Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - REPLAY: Is Empathy Making Us Stupid?

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

Today we're talking about something that will probably be quite controversial among Christian women: the danger of empathy. While empathy is usually a positive thing, focusing too much on it will cause you to compromise on things you really shouldn't. And unfortunately, the idea of empathy has been weaponized and hijacked by ideologues who want to push a narrative and crush any dissenting opinions. We don't need to abandon empathy entirely, but we do need to remember to balance it with critical thinking, before our desire to be empathetic leads us to affirm secular truth instead of God's truth. Watch our 2022 Democrat Campaign Ad here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgoGn5AGQXU&t=60s&ab_channel=AllieBethStuckey --- Previous Episode Mentioned: Ep 532: The Case Against Julius Jones | Guest: Sean Fitzgerald https://apple.co/3NL9rk2 --- "R.I.P. ROE" Sticker: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey/products/rip-roe-sticker "Go VOTE" Sticker: https://shop.blazemedia.com/products/vote-sticker?pr_prod_strat=use_description&pr_rec_id=6552e1052&pr_rec_pid=7931910291709&pr_ref_pid=7926489317629&pr_seq=uniform --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. All right, guys. I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. Last week, last Thursday, I was in Auburn, Alabama, speaking to some students there. And I think some people from the community with Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA.

We talked about all kinds of issues that are deemed very. controversial today, but it was a great crowd. They were super engaged and we only had one dissenting question. And you know, I really appreciated the fact that she had the courage to stand up in front of a bunch of conservatives and ask the question that she knew was going to kind of be antagonistic. She did have a little bit of attude. And I told her that. But I also told her that I was very proud of her for standing up and for saying something that she believed and asked a question that, you know, she thought was an important question to ask. And we as conservatives should learn a lesson from that kind of courage, that if you are in the minority or if you are surrounding people that you know

are going to push back against you, you still should have the courage to stand up and say what you know to be true or ask really important and even seemingly controversial question. So I had a blast doing that. I don't typically travel as much as I have in the past few weeks and as much as I'm about to over the next next few weeks. I kind of have just like this burst of travel that's fun, but also as you guys can probably understand, and maybe you understand from your own lives, it can also be very difficult to try to balance everything that is going on.

But thankfully, they're short seasons, and I have a lot of support, and I'm very thankful for that. And I'm thankful for you guys who come out and come to the talks. I always love meeting you. As I talked about last week, I got to stay with a fan-turned friend and just enjoying that Christian hospitality. It just edified me so much.

And I really do feel like we are family. And when I get to meet you in person, it's just amazing. So thank you to everyone who comes out and meets me and talks to me and all that good stuff. All right. Today, we are going to talk about the dangers of one, maybe two concepts. It depends on how far we get, two traits or characteristics. if you will, that we have been told are universally positive, but are actually dangerous and

destructive. And that is number one, empathy and number two, inclusion. And we talked about this in Auburn, and then it just got me kind of thinking about this subject. And I thought it was important enough for me to start the week out with. And I don't know if we're going to get to the inclusion portion because I could spend hours and hours talking about the dangers of empathy. So we're definitely going to talk about that. We either will do. like a part two about the dangers of unfettered inclusion or we'll include it in today's episode. And I understand I have already scandalized some of you by saying there are problems with empathy because empathy and inclusion are the values that have sucked so many people, especially young

people, especially women and especially Christian women into accepting ideas and policies that are actually very harmful. and they are harming the very people that these groups say that they want to defend the most vulnerable, particularly women and children. And I'll talk about how that is. But not just women and children. Also, the people that we tend to see is marginalized and discriminated most against in American society. I remember a few years ago, I saw a video of a pastor talking about the dangers of empathy, even talking about the sin of empathy. And then I saw an influencer.

I don't know if that's the correct term. I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but someone who has influence who is a Christian talking about how deleterious empathy can be. And honestly, for a while, I just didn't buy it. I just kind of felt like people who were saying this were trying to be edgy. And honestly, it kind of offended me. I thought of all the things in the world, of all the terrible things that a person could be, Of all the problems that we have in the universe, we're going to spend our time trashing empathy.

Like, doesn't empathy just me and putting yourself in someone else's shoes, trying to understand how someone feels to comprehend their position so you can listen to them, learn from them, and then potentially, if necessary, advocate on their behalf? Like, what could be wrong with that? Is it empathy what helps us be less judgmental and kinder to people? And then inclusion, how could that be bad? What's wrong with trying to bring more people into the fold, making sure more people feel seen and hurt? Shouldn't we, especially as Christians, be creating a more inclusive and empathetic society? Like, isn't that what Jesus would want? Isn't that loving people, loving your neighbor as yourself?

The answer is, though, I've realized over time and after some thought and some reading and some investigation, that the answer is actually no. The answer is no. not only should we not be prioritizing empathy and inclusion in our own lives, prioritizing. I mean every word. So make sure that you're listening to what I'm saying. I'm not saying, as I will talk about, that we shouldn't care about these things at all. But we should not be prioritizing empathy and inclusion in our lives. We also shouldn't be pursuing these as top societal values.

So first, to explain why, and if I'm angering some of them, you already understand that I'm going to explain my position hopefully clearly. And I also understand how you feel because I felt that way in the beginning of kind of this thought process. So first, let's talk about what empathy is. It comes from the Greek empathya, empathia, which means in a state of passion or emotion. And I'm going to butcher the pronunciation of the German word of empathy, which came around and about the beginning. of the 20th end of the 19th century, which is Einfulung. I think that's how you pronounce it, which literally means in feeling. It was built on that Greek word. And this is interesting.

If you look at the etymology of this word, it's meant a term from a theory of art appreciation that maintains appreciation depends on the viewer's ability to project his or her personality onto the object. So someone putting themselves into or onto another object to determine, to determine their feelings about it. So kind of like becoming that that thing so they can appreciate and understand it. So let's stop right there when we're talking about empathy. The etymology, so the study of this word, the study of the meaning of this word indicates that empathy is primarily about feelings. It is primarily about your state of emotions, the state of your mind. it's about your mentality. So when someone says that they're an empath, which is a word that you've

probably heard more frequently recently, they typically mean that they can feel someone's pain strongly. So they are constantly taking on the struggles of those around them and they feel them deeply. Typically, this is used in a very positive sense that you want your counselor or your friend, your psychologist, your pastor to be an empath, to be a very empathetic person. This is different than sympathy, which is feeling for someone or feeling with someone, but not necessarily putting yourself into their position and taking on the full depth of their pain. But both sympathy and empathy can be harmful. Both can be destructive, but especially empathy.

So how? Because feeling too much for someone can blind us to reality. a reality that is bigger than someone's experience in pain. It can make us forego principles that are higher than this person's experience and pain. It can cause us to ignore the truth, the objective truth, in favor of how a person feels. So when we allow someone's pain to become our own pain, we then become unable to separate feelings, which are subjective, from reality, which is objective. So here's what I mean by that.

And I know this is going to be controversial to use this as an example. But truly, the example of race and policing is, I think, the most relevant because this is where I see empathy tripping people up. It blinds them to what is actually true. It makes them ignore the facts because they are told being empathetic is latching on to whatever narrative the mainstream media puts out. So whenever there is a police shooting of a black man, we are expected to not just immediately express sadness, which I think is justified in fine, but we are also expected to express outrage and not just outrage, but outrage about this obviously being a racist and unjust event. So your empathy and love are measured on social media by how quickly you attach this

incident to white supremacy, systemic racism, and the problem with policing in America. It's not enough, as we saw after the whole Black Square saga, after George Floyd in 2020, it's not enough just to say, hey, this person is made in the image of God. Hey, this incident doesn't look like it was justified. It looks like it could have been an instance of injustice, that, hey, this person has value and dignity and worth and they weren't treated that way. And I think that is wrong. You learn very quickly that that is not enough by the rage mob and the racial social justice activists on social media. You learn very quickly that you have to go beyond that, that you have to say that this is part of a grand racist scheme and system and that you have to work to dismantle and reform the system because

it's not enough to be not racist. You have to be anti-racist, which means you have to work to break down the institutions and systems that have caused this kind of thing to happen. You're not allowed to say that this was an isolated incident or that you care about it because you care about people in general. You have to latch on to whatever the mainstream narrative say about race in order to be called empathetic and because we have been conditioned to believe that empathy is a fruit of the spirit, which it's not. And it's the foremost characteristic that Christians should try to emulate, which it isn't. Then we just find ourselves agreeing with what the loudest and angriest and most dramatic people on social media say that we should agree with.

So if you say, well, I have no idea if this shooting had racist motivations. We don't know if the shooting was justified or not. There's no evidence right now that this is an indication of white supremacy or systemic racism. We just don't know if this is a symptom of a larger racist problem with American policing. Let's wait for the facts. Oh my goodness, if you say that and I'm saying this. from experience. If you say that it's almost worse, if you definitively take the opposite position from the people who are saying that this is an instance of white supremacist injustice,

if you show any curiosity or any humility or any deference to the fact that you might not know everything, you are accused of being a white supremacist, of being a racist, and the worst thing ever being on empathetic. If you say, hey, we do have the fact. actually and they don't seem to be in line with this narrative that the police are shooting unarmed black men in droves and by the way like that's that's true that we that the facts don't actually support that it's exceedingly rare for a police officer to kill an unarmed person in general there are more white unarmed men killed by black unarmed killed by the police officer than killed by police officers than black unarmed people and the number of black men killed by the

police is proportional to the crime rate among black Americans unfortunately Unfortunately, that's a fact. Black Americans make up 13% of the population yet commit 40% of all homicides. In New York City alone, black Americans make up about 23% of the population yet account for 64% of all murder suspects, 67% of all murder victims. If you say that, if you counter any of the emotional rhetoric that we hear in these conversations about racism and policing and crime in the United States, if you go against the left-wing social justice narrative and you talk about facts and you talk about statistics and you try. try to add statistical and evidentiary context to the conversations, then you are accused of being unempathetic. And empathy actually blinds people to the facts that I just listed that actually do add context when we are talking about race and policing in the United States and whether black lives matter in the U.S. or not. Like all of those facts really matter. And yet we are told by the people who

weaponize empathy that you're not allowed to talk about facts because it's not loving. So but but here's why the statistics are actually important that I just listed that I know we're controversial but are nonetheless factual. One, that because of crime numbers, a black American is more likely to have an interaction with a police officer, which means they're more likely to have an interaction that ends in a poor outcome. Unfortunately, like a fatal shooting. I'm not saying that's good. I'm just saying that statistically that's how things go. So that should make us question, that alone should make us question whether racism is the motivator, has anything to do with it. And that question is important because if we assume

that a police officer shooting a black man is because of systemic racism and the police force or the justice system, then that sets the groundwork for policy change, like defunding the police or bail reform, both of which have led to levels of violent crime in major cities that we have not seen a decade. So that's my, that's my second point in that. Like, this kind of stuff, these narratives have actual consequences. So the empathy that causes us manipulates us to accept the narratives about policing and white supremacy and systemic racism in the United States completely uncritically without looking at the facts can actually make us support policies that end up causing more victimhood among the very people that we say that we are trying to protect by being.

being empathetic in the beginning. Did you follow that? So all of that means the reforms that we're seeing because of the narratives that are being pushed means more black victims of violent crime and murder. Black Americans aren't just the most likely perpetrators of violence in major cities. They are the most likely victims. So this is where, again, empathy is destructive. When the media and activists on social media, many of whom are Christian influencers try to get you to respond exclusively in empathy by saying, yes, this incident. was unjustified no matter what and a racist no matter what. And we need major changes to our system and our society. They don't believe that black lives matter. All you're doing is reacting to the

demands of emotion. And emotion, while it absolutely has its place and is natural, it very often ignores facts. And when we ignore facts in favor of feelings, we tend to push for policy that does not make sense and is destructive. And not just policy that doesn't make sense, but theology that doesn't make sense. You'll hear people talking about God's justice after these incidents, after these tragedies. I can call it a tragedy no matter what any time a human being, especially an unarmed human being, especially if it was unjustified, dies at the hands of the state or anyone else. I think it is a tragedy.

They're made in the image of God. But you'll hear people put out, you know, Micah, 6, 8, and I'll talk about racial reconciliation and reparations, white supremacy. but very few people seem to be willing to step back and say in the aftermath of all of that, hang on, what really happened here? What do we know? What are the facts? What's going on in this instance and in our country as a whole? And if you do ask those questions again, because I've been on the receiving end of this, you are told that now's not the time. Now's not the time for those questions. Now's not the time for facts. Now's not the time for statistics. But those people never have an

answer for me. When I ask, when is the time? Like, when is the time to ask those questions? When is the time for context? When is the time for data and statistics and for facts? That can actually help us make better policy decisions that will do a better job of protecting the communities that we say we want to protect, the most vulnerable communities, women, children, whomever it is. It seems that the people who are most empathetic in reacting to those news stories don't allow their empathy to carry them to the point of coming up with viable solutions because they are more concerned with sounding empathetic than they are actually loving the people they say they are concerned with. Because look, if we really cared, if this is an issue that's

really on our heart, if we really believe that Black Lives Matter, which I think that we all should, then we would care about the tens of thousands of Black Americans, including children, dying by homicide every day, largely thanks to the soft-on-crime policies of progressive cities. We would care that more black babies in New York City are aborted than born most tears. If black lives really matter, we wouldn't be only focusing on the people shot by the police. We'd be focusing on how to fix the problem of black people dying and drove at the hands of each other. But to bring that up, you're called racist. We're told, oh, that's not white people's business.

Why not? We share a country. We live in a shared society. It's our business if one kind of crime is committed against a black person, but not another. Our empathy is demanded when it's a police officer firing the shot, but not when it's a neighbor. Why? Why? Because the people who perpetuate only one side of the story, who perpetuate one narrative, the people in the media, the activist class who do so, have something to gain. Have something to gain. How do I know? Well, more than 130 black men who, according to the Washington,

to post not have deadly weapons on them, although that doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't present some kind of threat, have been shot and killed by the police in the past year. 132. Do you know their names? Maybe we should be asking, why not? I didn't know this. Because for reasons that we don't have time to fully analyze right now, they didn't trend on social media.

The media did not whip up your outrage, your favorite influencer or pastor did not demand your empathy. We didn't see rioting and looting in response to the loss of these 130 plus lots. And now that is a big problem with empathy. It one blinds you to facts, facts that matter, facts that should guide our reaction to something, facts that help us shape actual good policy rather than reactive policy that will end up hurting the very people that we want to help. And number two, it is unreliable. It is ungrounded. It tosses people and societies to and fro on the latest wave of media-generated outrage, which seems to be timed perfectly for elections. Tell me, is that love?

Is that the love that Christ calls us to? One that is unreliable, that is unpredictable, that is feelings-based, that is reactive, that is generated by social media outrage, biased news headlines, the timing of elections, that is untruthful, that defends things like looting in arson and rioting and can lead to unjust deleterious policy that will create more victims, like defunding the police or releasing violent criminals from jail in the name of equity? Is that Christian love? No. 1 Corinthians 134 through 6 tells us what love looks like. Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or

resentful. It is not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. So love. Love is, Christian love rejoices with the truth. It is not lie or celebrate lies, even and perhaps, especially those told in the name of empathy. The world measures our love by how quickly and how passionately, how emotionally we react and repeat mainstream left-wing talking points about racial and social justice. How consistently we mimic the vocabulary of activists about systemic racism and inequality without even understanding what is meant by these words. But that's not real. Honestly, at the end of the day, that is self-serving.

It's a vapid virtue signaling. It's something we do to be in the in crowd on social media to signal to other people that we're on the right side. We're doing the work. We're fighting injustice without having to do so much as get off the couch. And I don't doubt that we feel strongly or even that our indignation and compassion are real. But these feelings are so. often jinned up by what people on social media are telling us that we must care about.

And so often are not grounded in reality. And we call for policies and solutions, not based on what is reasonable and good, but based on what feels best in the moment, sometimes based on unsubstantiated fear, a resentment, or revenge. The Bible measures the Christians love by its patience, by its kindness, not its niceness. kindness and niceness are two different things, by the way. Kindness is not manners, but it's actually seeking the best interest of another person and best interest is defined by what God says is someone's best interest because he created us.

God judges our love by its lack of arrogance, its lack of rudeness, it's lack of irritability, its lack of resentment. Wow, how much policy today is actually based on resentment. He judges it based on its commitment to the truth, to find. facts, to objective reality, to theological truth that's revealed to us by the Word of God. Do you know how much God values truth when it comes to justice, when it comes to the court of law? I mean, we've talked about justice versus social justice so many times on this podcast. And we have cited our sources and talking about the four main characteristics that we see of God's justice when it

comes to law giving in the Bible, specifically in his law giving to Israel, and that is truthful. It is proportionate. It is direct and it is impartial. And on that truthful piece, we see how much God values it by his requirement of witnesses, his requirement of an impartial judge. He forbids deference or partiality to the rich or to the poor. He actually says that it is wicked to defer to the poor or to the weak person in a lawsuit that the judge must be impartial. And if there is a false witness against the accused, the person who gave, who bore false witness must take on the punishment that would have been endured by the person who was accused. That's how much God hates deceit. That's how much God hates lying. We should maybe take that a little more seriously when we try to

impugn the motives of someone, especially maybe a police officer who, by the way, I don't think police officers are perfect. I think they have major responsibility. They have people's lives in their hands. So they should be held to a really, really high standard. I don't think we should unconditionally support police officers across the board. But so often, because, again, we want to be seen as so empathetic. We immediately impugn the motives of a police officer as racist, as a white supremacist, our system as white supremacy. Look, that's bearing false witness. God takes that really seriously. God cares about truth so much that not only does he list it in 1st Corinthians 13 as a characteristic of what Christian love is, but we also see it in his law giving to Israel. We also see it

as inextricably intertwined with the truth. I actually heard a pastor say a few months ago, or it could have been last year at this point. When someone asked him to define justice, he said justice is empathy. No, no, no, no, no. In fact, empathy can be an impediment to justice because if you are feeling someone's pain and you put on someone's pain as your own pain, that can deter you from being able to see things objectively. That can deter you from being able to see the other side of the story or to look at the facts, to look at things in an unbiased, impartial way. You can take on their resentment. You can take on their paranoia. you can take on maybe their justified fear,

but their justified fear doesn't necessarily speak to what is objectively true. And that's the other major, maybe the main problem with empathy. It can wreck a person's theology. Because not only does prioritizing someone's feelings of pain cause us to deprioritize objective facts, but it also causes us to deprioritize or abandon biblical truth. I think, again, the best example of this is the issue of race because I see even Christian conservatives abandon all reason and all logic and all commitment to objective reality and adopt narratives and ideas that are simply not true, which leads to theological claims

that are not biblical. So the conversation starts with things that are true, that a white person cannot understand what it means to be black in America, true, that black people in America have been oppressed and unjustly discriminated against. true, that that is a sin, that racism should be opposed. All of this is true. So we accept that which is true, which I think that we should. We move into conversations about these truths, which I think is good. We seek to understand. We seek to listen. We seek to defer to experiences that we haven't had ourselves. I think all of that is good. That could be an example of empathy

that is actually productive. But just like any other value, just like, as we've talked about before, autonomy, authenticity, and as we may talk about today or another day, inclusion, when empathy is not subject to truth, both theological and factual truth,

then that's when it becomes harmful because it is not a good rudder for your ship. It could be a good part of your cargo. It could be a good part of your ship or maybe cargo isn't the right metaphor. It could be like a part of what guides you. It cannot be your rudder. It cannot be what the deciding factor in where you actually go.

The truth has to be. God's truth has to be. So when it comes to approaching conversations about race with empathy, what tends to happen among Christians who mean well is that they then move to embrace claims that are arguable at best. So, for example, that every disparity in outcomes between white and black Americans are because of injustice and white supremacy, that every negative outcome for a black American is the result of unfair treatment or an unfair system. Why? Because very often the same people that are saying or talking about their pain are also making these

objective claims. So because we want to be empathetic, we agree with them. It's not empathetic to argue. And if a white person has already acknowledged the reality that they will never know what it's like to be a black person in this country, it can feel like it's not their place to argue that or that they have or they feel like they don't have the ability to even talk about it. So what happens is we as Christians move from empathy feeling someone's pain, trying to understand their perspective, listening to them, which again is all good to simply accepting every claim and argument, even if they're not objectively true, which again can be disastrous. So that means we've moved into an unloving territory because it is not loving according to to scripture to lie. And as we've already established, accepting lies has policy consequences and policies affect people. In the case of defunding the police in much of so-called criminal justice reform, the consequence is more black people dying by homicide.

And here's why empathy can be so blinding. It is true that we don't have access to someone's personal experience, but we all have access to facts. You don't have to be a certain skin color to look at data, to look at history. So when someone claims that there is institutional racism against black Americans today, we can ask how, let's look at the specific examples. And where there are specific examples, yes, let's look to dismantle it. But let's look at those specific examples before accepting the claim. Because every single official policy and program in place right now from colleges to corporate America discriminates in favor of black Americans not against them.

When people say that there is an epidemic of police officers shooting unarmed black men, we can point to the numbers and say, well, we don't know if that's really true. When someone says the reason for fatherlessness among black Americans is because of the, because the state is unfairly imprisoning black men, well, we can point to the fact that the fatherlessness race started to increase not in the 1980s when there was a rise in policing in these tough on crime policies, but actually in the 1960s at the start of the welfare state. And by the way, the rate also increased at the same rate among white families.

families. It's not empathetic to ask these questions. It's not empathetic to bring things up, but it is right. Again, because the truth or lie will determine not just the narratives and not just what people believe, but also what the people in charge decide and what the people in charge decide then will affect people. You know, whenever these situations happen after George Floyd or after any of these conversations, which by the way, the empathetic side, sometimes is right. Sometimes they're sometimes it's true like the accusations that they make are sometimes accurate and that's fine. All I'm saying is we have to subject ourselves first not to how we feel, not to empathy, not how someone else feels or what they say, but what is actually true. But whenever we

do that, whenever we ask the questions, whenever we give statistical context, you're told that you're unloving, that it's wrong, there's not time that you're racist, you're called the bigot and all of these things when really all you're trying to do is help. and understand people see what is actually true so we can make reasonable decisions. I think about this metaphor. And I ask people, like, what is loving in this situation? If your toddler tells you that they think that there is a monster in their closet or they think that there's a monster in the corner of their room. And you actually know, this is just a metaphor.

Don't read too far into this. Like, which part is which here? I'm just talking about empathy versus the truth. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular.

This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. And they see like a jacket over the lamp in the corner of the room and they think it's a monster and they call you to their room. What is the more loving thing to do? Is the more loving thing to do say, yes, you're absolutely right. Your fears are valid. That is a monster.

good luck, or is the more loving thing to do to turn the light on and say, I totally understand your fear and I see why you think that. And I'm sorry that you feel that way for your experience. That must be really scary. But let me show you what is actually true. Let me show you what is real. If you were to justify your toddler's fears and to say, yeah, there is a monster in your room, your feelings are valid, they're absolutely right. You're just perpetuating more fear. Who knows what your child is going to do? That would be irresponsible. that might be empathetic to try to validate their fear in that way, but it's not actually truthful. And it could lead to bad outcomes, psychological outcomes, or who knows, maybe they try to

break the lamp. You understand the metaphor. Truth is not always empathetic and it is not always soft and it doesn't always come across as compassionate. It isn't always well received, but it is important, especially when we're talking about things of such great confidence. I think empathy so easily manipulates Christian women into accepting narratives and accepting things that aren't true because we of course are all attracted to someone's feelings, to someone's fears, to someone's experiences, to someone's stories. And that's fine. I think we should be. I think God created us like that, especially Christian women like that. I think that we should lean in to those natural feelings of compassion and nurturing and understanding that we have and not arguing that

we should be callous, that we should shut someone down and we should question someone's experiences. All I'm saying is that we cannot allow our empathy to listen to someone's experiences and say that that is the objective fact and the rule across the board that should then lay the basis of future policy and our understanding of how the world works. What I'm saying is that we have to be a little bit more critically thinking. We have to not only ask, well, what does God say justice is? What does God say truth is? What does God say love looks like? But we also have to be reasonable and logical. Use the minds that God gave us, the resources that God gave us to research ourselves to look into the numbers, to look into the claims and to really second guess a lot of what the mainstream social justice narratives tell us, not just about this, but about anything. I use this example simply because I think it's the one that trips us up the most. because we have good intentions to understand people and to understand their concerns. But it can also be the thing that allows us to believe things that just aren't true.

This is one example of how empathy can harm. Empathy, as I said, just like autonomy, just like authenticity, just like any other virtue has to be subject first to God's word. It has to be subject first to theological truth. And I'll explain a little bit about what I mean. Authenticity being yourself can be a really good thing. It is a good thing in the sense that you don't want to be fake. You don't want to pretend to be something or someone that you're not.

But authenticity, when unbridled by a value system that is bigger than you, that is bigger than yours, it can lead to the justification of all kinds of sin and selfishness. you can do whatever you want to do because you're just doing you. Autonomy is the same way. We've seen autonomy use as justification for abortion. If all that matters is that you're in control of your body in your life, then you can justify any kind of sin and selfishness. But autonomy over your life and your body can be a good thing.

Authenticity being yourself can be a good thing as long as they are subjected first to your submission to Christ and His Word. The same thing is true of empathy. Empathy can be a good thing. thing, as long as it is subjected first to the truth. All of this is really tough for the Christian because we have a high view of the individual. We have a high view of human beings being made in the image of God. So that means we believe that their feelings and their stories matter. We don't just look at people as data points or as statistics. We actually do care about their personal

experiences. And I think the desire to fix someone's circumstance or to assuage someone's fears or to link arms with them and say, I will fight this battle with you is good. I think it is even Christ-like in some ways. But again, when we are led by things and feelings that aren't true, we can actually be aiding and abetting in someone's destruction and societal destruction rather than something that is good. I think another example of this is with the death penalty. Let me just wait into all the most controversial stuff today. But all of this made me think about this case in Texas about a woman named Melissa Lucio. And she is a mom that was convicted of killing her two-year-old back in the early 2000s.

And I've seen a lot of conservatives in Texas say that she is not just that she shouldn't get the death penalty, but also that she is innocent and that she did nothing wrong, that she didn't commit this crime. The Innocence Project, we've talked about the Innocence Project. And I think that they have very dishonest motivations. I don't actually think that they care about people's innocence. I think that they think that the death penalty in general is wrong. So whether someone is innocent or not is not as much of a concern to them as it is that the person isn't. executed. And however, they often make the argument that the person is actually innocent when they're not. And that is true about Melissa Lucio. A lot of conservatives, I think, have become sympathetic to her cause and have also said that she is an

innocent person because the Innocence Project has said so. Innocence Project has said she's like this wonderful mom that she, that times were hard. She was sexually abused in her past, but she did the very best she could. And she's basically being framed by this prosecutor who just wanted to appear tough on. crime and then of course there was this Hulu documentary I'm talking about her called Melissa versus Texas and those documentaries are notoriously biased and only really show you one side and I did some digging into this and I can do more on this because that's not what this episode is about I'm trying to give you another example of how empathy can blind us to reality when we take on someone's feelings

and in story it can blind us to what is actually true or other competing facts that actually contradict their story and the feelings that we or they might have. And so I won't get into all of the details of this particular case, but all I did was look at the court transcript. So what did her attorney say? What did the prosecution say? What did the witnesses say? What did the journalist at the time when she was being sentenced say? That tends to be far less biased than the journalism that we are seeing today. And what I found is that the Innocence Project's claims that she was a perfect mom, that there was no evidence of abuse, that there was no evidence whatsoever that she could have possibly killed her child were simply not true that her attorney, in court,

her attorney who was trying to argue that she should not get the death penalty said, look, Melissa Lucio abused her child. She bit her child. Yes, sure, she sexually abused her child. Yes, sure, she bruised her child, she broke her arm. But his argument was that he did not, she did not push her down the stairs. And that was not how this child died. So even the defending attorney of Melissa Lucio said, yes, she was an abusive mom. She was a terrible mom. She's admitted to being a terrible mom. The Innocence Project and other conservatives in Texas who were trying to get Governor Abbott to grant her clemency or all saying, no, she was a wonderful mom. She couldn't have committed this crime. It was just because she had a bad pass and she was poor. And that's why she's being picked on.

you have to do is read the court transcripts. And you can see what her defending attorney admitted to that the emergency room physician, that the paramedics who showed up said that this was the worst case of child abuse that they had ever seen in their entire career. Those are the facts. That's what the witness said. That's what her defending attorney admitted to. And not only that, not only was she then sentenced to the death penalty in the original case, but also in 2011, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld her conviction and death penalty in 2011. And so this has been hashed out. The evidence has been looked at multiple times.

The witnesses said what they said. The defending attorney admitted what he admitted. She actually confessed. Of course, the Innocence Project said that that was coerced. But what happens in this case, also in the case of Julius Jones, which we did an episode on, which the Innocence Project said that there's no way

he could have been guilty. Again, just blatantly lied about that. What happens? to Christians and even Christian conservatives, we hear someone's story. We say, oh, we just have, we have empathy for this. They must be innocent because they came from a poor background or because of the color of their skin or because of these other factors. And we won't even allow ourselves to look at the facts of the case because we don't want to appear empathetic. So we self-censor. We don't even want to look at the truth. We, it's not just that empathy is inhibiting us from

looking into the truth. It's that we don't want to seem unempathetic. So we're not looking into the truth because we're afraid of what people might say that is not Christ-like. That is not biblical love. Love does not rejoice in falsehood or rejoice in wrongdoing. It rejoices with the truth. Now we've also talked about the death penalty and whether that is a just punishment. Of course, I believe so because I agree with God. And God created the death penalty and he didn't just suggest the death penalty but before the creation of Israel. In Genesis 9, 6, he demands the death penalty for murder. And if God is love, as 1 John 4-8 says, and he demands the death penalty in cases of murder, then the most loving and just thing I can do is agree with the God who

is love and created justice and demands the death penalty for murder. I'm not going to out-love or out-justice God. But again, empathy, which is only taking on the pain of the people who are telling us their pain and their story, when that is supreme, that robs us of being able to look at justice impartially according to what God says is justice and to love the way that God says to love, which is in accordance with truth. What he says is truth and what is actually factually true. The death penalty is another instance of this. We cannot allow empathy to rob us of that, which is true. That is my charge, my call, my heart for Christian women. Not that we would stop loving people, not that we would stop having soft hearts for people's stories, not that we would stop trying to

understand people's experiences and pain because I think that's really important, but gosh, that we wouldn't allow that to make our minds mushy too. Like that's what ends up happening is that our hearts are so soft that our minds actually become like oatmeal. Like, and we stop thinking. We stop asking questions. We stop caring about the facts. We only listen to people's experiences. We don't even ask ourselves, but what does God say is true? What did the statistics say? What does the data say? All of that matters.

In fact, if you care about people, if you care about really loving people, you'll care about all of those things, more than you care about feeling someone's pain. That's the hard truth of it. And we don't have time to get into the dangers of unfettered inclusion today, but I have a lot to say about that. And so maybe I'll do that on Thursday,

or maybe I'll do that next week. I'm not sure. And maybe I'll get into more of this. this Melissa Lucio story on Thursday. Y'all tell me what you're interested in hearing. All right, that might seem kind of random. I'm not really sure why I decided that was the thing that I want to talk about. I think it was because we talked about it at Auburn.

And I've been writing about that and thinking about that a lot. Recently, just how this trips us up as Christian women so much. And I think it's an impediment to wisdom. It really is. It's an impediment to discernment. And let me pull up. James four because this verse just came to mind. Oops, no, it's James 3.

Okay. This is verse 13. Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct, let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes from above, but is earthly, unspeiritual and demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exists, there will be disorder in every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.

And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. Wisdom from above is open to reason. It creates good fruit and it is impartial. and sincere. That is the wisdom and not just the wisdom, but I would say also the love from above, very different than the vitriolic, unreliable, worldly, superficial empathy that we see touted by the world today. All right. Thank you guys so much for listening. If you love this podcast, please leave us a five-star review. We will be back here tomorrow. Hey, this is Steve Daste. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest

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