When Your "Empathy" is Really Self-Serving

I have something of a love-hate relationship with the word “empathy.”

I’m a passionate person. I cry in sad movies, am infuriated by injustice, and, generally speaking, I do care about other people, even the ones who annoy me. If a drag queen were being assaulted in the street, for example, you probably couldn’t stop me from intervening. It’s just the way I’m wired. My husband had to convince me to sit down in a restaurant once when I saw a man mistreating his wife. (My husband wisely decided to confront the situation on my behalf; the results were a lot better that way.) I don’t have to agree with you to see your dignity and value as a human being, and I see no point in being pointlessly antagonistic. My heart really is for restoration, and I don’t delight in seeing anyone suffer, even when they deserve it.

But while I do care about how people feel, it’s never more important to me than what is ultimately true. And this seems to put me at perpetual odds with the self-described “empaths” of the world.

Now hear me when I say I recognize the reality that some people are legitimately more tender hearted and compassionate than others, and that’s a good thing. We need them. They bind wounds and carry burdens. They go the extra mile to check in with those who are suffering and let them know they’re not alone. This aspect of empathy is good. It’s necessary. Like Christ, it’s characterized by grace and mercy.

And it’s true that there are some wicked, power-hungry men wreaking havoc in the Protestant world with hateful diatribes that characterize empathy as a sin. (I’m not interested in giving their pages any traction, so I won’t link to them here.) I’m not suggesting that we throw the baby out with the bath water.

But when empathy becomes your entire identity, then people-pleasing becomes your hobby, manipulation becomes your strategy, affirmation becomes your end game, and honest people, ironically, become the collateral damage of your self-obsession. I’ve personally always struggled most with people who identify themselves as empaths. I feel like every interaction with them is secretly their demand for me to validate their goodness. Their “empathy” often feels like a manipulative strategy for ensuring everyone else’s praise, which makes their alleged empathy all about them and casts you as a villain if you don’t play by their rules.

I can think of no clearer example of this than progressive Christians’ approach to gender identity. My Twitter feed is constantly cluttered with the self-righteous finger wagging condemnations of people who have fully convinced themselves that if you really love Jesus, you will indulge a 12-year-old girls’ deeply held delusion that she’s supposed to be a boy.

But while these people are busy signaling their alleged virtue to the world, they’re actively affirming these kids in an ideological death sentence. Scores of quirky 15-year-old girls are lining up for elective double mastectomies. Boys as young as 8 are being put on dangerous cocktails of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones that will render them permanently sterile before they’re even old enough to drive a car.

Listen to this poor, sweet man named Seth, and ask him how “loving” he thinks it was for people to validate his delusion. Listen to any of the hundreds of vocal detransitioners who are now lining up to file lawsuits against the butchers who left them with irreversible damage. When you listen to Scott Newgent tell you about about her seven surgeries and pulmonary embolism and 17 months of recurring infection in her phalloplasty wounds and permanent lung and heart damage, are you sure it’s all that loving to funnel other people down this road by convincing them it’s God’s design?

When you read about Sean’s extensive history of childhood trauma, including multiple bouts of aggressive cancer and the loss of both his brother and his mother, do you really think hormones are going to cure what’s broken? What if I told you that the hormones actually ended up likely killing him, as they were incompatible with his late stage cancer diagnosis? Was the doctor who prescribed those deadly pills really acting in love?

This poor woman hates her body so aggressively that she had skin removed from her arm to fashion a fake penis and skin grafted from her leg to replace the skin on her arm. She’s seen here injecting testosterone into her body. This is self-hatred, not love. It’s butchery, not healthcare.

Indulging delusions like preferred pronouns is precisely as “loving” as agreeing with an anorexic girl’s belief that she is morbidly obese when, in fact, she weighs 85 pounds. The truth is that it’s not loving at all. It’s actually pretty hateful. Do you want these people to die in their delusion? How much self-harm are you willing to cheerlead for woke points and ego strokes?

The victims of this demonic ideology don’t need churches to fly rainbow flags in their honor; they need churches with enough honor, moral courage, and genuine concern for their well-being to risk telling them the unpopular truth that could save them. They need churches who are selfless enough to be misjudged and disliked. You don’t get credit for being “kind” if your version of kindness is volunteering to lead a parade of people straight off a cliff.

Flannery O’Connor may have said it best:

“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”

Tenderness is no substitute for truth. Love people well enough to speak it.