The Call is Coming from Inside the House (of Worship) | Book Review: The Sin of Empathy by Joe Rigney
- Sara Raztresen
- Apr 4
- 16 min read
Self awareness? Who is she? I don't know her.
Two and a half months ago, after Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal diocese of Washington D.C. gave her address to Trump and pleaded for mercy on behalf of immigrants, trans kids, and other vulnerable people in the country, something strange happened. Floating around for some time was a Tweet claiming that Bishop Budde was God's enemy, and that she hates God's people, and that we should not commit the sin of empathy.
The... sin... of empathy.
Which it seems he's drawing from a weird reading of Deuteronomy, where God instructs people not to have pity on people that would be stoned to death for introducing people to idolatry in the community (Deut 13:6-8):
6 If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, 7 gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other), 8 do not yield to them or listen to them. Show them no pity. Do not spare them or shield them.
Weird how Christians are so willing to follow these kinds of rules in Deuteronomy, but not the other rules about like, building temples or doing certain ritual purifications or properly owning (or selling) people into slavery (or any of the other million and two things that the Old Testament demands that literally nobody does anymore in 2025, regardless of what faith they subscribe to). Weird also that they act this hard hearted against their fellow Christians when that kind of... misses the entire point of Jesus and the Christian faith to begin with.
But I digress.
Now, as if that wasn't enough, it only took another month for a book to come out bearing a title with the same head-scratching phrase—and I don't know about you, but to me, there's something about a book titled The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfits that really makes you do a double take. Anyone who thinks of empathy, after all, understands it as that thing you experience when you're a person with a functioning sense of social connection: being able to sit with a person in their pain (or joy, or anger) and make space for that emotion. It's something that anyone who has ever heard of this Jesus man might think would line up with His teachings pretty well. After all, being able to see and validate other people's feelings, being able to relate at all, is one of the things that allows us to accept, understand, and work with other people, and would thus help us do that one simple command Jesus gave His followers towards the end of His life:
My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. (John 15:12-14)
Seems simple enough, right? And yet, it seems we will never run out of people who want to get coy with the idea. "How do you define love?" says every Christian that thinks they're clever. "Love doesn't let people live in sin!" says every Christian that thinks the peak expression of their faith is telling a gay couple, gently, that they're going to hell for their fleshly desires (or whatever). "Love is following God's design for humanity!" says every Christian man that would really hate it if his wife started doing anything other than glibly agreeing with everything he said and got an independent source of income from him.
And when we start thinking like that, we start getting books like Joe Rigney's fascinating little book here.
The Sin of Empathy: An Overview of Its Author, Content, and Rhetoric
So, as a professor that teaches a course on rhetoric, messaging, and writing, I do feel I have a solid handle on what Rigney quickly describes in a single sentence in his book: the concepts of logos (appeals to logic, reason, ration), ethos (appeals to one's credibility), and pathos (appeals to emotion; tugging on the heartstrings), which are employed in pretty much every argument someone uses to try and convince you of anything. From buying a certain brand of gum to voting for a political candidate and everything in between, if someone is trying to convince you of something, they are working your sense of ration and your emotions; they are trying to wear down your skepticism with a carefully explained and argued "trust me, bro."
And Joe Rigney does this right from the start of his book, with a foreword from a certain Rosaria Butterfield, who tries the double-whammy of ethos (highlighted in green) and pathos (highlighted in pink):
Those who know the author know that Joe wears many hats: professor, academician, college administrator, C.S. Lewis scholar, aficionado of all Great Books, and master of biblical theology and the well-turned phrase. But this book is authored by Pastor Joe Rigney. His concern on every page is your soul and God’s glory (3-4).
You trust someone who paints themselves as an authority, as a learned and factual source (and certainly, Rigney has some privilege to call himself a scholar; his PhD thesis on Jonathan Edwards, done with the University of Chester, is stunningly normal of a topic for an aspiring theologian proper). But you also trust someone who you believe cares about you and your wellbeing. Rigney works both of these angles right out the gate, while showing something of his hand in Rosaria's telling previous portion just before this:
Does pro-life mean protecting infants in the womb or illegals at the Southern border? Do government schools bless Christians or challenge their First Amendment rights? Is homosexuality a sin, found in the flesh, forbidden in the law of God, and overcome by the Savior, or is it a personhood group with an immutable but morally neutral untapped blessing to be stewarded and sanctified, rendering queer treasures in heaven? When empathy is unhitched from the Truth, it becomes an idol and a god. And feelings create tyrannical idols and gods (2-3).
The shrewd know where this is going right away. And those who agree with this kind of rhetoric find themselves soothed by a promise of their ideas and values being championed by a scholar and pastor, whereas those who disagree know that it's time to look under the hood of this author and understand where, exactly, this supposed "academician" is coming from, and what is influencing his ideas.
Why we would look under the hood, though, is important to go over. To look at this is to look at the P in the CRAAP acronym, a tool I use to teach my students how to identify quality sources:
C: Currency
R: Relevance
A: Authority
A: Accuracy
P: Purpose
Even if every one of those first four letters (the date of a source, its relevance to the topic one is researching, the credentials and expertise of the author, the verification of the information inside) is good, if that purpose is mucked up (showing obvious sociopolitical or religious bias, trying to get people to purchase things and therefore potentially skewing information, not being transparent about one's affiliations, etc.) then it throws the whole source into question—and so came my first problem with this book. Despite Rigney's PhD, despite his pastoral office, what one finds when looking into him is certainly nothing appealing to anyone who isn't on board with his brand of politics: namely, ardent Christian nationalism.
Rigney was the former president of Bethlehem Seminary and College, where he received his master's degree in theology, and he was pressured to step down not only for his advocacy of things like infant baptism (a position not held by Bethlehem's baptist affiliation), but his belief in Christian nationalism, which posits that the entire of America should be not just a culturally, but a politically Christian entity. This is a pretty unsavory position considering, you know, it flies in the face of the entire point of the first amendment and immediately makes anyone not Christian into essentially a second class citizen when implemented to the extent its proponents want it implemented. No one likes that idea because it sucks! Go figure!
More than that, Rigney also had some issues with people being victims of "untethered empathy" in the Bethlehem Baptist church, as well; apparently "coddling" and "cancel culture" were something of an issue, where Rigney claimed that to be too empathetic to the struggles of basically any marginalized group would "threaten Christians' relationship with truth."
But what is this truth Rigney is talking about? Well, if you expected a (not so) delightful charcuterie board of pretty much any -ism and -phobia you could think of, you'd be correct. And again: for folks who already agree with Rigney's political leanings, they may very well be relieved, even encouraged, to see entire chapters titled "Feminism: the Queen of Woke" and sections of text claiming feminism to be a "cancer." Here's a sample of what I'm talking about:
If you successfully and effectively resist the cancer of feminism, you will be called an abuser or an abuse-enabler. They will do this because these are the labels that continue to have substantial social leverage (“racist” and “misogynist” are all tuckered out) (138).
Throughout the second half of this book, Rigney tells us all about how we might "understand how the woke rot penetrated so deeply into society and the church" (73), and he does this by setting up the first half of the book with broadly applicable ideas that most reasonable people, I think, wouldn't be too hard-pressed on. That untethered empathy concept, after all, has some merit; there is some kernel of truth to the idea that people, as Rigney spends a long time picking apart C.S. Lewis's stories like The Four Loves and The Great Divorce to explain, can and will take advantage of people's willingness to relate, comfort, and assist troubled folk to manipulate them into doing things that aren't good for anyone. Emotional manipulation is real, and there's no denying that; there's also no denying that sometimes, leadership can fail when it's more concerned with placating people than taking charge and addressing problems in ways that'll benefit anyone (which Rigney pulls from rabbi and family counselor Edwin H. Friedman's A Failure of Nerve).
However, Rigney stretches this kernel of truth far beyond its reasonable application. He lulls his target audience into a false sense of security, and slowly lulls their critical thinking to sleep, by taking so long to build up this concept of emotional manipulation and emotional abuse that can come from this "untethered" (as in, without boundaries, conviction, or the full spread of facts on a subject) empathy. Chapters one, two, and three are all about this.
Before all that, though, Rigney hints at where he's going with this on the very first page of the introduction when he wrongly puts a sexual abuser's emotional manipulation of their victim to "not tell anyone" of the abuse on the same level as a doctor asking parents, "would you rather have a dead son, or a live daughter?" (referring to the very real fatality factor of the psychiatric condition of gender dysphoria, which highly increases risk of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation) (5). This is, to anyone who does not align with Rigney's political views, a red flag. To people who do align with his views (and the way he addresses these issues, coining terms like "trans-insanity" and making a stark and loaded dichotomy between "natural marriage" and "same sex marriage"), this is a sign that they are in safe territory, and that their views will not only be tolerated, but validated.
The entire last half of the book, therefore, does everything I tell my students not to do: uses heavy, loaded language, makes it very clear that the author thinks it's "woke" and untruthful to accept the reality of people's differing expressions of gender and sexuality, and scapegoats an entire class of people (women, specifically feminist women) for the reason that society is apparently, in the minds of folks like him, in complete free fall. It's so predictable that it's not even worth digging into more than I already have, honestly: it's a book rife with icky things like complementarianism (the idea that men and women are just assigned different roles in life based on their gender per God's design, with women usually being the ones getting the short end of the stick and being encouraged to subsidize men's public lives with their domestic labor in the home), as well as all wacky claims that Christianity's image has been ruined by "progressive billionaires" pulling the strings behind the scenes and getting the public to turn against the Church by encouraging the "tyranny of the sensitive" (82).
All in all, though, as I read this book, I discovered more of the same: more outdated social philosophy, more weaponizing of God's name to justify being a complete tool to innocent people, more gaslighting and semantics to manipulate people into thinking Rigney had a point here, and most of all, the most glaring lack of self awareness I have ever seen, which brings me into my next point here.
The Lack of Awareness in The Sin of Empathy That Everyone Saw Coming
(At least, I'm sure everyone who saw this title might've seen this coming.)
What, was I supposed to be surprised that a book with a title like this, by a known Christian Nationalist who considers basic social responsibility and understanding "coddling," and who pins feminism as the root of all the "woke rot" spreading through Evangelical churches, would be so pitifully lacking in the self awareness department? Was I supposed to clutch my pearls every time this man decided that trans women were just "mentally ill men" or put the emotional manipulation of a sexual abuser in the same category as a doctor being real with his patient's parents about gender dysphoria being a serious risk to their child's health? Because I was neither shocked nor scandalized to see all this in the book. The only reason my Kindle highlights are so full of "oh my God" and "what the fuck?" is because it was impossible for me to capture the feeling of rolling my eyes straight out of my skull in text.
Here's the thing, though. Time and time again, when I make the attempt to digest books from these types of thinkers in this specific brand of Christianity, I notice something most peculiar: they assume, right out the gate, that they're the only ones that have the Truth™. They genuinely believe their faith isn't based on, well, faith (that trust that what we believe in is real, that the spiritual experiences we have are genuine, that our God is on our side and that His way is the best way to make this world good). Rather, they believe faith to be something empirical: something they can prove, something that is objectively true and that anyone who doesn't accept is simply in sinful denial of.
Problem is, though, that every single one of the apparently 45,000 and counting Christian denominations thinks the same way, too: that they have the Truth™ and these other denominations are led astray. It gets to the point where anyone honest with themselves would recognize that maybe this Scripture that folks in the more mainstream Protestant-derived denominations love to say is so very clear is actually a bit more complicated to understand, interpret, and integrate into modern life than they realize when they read passages to themselves without any guides, study notes, or scholarship to help them out.
However, so long as Christian hegemony remains strong—with a majority of politicians and other powerful people claiming the label, with churches of every flavor open on every other block, with Christian values still considered the "standard" in a large portion of the U.S.A, and a lot more—the fact is that people will be happy to claim that label even if they aren't so keen on actually doing that work to see the root of the Biblical message. And in fact, worse than that, plenty of people who know that many Christians are Christian because it helps them fit in, because their parents told them to be, because it's what everyone else believes, or what have you, will take advantage of that lack of knowledge and instead steer the religion in directions it patently was not meant to go in. When that happens, we get books like Rigney's—ones that do some radical mental gymnastics to make their point, that take broad truths and warp them into bludgeons for their terrible takes, and who never pause to think if maybe anything they're saying actually applies to them, too.
I'm here to tell you: it does. It does in the most embarrassing way. Because you see, as I said, Rigney gives some good broad truths here—before he starts breaking their bones and re-grafting their skin until they no longer resemble those broad concepts. There absolutely is a problem with people taking advantage of others' good intentions with emotional manipulation; there are people who use "therapy speak" to get their way, always using their boundaries as a way to shut down conversation or their trauma as a way to deflect responsibility and accountability. There are absolutely reactionary, anxious people who are more concerned with avoiding feelings of guilt and shame when a group tries to make progress than actually sit with the discomfort and work through it (because let's be real: sometimes it feels like any broad statement one makes has to come with five million qualifiers and disclaimers, lest someone come and say "well some people can't do XYZ! well I don't do this, so this criticism isn't valid! well, what about people who have [insert extremely niche problem here that is obviously not the point of the conversation]?).
Like, Rigney, baby, I get it. Trust me when I say no one is more annoyed with reactionary, anxiety-driven, victim mentality shit than leftists. Trust me when I say no one sees it more, and has to work around it more, than leftists. Trust me when I say you could've kept this book (even the sparse parts I agree with!) in the Documents folder on your computer, because we already have language for these problems. You did not need to tell us that these spaces have this issue.
However, Rigney says this about anxious apathy (which is the idea that some people are apathetic, not caring about others, in an anxious way, which shows up by forcing down bad feelings in people and fostering a sense of basically toxic positivity):
We find their sadness or grief or anxiety intolerable, and we either try to steer them out of it against their will or withdraw from them and shut down. Our anxious attempts to find silver linings are driven by our own agitation (26).
And what's so funny about this idea to me, is that Rigney and others like him don't realize they're doing it when they talk about the terrible rot of wokeness and the cancer of feminism. They don't realize that when they sit there, yelling about how it's "coddling" to give attention to areas of systematic injustice, like racism and misogyny and what have you, they're telling people who are disadvantaged by these systems to just shut up and never point it out so that Rigney and Co. don't have to feel bad about the benefits of such injustice that they reap every day. It's uncomfortable to realize that you benefit from an institution you never asked to make, sure. It's hard to know you're responsible for helping take apart a system you didn't build.
But then comes the double discomfort, the straight up dissonance, of knowing that people like Rigney don't just benefit from these institutions, but actively want to keep those benefits. It leads to them trying to do Olympic level apologetics to insist that it's just God's design to have women subservient to men or for trans and gay people to not exist, to draw on nature to say this is obviously how it works (when anyone who knows what a lion or an elephant or a clownfish or a black swan is can tell you otherwise).
And what that is, plainly, is a sign of someone trying to avoid the dissonance that comes with knowing that this nonsense is not God's design (but is in fact a holdover of pre-Christian cultures of antiquity and pre-Jewish Mesopotamian culture), in fact is not natural (as we're seeing more and more evidence that women have a potentially greater capacity for leadership than men), and is continuing to hurt and disenfranchise thousands of innocent people everyday. In a truly ironic twist of fate, it's them trying to claim their own victim mentality as they claim all of the greater society is against them and isolating them—as they insist that this terrible society has regressed on "natural" values and has become so backwards as to see Christianity in a negative light. It's to create fictional scapegoats and bogeymen like Rigney does, citing the insidious plots of some nameless "progressive billionaires" in his chapter on the alleged "Progressive Gaze" (a play on the concept of the male gaze):
Through a mix of empathy, faux justice, and credibility, the world discovered a powerful steering wheel for the church, one that progressive billionaires exploited to neutralize and co-opt God’s people for their own purposes (82).
Meanwhile, the case has been made for the exact opposite: that it was conservative rich folks lashing out against the "slavery" of FDR's New Deal that pushed that whole concept of a Christian society to its full fruition. Kevin M. Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America covers that topic and points out "how an unholy alliance of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics to this day." But that's a story for another time. And one that would probably upset Rigney and make him all kinds of uncomfortable, and we don't want that, because we're kind, empathetic, feminist wokesters, right?
Wrong. Here's the thing folks like Rigney don't understand: the whole facts don't care about your feelings shtick works two ways. And the facts here is that society is progressing. Yes, there are bumps in the road, and bad actors who would use the language of equity and social justice and mental health to simply avoid any challenge or accountability in their life. Yes, there are plenty of people more interested in virtue signaling and showing off their social justice plumage than actually getting in the pit and getting dirty with everyone else to make tangible change. Yes, there are people who are reactionary, who steal and steer the conversation away from the point to make it all about them. These people exist, and there's no point denying that.
But that's precisely it, isn't it? We recognize these problems. Folks like Rigney, who write books about why it's bad to be inclusive and why empathy is some womanly, decaying force destroying the Godly purity of (his convenient use of) doctrine and ripping up (his convenient interpretation of) Biblical truth, refuse to recognize the same problems in themselves or face that same discomfort they're asking everyone else to. So, honestly, all there is left to say to people like this is:
Suck it up, buttercup. Quit asking us to feel bad for you and respect your ideas and your expression of faith when those ideas and expression aren't based in facts (scientific, theological, or otherwise) and don't consider everyone on equal footing in society and deserving equal rights.
You're not oppressed because people don't want to join your religion or turn their nose up at it. You're not being treated poorly because people got annoyed that you tried to drag them to church after they said no a thousand times already. Your religion isn't being disrespected because people don't like the way you're side-eyeing a gay couple for having the audacity to hold hands in public. People aren't "cancelling" you because you called a woman a murderer for having an abortion.
They're just expressing the same right to their free speech and freedom of religion as you are, and if your skin is too thin to handle the world not revolving around you and what you think is the Ultimate Super Truth™, then maybe learn some of that mental resilience and strength you crow about everyone else not having and move on. We aren't falling for your emotional manipulation and we don't appreciate your co-opting of the Bible to justify being a drag on social progress.
Anyway, that's all I got to say about this dumpster fire. It's all just more of the same: more boring, obvious attempts to stir the pot, rife with hypocrisy and embarrassingly regressive social philosophy. Just let it die on the vine; ignore it like the toddler-foot-stamping it is.
Sara Raztresen is a Slovene-American writer, screenwriter, and Christian witch. Her fantasy works draw heavily on the wisdom she gathers from her own personal and spiritual experience, and her spiritual practice borrows much of the whimsy and wonder that modern society has relegated to fairy-and-folktale. Her goal is to help people regain their spiritual footing and discover God through a new (yet old) lens of mysticism.
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