when it comes to the immigration issue, is a perfect example of this. And you know, I have a lot of compassion for people who live in these crapholed countries and they just want to escape
and have a better life for their family. I think most people can understand why you would want to leave someplace where there's no opportunity in danger to make the
long trek to the United States of America. But so much of it happened and was allowed that now we see people rooting and cheering as people are dragged off the streets by ice and it's like with the pendulum swung so quickly too, I can understand why you'd want to come here to Uh yeah, we don't care if you get due process and we're going to toss you out on your ear. It's it's been it's been an
interesting thing to see. But ultimately, I think we're seeing more and more of a backlash against more of these issues where empathy has been weaponized to use a better you know, for lack of a better term. Do you see a shift on some of these things, and are we going to shift too far too fast?
Well?
I think like when it comes to the people who celebrate ice, you know, rating and deporting individuals, I think the celebration is less about is less of cruelty about those individuals who being deported, and more a gratitude that someone finally decided that enough was enough.
So I think it was after you know.
Decades of politicians puttsing around and not doing anything as millions and millions of people illegally enter the country and distort and it was highly destructive to many communities. Right, So this is a good example of the myopics. So in the name of compassion for people refugees, or asylum seekers, or even just migrants from other countries who wanted to come here seeking better life. Well, what about the people whose jobs they displaced? What about the wages that were depressed?
What about the factories that the jobs that were taken from Americans who now had to compete with under the table untaxed labor. And it's like, no one felt compassion for that group of people. So now when that group of people see someone finally standing up for the rule of law and for a border, they rejoice. And that fact not necessarily that, you know, individuals who were brought here as children are being deported. I think that Americans would have a far greater compassion if we actually had
a regulated system and a firm border. But this is an issue that cuts right to the heart of the scent of empathy question. A friend sent me a picture a couple of weeks ago from the Mexican side of the southern border, and written in big block letters on the Mexico side in graffiti was the word empathy. And I thought, that's actually a really good illustration of what I'm getting at, because the idea of the graffiti was this wall, this border wall is an affront to empathy
to compassion. Empathy means you don't get to have borders, you don't get to have boundaries. You have to let anything, anything goes. And I think that's a really good illustration of precisely what I'm trying to avoid.
No borders are good, right. Good fences make good neighbors.
If you have a big border, if you have a wall, you can also put gates in that wall and allow the number of people that you think you can handle to come in.
All of that is made possible when you have boundaries.
When you lose boundaries, it's just one big mess, and is what we find ourselves in twenty twenty five.
So someone has texted our Common Spirit Health text line with this question, if I understand correctly, compassion is good if it's to white, straight folks, and beyond that it's out of control and becomes a negative. How do you respond, because that's a criticism that I see.
Of their book.
Yeah, sure, well, I don't know about the white part. I think the race question, the ethnic question. Yeah, we should be compassionate to all peoples of all all races, insofar as we have the ability, and insofar as it doesn't compete.
With our other duties as far as the straight the straight piece.
Yeah, I'm a Christian. I think that homosexuality is wrong. It's disgusting, and it's sinful, and therefore I don't want society celebrating it endorsing it, because I think it's harmful and destructive in both the short term and in long
term to people's souls. And so I want a society that rather than flying the rainbow flag and encouraging vile affections, I want a society that reinforces the basic institution of society, which is the natural family, where a husband and a wife covenant together for a lifetime for the good, for their own mutual happiness and for the bearing and rearing of children, which is the foundation of every other institution
of society. And because we've abandoned that institution, like a lot of these other problems that you've mentioned here, whether it's the homelessness which is often driven by mental health and addiction, and what feeds that well, uh, single parent homes, right, rampant divorce, the decline and.
Decay of the natural family.
Those that that one issue sprout so many other issues, and we won't defend and preserve and maintain this fundamental institution of society, and as a result, we're reaping what.
We've sown and it's justified with what maintains it.
Though, is this false notion of compassion that says, validate and affirm everybody's desires. If you desire it, we affirm it. If you want it, you can have it, do what you feel.
And instead we should say, no, what, how has God made us? What? What? What standards does he put in place?
He knows best how we're designed and has given us a blueprint in his scriptures for how we're to live. If we live according to his word, then we'll find that we find there's life there, there's joy there, there's health and wholeness there, rather than the decay and destruction that surrounds us everywhere. Uh.
Doctor Joe Rigney is my guest. The book is the sin of compassion, and it is a excuse me, the sin of empathy when we get back to the name of the But you kind of threw me there because my views and I understand the biblical perspective about homosexuality, but I don't necessarily share that because so many of my gay friends would love to be straight. They would love nothing more to be straight, but that's not how
they're wired. And I happen to think that, you know, God thought they were important enough to put on the earth, and we'll disagree about that. I felt like I needed to say that. I hope you understand, but ultimately I do think that the overarching point goes well beyond white or straight or anything else, because you can apply the sin of empathy to so many different things that are the problems that are being and I'm put air quotes around solved and being solved badly because we have untethered
ourselves from anything that makes sense. Doctor Joe Rigney. I put a link on the blog today so people can buy the book. I really appreciate you coming on and having this conversation, and I hope people buy the book and begin to understand that we can be compassionate and still not get sucked in to the things that don't make any sense. Thanks for your time today.
Thanks Madie,