For a book about the perils of empathy’s excesses, Allie Beth Stuckey’s newly released Toxic Empathy (2024) is rife with respect for empathy itself.
Christian compassion, Stuckey acknowledges, is a positive force in our daily lives. When we see a friend struggling with a heavy physical or emotional load, we lend a hand or a shoulder if we can. As well we should.
But, Stuckey argues, empathy becomes toxic when it is routinely weaponized in reflexive deference to political arguments predicated solely on compassion, to the exclusion of any opposing facts. Stuckey contends that on issues from crime to gender ideology to immigration, today’s left ruthlessly exploits people’s empathy while either burying or ignoring any truths that do not engender sympathy for its cultural and political agenda.
Two driving questions motivate Stuckey’s compact, focused book: “How can we tell when empathy has become toxic?” And “how can we tell when the point of an emotionally charged argument isn’t to help us love someone but instead to approve of a damaging progressive agenda?”
In a conversational tone far more pedagogical than polemical, Stuckey provides answers, by way of arguing that what she believes to be the five fundamentally misguided theses of today’s progressive movement are best understood as toxic empathy run amok: “Abortion is healthcare?” What about the child whose life it ends? “Trans women are women?” By what cogent, universalizable, or scientific definition? “Love is love?” Through what historical, societal, or ecclesiastical lens? “No human is illegal?” What about government’s primary imperative to establish borders within which citizens have certain rights, protections, and expectations? “Social justice is justice?” What about when the resultant “justice” on offer is patently unfair, discriminatory, or self-defeating?
By softly revealing the hard truths left unacknowledged at the heart of each of these progressive catch phrases, Stuckey demonstrates the vacuity of the ideas those catch phrases represent. To skewer these ideas, she relies on a well-crafted mixture of anecdote, data, analysis, and biblical exegesis.
Every aspect of Stuckey’s book, from its content to its language, reveals deep empathy for and identification with her audience: Christian women with a biblical worldview, of whom she is one. Women like Stuckey are particularly susceptible to toxic empathy, she posits, because they (rightly) value Christlike gentleness, kindness, compassion, and tolerance in their everyday lives.
Indeed, Stuckey’s book is best understood as an extended warning to her fellow Christian women that applying these virtues uncritically to political and social questions, as the progressive movement encourages us all to do, is the road to (literal and figurative) perdition.
This message, with its underlying imperative to “introduce those with whom you disagree to the freeing love of Jesus” comes across loud and clear to its intended audience. And persuasively so.
It is no criticism of Toxic Empathy to note that this is not a book likely to appeal to anyone outside the aforementioned cadre of Christian women. In fact, Stuckey’s precision in addressing herself directly to the defined readership poised to understand and adopt her perspective is one of the book’s strengths.
In this vein, Stuckey maintains admirable focus and discipline throughout Toxic Empathy. She explains why half-baked arguments like “no human is illegal” are ultimately incorrect, unchristian, and dangerous.
But she does not either state or imply that progressives’ ostensibly secular appeals to empathy not only exploit Christian compassion but rely for their very existence on a bastardization thereof. This reality is outside the scope of Stuckey’s project, yet inextricable from it.
Many (though not all) of the progressives who insist that “no human is illegal” or “social justice is justice” claim to be secular. Some, like bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose most recent book, The Message, accuses Israel of unprompted and indiscriminate genocide, even claim to be atheists.
But tribalism, genocide, and barbarism are the historical rules. Certainly, they are the dominant and brutal legacy of the pre-Judeo-Christian world, in which might typically made right.
I understand why well-meaning Christian women—whether Stuckey’s evangelical, Bible-quoting friends or my Catholic, Pope Francis adoring ones—are led politically astray by misapplied empathy. I do not understand why anyone who claims to be an atheist, as so many progressives like Coates do, has any particular interest in the plights of impoverished immigrants, displaced Gazans, or anyone else.
Without any explicit or implicit religious imperative to treat others as oneself, human nature in all its self-interest is free to reign. So-called “secular humanism” is a hollow, self-deceptive nothing-burger.
So, there are only two real possibilities here: Maybe the allegedly secular left is in fact broadly afflicted by what my Catholic Church deems “baptism of intention,” wherein people follow Jesus without being aware of their latent faith. In that case, many of Stuckey’s God-fearing friends (and mine) are not really victims of a fundamentally misguided, secular left—but co-creators of a circumstantially misguided, unwittingly religious one.
Or maybe today’s left isn’t actually interested in the well-being of its supposed beneficiaries. Maybe it is interested only in power; does not wish for whatever reasons to compete in the old-fashioned, meritocratic way in the established fields where traditional kinds of power are on offer; and sees clearly that one catches more revolution-seeking flies with honey (i.e., professions of empathy for others) than with vinegar (i.e. naked appeals to self-interest). In this case, the compassion of Christian women is being knowingly exploited by malevolent, venal manipulators.
My best guess: It’s both of the above, but the left is home to more “true believers” (in the belief that they don’t believe) than demonic charlatans.
As a reasonably self-aware believer, and at the risk of being accused of toxic empathy myself, I do want to note my one departure from Stuckey as an example of my point about progressivism and faith.
Stuckey’s arguments about abortion, transgenderism, illegal immigration, and 2020’s DEI initiatives are spot on in theory (even where, as in the case of abortion, I do not entirely agree in practice).
But her take on “love is love” (i.e., her dissent from cultural acceptance of gay marriage) is less than persuasive to me. Not because I believe that homosexual marital love is exactly the same thing as heterosexual marital love (it isn’t). And not because I wish that my Catholic Church would perform gay weddings (I don’t).
But because I believe in as much pluralism with respect to the civic pursuit of happiness as can reasonably coexist with public safety and religious freedom.
Unlike abortion, unlike transgenderism, unlike illegal immigration, and unlike 2020’s DEI initiatives, gay marriage does not hurt anyone. Indeed, it helps a lot of people, not least gay couples and their communities.
Yes, all the arguments of the mid-2000’s against gay marriage, which was then opposed by most politicians on both sides of the aisle—that it diminishes the cultural imperative of heterosexual marriage, that it normalizes marriage writ large as an individual rather than a societal institution, and that it imperils religious freedom for churches that refuse to perform gay marriages)—have been proven at least somewhat true.
Still, there is a slip between the cup and the lip here: “This will cause that” is not the same as “this is that.” Abortion is by definition the end of a child’s life. Illegal immigration is by definition a public safety crisis. A man is by definition not a woman. These hard truths demand deference—my empathy for the pregnant woman, the impoverished immigrant, or the person with gender dysphoria notwithstanding.
But gay marriage is not by definition the devaluation of marriage or married childbearing. That its broad acceptance, in concert with myriad other cultural factors, may have resulted in this undesirable outcome is too long a way around for this fairly conservative Catholic not to affirm that there are weighty societal, spiritual, and familial benefits that merit deference here, too.
Why?
Because I am a believer. So, “love your neighbor as yourself” (gay neighbor included) has resonance for me. Without that Judeo-Christian understanding, it would not be logical for me to have any empathy (toxic or otherwise) for anyone.
So, while toxic empathy is a profound problem that truly cannot be overstated, we must also recognize another, even deeper problem: The further we get from the fumes of our nonsectarian, religious founding (that is, unless we reverse today’s rapid and unrelenting secularization) the less true empathy of any kind there will be.
Talk about toxic.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a regular opinion contributor at The Hill. Her writing about books, culture, and education has appeared in USA Today, Law and Liberty, Deseret News, and The Washington Examiner.
