Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Joe Rigney serves as fellow of Theology at New St. Andrews College. He received a Master of Arts from Bethlehem College and Seminary and a PhD in theology from the University of Chester. Prior to serving at New St. Andrews, professor Rigney served as president of Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and as a pastor at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. He’s the author of many books, including Live Like a Narinian, The Things of Earth, and Leadership and Emotional Sabotage. It’s his most recent book, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion, and Its Counterfeits, that is the topic of our conversation today. Joe Rigney, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Joe Rigney:
Thanks for having me.
Albert Mohler:
Joe, I have to tell you, you have intentionally hit a hornet’s nest here, and that’s why we’re having this conversation. So what is it with you and empathy?
Joe Rigney:
We have a long and storied history, and I wasn’t hugged enough as a child, I think is really what it goes back to. No,
Albert Mohler:
I think that’s what most of our viewers are going to suspect.
Joe Rigney:
That is, although it’s interesting, in all of the blowback I’ve taken over the last eight years or so over this, nobody’s ever asked about my feelings. Everybody’s very concerned about other people’s feelings. My feelings have never been concerned. No, I really got into this about 10 or so years ago, I read a book by Edwin Friedman called A Failure of Nerve. I was teaching a leadership class. I think actually it’s interesting, I think the first round of that class, they read a couple of different books. One was a little book by Piper—this was at Bethlehem—and then Friedman’s book, and they read Courage, Courage to Lead. Right. That was the,
Albert Mohler: Conviction.
Joe Rigney: That’s what it is, yeah. And so those are the books they were reading. And I don’t know how I came across Friedman, but I read it and thought, man, this guy is putting his finger on so many things, and in it he draws attention to the danger of empathy. And we wrestled with this as a class—for a couple of years I taught this thing—and then it was as if the world conspired to just prove him right.
And from about 2014 on, it was like everywhere you looked, you saw this angst and reactivity and passions raging, and then people being manipulated by empathy. And so back in 2018 or so, Doug Wilson and I shared an affinity for Friedman, and we recorded an episode called “The Sin of Empathy” for a show that they were running and that went, then we were off to the races. And so since then, basically the reason I’ve written so much on it is because the one time I did, everybody lost their minds. And then I spent a number of years trying to explain myself, what I meant and what I didn’t mean, applying it and different things to try to bring some clarity to the subject. Initially I thought that might work, now it’s all, I’ve just given it up. Some people are going to see it and get it, and some people just, you can’t help them, so you just press ahead anyway.
Albert Mohler:
No, you really do make a very strong case and you define terms. And by the way, speaking of Friedman, this is not the only area of life in which he offers some pretty rare insight. And so it’s just a reminder to us that some tough signs from unexpected sources, you get just some just really clear common sense.
Joe Rigney:
Yes, no Friedman, the exercise was a plundering of the Egyptians, because while his theology was whack, he was very evolutionary in his thinking, lots of psychological therapeutic language, a lot of common grace insights into the way the world works and how social systems operate. And I took a lot of that and then discovered, I discovered two things. One was a lot of the things he said I had actually I think heard before in C.S. Lewis. So Lewis, I realized that Lewis was putting his finger not under the label empathy—that word wasn’t a thing back then—but the same dynamics. And then also seeing it in the Scripture, seeing the way that the antidote to it and the language, how does the Bible talk about this? That was kind of a big burden that I’ve tried to bring some coherence to our language about how we talk about these things.
Albert Mohler:
I can remember hearing the word empathy gain increased traction in my own lifetime, and it has always seemed to me to be a synthetic word, an artificial word. And I guess one of the greatest questions to me is why, well, let me put it this way, doing an autopsy on why it became a substitute for sympathy in many cases, itself tells the story. So you do it well in the book. So tell the story. John Calvin didn’t write about empathy. Joe Rigley does. Why?
Joe Rigney:
Yeah. So the word actually comes into English in the early 20th century, I think it was a German term, and it came out of aesthetics. It was about projecting yourself into a piece of art and emotionally projecting yourself into a piece of artwork or something.
Albert Mohler:
It’s a relocation,
Joe Rigney:
Yes.
Albert Mohler:
A relocation of the self.
Joe Rigney:
Yes. And then it kind of migrates over time. And by the time you get to the kind of the fifties, sixties, seventies, it started to enter through the kind of therapeutic world, and it’s basically billed as a kind of improvement upon sympathy. And so the idea I think was that sympathy or pity, which were usually used interchangeably—really if you pity someone, you’re in the, I don’t know, if you want to say the dominant position, the helping position, they’re in the pit, you’re not. And that kind of asymmetry for sufferers and for some people who are trying to help them was kind of intolerable. And so empathy was regarded as a kind of improvement where you don’t stand outside the pit and try to help someone, but you actually jump into the pit with them.
Albert Mohler:
I want to make an argument to extend that a bit. I think the substitution of empathy for sympathy also has to do with one of the major distinguishing figures of liberal thought, leftist thought. And that is from the concrete to the abstract. And so I think the difference between sympathy and empathy is also the fact that sympathy means you feel for someone in a concrete situation of being in a pit. Empathy means you care for everyone in the world who’s ever been distressed by the idea of a pit. It’s a very different thing. It allows for a moral abstraction of the relationship.
Joe Rigney:
And there’s a kind of fusion of emotions. I think when I started to think through the biblical language, there was an “aha” moment I had, it was actually a student of mine who made the observation because people were really upset because I said the sin of empathy, and everybody’s, and he said, when we talk about if we said the sin of anger or the sin of fear, everybody would know what you meant. They would know that there’s a good form and a bad form and that this can be sinful or maybe not. And I realized, oh, actually that’s the right categories. This is a passion, and all the passions, it needs to be governed. And if it’s not governed, it becomes destructive. And so that was a key moment in my own thinking through it was realizing the passions rage, and the reason empathy in particular, I think is so dangerous is because it’s about the sharing of passions. You feel something and then I feel something and whatever you feel I need to feel and I get kind of sucked in and you lose a sense of boundaries, a sense of identity, a sense of what’s good and what’s bad, because the feelings and the emotions are now in charge and running the show.
And I think as you see, the late 20th century, early 21st century especially, the feelings were in charge, passions were running the show and was why Friedman identified it as a problem. The first person to bring up empathy in an institution is probably trying to steer you. And then we saw this over the last 10 to 15 years and all things woke, that the common thread that I came to recognize in all of these different controversies, whether it was race or abuse, whether it was manhood, womanhood and sexuality, the common thread underneath was the victim is always right—the alleged victim’s always right, the proposed victim’s always right—and you can’t question challenge or anything because to do so would to be heartless, not empathetic. So empathy became the steering wheel by which opportunistic people took advantage of Christian soft heartedness.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I don’t know that you actually say this in the book, but one of the points I make about empathy is that it’s synthetic, it’s artificial, but we are living in an age in which artificial emotional states or artificial moral impulses often displace the real ones and so when you write about the sin of empathy, I think it could be argued that that’s an overstatement. It’s an exaggeration because not every dimension of what we might call empathy is sinful.
Joe Rigney:
Absolutely.
Albert Mohler:
The problem I would argue is the displacement of the real for the unreal.
Joe Rigney:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so there are of course emotion sharing at a base level is required. Weep with those who weep—that’s a biblical command—Jesus was moved with compassion, all of these things are very good. The analogy that I give the most often is if someone’s drowning, empathy wants to jump in with both feet and get swept away. Empathy jumps in. Whereas compassion says, I’m going to throw you a life preserver. I’m going to even step in with it and grab you with one arm, but I’m remaining tethered to the shore. I’m not letting go of what’s true, what’s good. One of the ways I put it, compassion reserves the right not to blaspheme. And often under when people are hurting, it’s really tempting to just go wherever they want to take you to let them sort of steer your emotional vehicle wherever they want. And if you’ve been told your whole life as a Christian to be kind and tender hearted as the Bible does, to be like Christ and to weep with those who weep, it becomes a really powerful motivator, and it’s easy to bypass these larger considerations of, but what’s good in the long run and what’s good for the whole group, that’s the danger.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. So let’s do a history of ideas approach to this. And you mentioned the coinage of the term somewhere in the early 20th century, likely from a German source, a lot’s going on then. So I mean, that’s not a moral vacuum. A lot’s going on. Then you mentioned the idea that sympathy and perhaps even compassion is seen as a representation of a dominant condescension to a subordinate and with the theories of the age, especially the kind of artificial egalitarianism and all the rest, that becomes a problem. But it seems to me there’s more to it than that. I want to just test this with you. It seems to me that you can’t separate this from the secularization of the self that took place in the modern age, and by the way, shows up in so many ways, including the rise of psychoanalysis, I mean, Freud, Maslow, you go down the list. What you do becomes and who you are becomes abstracted from what you feel and how you project yourself.
Joe Rigney:
That’s exactly right. I think, and actually in Carl Truman’s work on the self and the modern self, he actually draws attention to this sort of idea of the elevation of empathy as a way of getting in touch, not only with your own self, but with other selves, but like you said, abstracted or denatured, you’re not actually tethered. We see this, the apotheosis of this, of course, is in the transgender movement where your feelings have no tethering to your bodily embodied reality, but whatever I feel you must affirm. And if you don’t affirm it, you’re heartless and cruel and you’re bad. You’re an evil person for not affirming my feelings. And that’s sort of the end result of it. But there’s all kinds of gradations long before that that are much smaller, but still steering wheels.
Albert Mohler:
One of the things I often try to point out is that obviously worldviews have consequences, but if you deal with the actual, things get clarified. So if you take a “Occupy New York” protestor and you take a suburban Christian housewife and you present them with a child in need of clothing and water and food, I think they’re going to know exactly what to do. They’re going to clothe that child, they’re going to feed that child, they’re going to give that child water. The difference is when the left creates an abstraction, which supposedly represents every child in the world and every need of every child in the world, and then proposes that that’s where we shift our moral reasoning. That becomes a huge problem. I think that’s one of the reasons why the left doesn’t have children, because instead all the children of the world are theirs.
Joe Rigney:
And it’s Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov illustrates this, the person who I love humanity, but it’s people I can’t stand. It’s the near and the clear, the obligations there that actually would require something costly. To make it abstract and to make it a kind of class, there’s this generic group that’s now been identified, that becomes sort of the animating principle and becomes, and Christians again go, well, I care. I want to care. I want to be a caring person. And so whatever I have to do to show myself, to prove myself a caring person, I will do it.
And I think that’s why a lot of churches and ministries went along with a lot of folly for a long time because it was about demonstrating their compassion to the satisfaction of progressives. So there’s an entire chapter in the book called “Life Under the Progressive Gaze” that describes how this happened as Christians came to have a little censorious progressive over their shoulder, evaluating whether they were being caring enough. And by doing so, all sorts of things shifted. And we think of it often as drift. If it’s theological drift, it’s actually being steered.
Albert Mohler:
Okay, so is it still right to just begin the conversation with the title of your book, The Sin of Empathy?
Joe Rigney:
So the title, the rhetoric is designed to arrest attention. It’s like any number of things. There’s other books. There’s an old book called When Helping Hurts. That’s on, actually, there’s an overlap there. Or even D.A. Carson wrote a book years ago called The Intolerance of Tolerance and titles like that are meant to provoke thought to make people go, whoa, wait a minute, what might that mean? So yeah, the provocative title is intentional, and I mean it. I mean that there is a form of empathy like anger, like desire, like fear and grief. There is an ungodly sinful form of it. And the reason it’s so dangerous is that while those other sins are often recognized as potentially bad, most people have a hard time imagining how empathy could ever be harmful. And therefore, if I’m the devil, where am I going to hide some of my most destructive tactics? It’s under the thing that nobody expects to be bad.
Albert Mohler:
Well, okay, so let’s go to a concrete example. Let’s go to Job and his friends. What constitutes the sin of Job’s friends?
Joe Rigney:
Actually, the place where I think about in terms of the Job story, where I see the empathy coming in or a resistance to empathy is actually Job’s wife, job’s wife has had a horrific thing happen. Her 10 children are dead. Their entire household has been upended by this, raids and everything else, she’s in about the worst position a mother could possibly be. And so when she comes to Job and says, “Curse God and die”, it’s hard. You can’t help but feel pity for her. What has she been through? The anger that’s erupting there, the pain is all there and Job, it would be easy for him to say, okay, honey, I agree with you—to go along with where her emotions are taking her. But instead, Job says you’re speaking like a foolish woman. And if you imagine just transplant that situation to the present day and imagine a woman in a similar position, really suffered, really been through the ringer and saying things that aren’t true, right?Blaspheming God, how many pastors, how many husbands, Christian leaders would have the fortitude to say, I know where you’re coming from, but that’s not true. You’re speaking foolishly. We need to accept good from the Lord or evil from the Lord as well as the good.
And so Job actually, there really models a kind of thing that I’m trying to say. I think that if he was empathetic in the modern sense, he would’ve just gone right along with it. He would’ve understood her, he would’ve joined her in those emotions, shared that sense of outrage at God and cursed him. And the story would’ve been a very different story.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I think the Book of Job is a test case in terms of Christian theology in this sense and our understanding of the goodness and the providence of God, but also our understanding of how we view, I’ll put quotation marks around this “victims”.
And honestly, again, I think it’s much easier for us in the concrete to understand how to deal with a child before us. And that gets back to the context of proximity. But empathy really isn’t about proximity, empathy is about abstraction. So much of empathy is driven to all the needs of all the people around the world. And we see that right now, even in responses in the early years of this presidential, and early days of this presidential administration where people come back and say, this is uncaring, this is a rejection of humanitarianism. And honestly, they would make that argument regardless of how any kind of, let’s just say accounting was done
Joe Rigney:
Right. Well, just today, David French actually mentioned me in his columns today and mentioned the book, and it was about the strange Christians who are rejecting empathy. And the example he gives is the sort of work that Elon Musk and the others in the Trump administration are doing in cutting off some funding to various things, pausing funding, trying to figure out what’s going on. But for French, simply the fact that you’re not going to fund everything that’s been funded under the sun. And if you applaud that and say, this is good, I’m glad we’re getting a handle on where the money’s going and is it actually helping, is it useful? That’s a sign that you’re not being empathetic and for a Christian to join it contrary to the spirit of Jesus. But it’s a good example of what you’re saying with the abstraction of We’re helping feed the hungry around the world becomes a justification for massive grift in the government who are funding left wing agitprop every which direction in the name of compassion. And I think this is the left figured out, this was a major opportunity in steering wheel, a way to enrich themselves. And they’ve done it. They’ve run this play and Christians have gone along with it because we want to be soft-hearted.
Albert Mohler:
Well, someone like JD Vance, the vice president of the United States who’s been in three controversies since the inauguration, and I think right in all three of them, he enters into a situation in which he speaks directly to the inadequacy of the empathy defense and points to the fact that there’s actually an industry behind this. Even David French’s article, if people just go and Google some of what he’s talking about, they’ll quickly discover there are incredibly legitimate concerns about what’s being done. In other words, I think one of the things we have to do is say, I want to respond in genuine Christian love and genuine Christian responsibility. But I’m not going to concede to you the word humanitarian.
Joe Rigney:
Right. No, and that’s absolutely right because the control of the dictionary is a really big deal here. And so if progressives are able to define what compassion means and then to say conservative Christians are cruel and coldhearted because they don’t go along with all of our policies, then they’ve kind of won at the outset. And we ought to resist that attempt to define compassion on their terms, recognizing the ways that it’s being used to manipulate us. And I would say too, the other element of this is, this is as old as dirt, the impulse that people have to throw pity parties. What I learned from Lewis is people sulk in order to get their way. You read The Great Divorce, that book is just filled with people throwing pity parties in order to get their way, or at least attempting to. And when you realize that that’s how it gets into homes, it gets into churches, it gets into everything. And that fundamentalist, you actually do need to care, but you have to remain anchored and more to the truth of God, to the reality of God, he has to be more substantive for you than anything else. And once that’s true, now you can afford to be compassionate. Now you can actually have real compassion for people. I don’t want to cedethe word to the left.
Albert Mohler:
So let’s go directly to the left and I’ll raise one of the most, a figure now we would describe as expressing a form of policy empathy, and that’d be Karl Marx. And the thing about Karl Marx was he supposedly had sympathy, empathy, compassion for all the oppressed all over the world, didn’t even take care of his own family, his own children went hungry.
So I mean, this is something very akin to what’s going on. We have Hollywood celebrities and political figures, and frankly, to some extent, this has been a driving energy in on the college campus. And so they’re not really talking about feeding concrete children right here. In so many cases, it’s this empathizing with an entire world that creates even in some cases, a western construct. I think we all understand children need to be fed, but that’s not even where this stops. It goes all the way through just as Marxism goes all the way through the redefinition of the entire society in empathetic terms.
Joe Rigney:
That’s right. Well, and even to piggyback there, the empathy is often paired. I don’t think people realize how empathy is tied into cruelty. And so one of the things I learned from Lewis is he has a quote somewhere where he says even a good emotion like pity when it’s not controlled by charity and not controlled by justice, it leads through anger to cruelty. Because most of our atrocities, the atrocities that we commit are stimulated by the other guy’s atrocities. So they did something evil, and so we’re going to do it back. And then he actually, to bring in Marx, he says, “Pity for the oppressed classes when separated from the moral law as a whole, lead by a very natural process to the unremitting horrors of a reign of terror”. And so in the name of empathy, it’s amazing how much cruelty you can do.
The French Revolution is liberty, equality, fraternity, how much blood can you shed in the name of fraternity? How much cruelty can you do in the name of empathy? I think there’s a quote by a guy, Paul Bloom is a secular psychologist, wrote a book a number of years ago called Against Empathy. And the quote that got me turned onto him was where he said, “When most people hear the word empathy, they think kindness. I think war. because it’s empathy for my in-group, empathy for the oppressed classes, empathy for these people, is coupled with intense rage, hatred, demonization of anybody that I think is threatening them.” And so that fits right in with that cultural Marxist framework of the oppressor oppressed hierarchy that came to dominate American society over the last 15 years. And that thankfully seems to be beginning to be dismantled. We’ll see if we have the fortitude to go through it to go with the full deconstruction of that framework. But for a number of years, that was the way that many Americans and many churches viewed the world, and it was powered by empathy.
Albert Mohler:
In the last century, in the last decades, you had the emergence of figures such as Alistair McIntyre who talk for example, about the cultural power of emotivism, even emotivism as a mode of thinking. And I think in terms of the diagnoses of our age, that one’s indispensable to me. It’s the constant emoting, and that’s what I associate also with empathy. There’s a political dynamic—and we just kind of talked about that, we can come back to it—but there’s the therapeutic dynamic that empathy is an achievement with an agenda, and it’s separated from any ontological connection to objective and objective, wrong or even to objective good.
Joe Rigney:
That’s right. Yeah. So Lewis spoke to the same thing when he talked about subjectivism and the way that the feelings came to dominate in the absence of any sort of objective moral order. And this is why churches were so, I think susceptible. The place where this actually showed up first in a lot of places was the counseling ministry, precisely for this reason, soft-hearted counselors who really wanted to help real people. I think that initially they had the best of intentions. But because that emotivism came to dominate, it meant that they were being led farther and farther. And what you had in many cases was an alteration in the dictionary. So terms that had a agreed upon meeting that had a concrete meaning, so what did the word abuse mean 30 years ago?
Well, it meant physical or sexual violence. It actually meant something like that. Well, under the influence of empathy, it was enlarged to encompass any disagreement whatsoever. Any distress that you might cause to another person is now evidence that you are an abuser. Words like trauma had a similar kind of concept where now it’s not just you went to Vietnam and came back and you had PTSD, but now you had a bad experience at a church. And so you’re living with the trauma. And in that environment in which to connect the dots, where victimhood has come to confer invulnerability where a victim, an alleged victim cannot be questioned, challenged, you can’t even say, but is that really what happened? You can’t do what job did to his wife in that kind of environment, you’re going to get a kind of victim hood Olympics. You’re going to get people competing to see who is the biggest victim. And churches that want to be soft-hearted, that are laboring to care well for those who are hurting, are going to find themselves in a position where they’re either going to be faithful to God or they’re going to be steered by the emotions of others, and they will come to appease and accommodate the most immature and reactive members of their community.
Albert Mohler:
So Joe, I want to talk about something for a moment just to relate personal experience here. I know you’ll empathize with me, but when I was elected president here and elected to bring about a comprehensive conservative redirection of the school, this institution had the only non-university based graduate program in social work in the country, fully accredited by all the appropriate authorities. And I knew a collision was going to come just because of the confessional character of the school. And it came a little faster than I expected. I knew it had to come, but honestly, there were some more important priorities I had at the moment, and that’ll tell you something, but nonetheless interrupted when it erupted. And I fired people and shut down the school. And so I had people that just went ballistic, you don’t care about people. You’re firing people who care about people and you don’t care about people. And I said, we’re firing it because of an objective collision of truth claims here. And so I pled with the board of trustees to establish an investigation, basically did the president act rightly or wrongly?
And they said, no, we support you. I said, that’s not good enough. You’ve got to support me with an investigation. So they did the investigation. So they invited the head of the accrediting agency for social work for these hearings, and they invited the chief of social work credentialing for the state of Kentucky. And of course, just because they’re investigating my handling of this situation, I of course wasn’t in the hearing. So I had a couple of trustees come in and say, it’s over, it’s over. And I said, why? And they said, well, and these are just sweet Christian laypeople by and large who were board members. And when they were confronting the question of this collision of worldviews, they honestly thought that it was just another form of compassion and empathy and sympathy It’s all good. And so in the hearings, they started hearing some strange things. And of course, this is right when the LGBTQ stuff is kind of hitting stride and people are knowing, now they got to ask this question. And so one of the trustees who is a pastor just pointedly and extremely convictionally focused, the question knew what he was doing. And he said, so is homosexuality morally right or wrong? And the head of the agency came back and said, well, that’s not a question we ask. And so the trustee, who was a good guy, he was really smart. He said, well, it’s a question I ask. And so the person came back this very secular, but very powerful spokesman for the social work profession, came back and said, the question is, I would ask that person if he is fulfilled in his homosexual activities. So this guy thinks this can’t possibly be as bad as it looks. And so in the best moment in these hearings, this trustee turns back to this social work expert and says, well, what if this guy was robbing banks? And she responded, I would ask the same question, is this helping you to meet your life goals? Is this helping you to achieve who you want to be? There’s no objective, right and there’s no objective wrong. So anyway, I’ll just cut to the chase here. I had these trustees come into the room and they said, we don’t need to hold any more hearings. This thing’s over, over, over. We want to pour concrete over the grave.
But anyway, I told them, you have to finish the hearings in order to get over the empathy crisis.
Joe Rigney:
That’s right. Well, and you can see, and even in that mentality is precisely what leads you to a world in which we’re going to castrate people. We’re going to mutilate their bodies because we think it will be what’s because they say it’s what’s fulfilling for them.
Albert Mohler:
We’re going to feel with them in their confusion rather than help clarify the confusion or the basis of truth. And even just creation order, we identify with their misperception.
Joe Rigney:
That’s right. And we join them. We jump in with both feet, and then we get swept away into all kinds of folly and insanity. And really, I think that’s the other thing is when the people were accusing, you don’t care about people, you don’t care about people, and a completely appropriate response would’ve been, I care about the church. I care about the truth. I care about the flock of God, who’s going to be trained at this institution, and I care about that. In fact, so the problem isn’t that I don’t care, it’s that I care about two things. I care about God’s people and I care about the truth. You care about neither. And this is why, part of the reason I’ve gone on the war path on this, and that I do hope that one of the results is that there are perfectly acceptable uses of the term empathy. I’m not a word wrangler. I’m not trying to fight about terms because you could do the same thing under the banner of pity or compassion or any other term. But I do want people to be more mindful of the ways that institutions and families and communities can be hijacked by powerful emotions in the hands of advocates who are trying to steer them. That’s what I’m concerned about, and I don’t want the emotion.
You mentioned JD Vance, one of the comments he made is We’ve got to get rid of this emotional blackmail. And Lewis said the same thing, John Piper was the one who taught me about that phrase, where people make, “Do you love me?” Is whether I feel loved. And their feelings become sovereign judge and jury to determine. And if you don’t jump through enough hoops, if you don’t do it in the right way, if you put up any resistance to where they want to take you, you don’t love. And if you care most about being perceived as loving by any human being, you have a big steering wheel on your back.
Albert Mohler:
Okay. So you dare to make another argument. And I honestly have for decades made the same argument. And I think you do so in a really clear way and a very disciplined way. There is a link between the substitution of empathy for genuine biblical compassion and a confusion over gender in the church. Those two things are not accidentally aligned.
Joe Rigney:
Right. No, that’s absolutely right. So a big part of why do we have such a problem with societal, if this issue has been an issue since time immemorial, people have always thrown pity parties. That’s always been a thing. Why is it so destructive in the modern world? It’s feminism. Because what feminism has done is it’s taken the more empathetic sex, women are the more empathetic sex by God’s design, I think it’s a glorious design feature that God made women to intuit emotions, share emotions, feel emotions respond to suffering, people with care and compassion. This is a great and glorious gift that God intended to be used for his glory and the good of others. That’s true. But that same gift, if you try to put it in other contexts, particularly context in which you have to draw clear lines and show fortitude and courage in the face of threats, it is not an asset. It is a liability.
There is a reason that the empathetic sex that women are barred from the pastoral office, they were barred from the priestly office in the Old Testament for the same reason. Because priests and pastors, priests in the Old Testament, pastors and ministers and elders in the New Testament, are charged fundamentally with guarding the doctrine and worship of the church, of setting the perimeter for what is in and out. That’s the calling. And therefore the sex that is bent and wired towards care, nurture, compassion and empathy is ill suited to that role. So it’s no surprise that in a culture which has become dominated by feminism, it’s deep in the American system at this point, that in that same timeframe you would have an outbreak of empathy that would become the steering wheel by which every institution is hijacked.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Well, and you talk about institutions, I didn’t premeditate to go here, but when you think for instance about the evangelical world, the pan-evangelical world, all that it is the evangelical blob. When you look at it, look at how many of the central institutions, you’ve seen a change in gender, in the leadership and in the staffing, and you see this thing has been turned into something very different than it even was, this is now a different thing. It’s not only that this has been turned in a different direction. You’ve got, it’s not just new wallpaper on the wall, it’s serving a new mission, it has a new identity.
Joe Rigney:
That’s right. And it’s interesting if you compare the different denominations and we’ll use concert, the mainline went off the rails a long time ago, and Wayne Grudem tracked it and showed how evangelical feminism is the new path to liberalism and shows how every denomination that goes down that path ends up in the same place, affirming sodomy, affirming homosexuality, sanctioning, gay marriage and so forth. But what about conservative denominations? Well, you see the same cultural pressures at play, whether if you’re in the Southern Baptist, the debates that you guys have had over the Law Amendment and whether or not we’re going to actually hold to the Baptist Faith and Message and the definition of the pastoral office or not, are we going to find creative ways to evade that by making sure that we have enough women upfront, maybe not preaching initially, but doing other things like reading scripture and so forth. Or in the Presbyterian Church in America, they’ve had major debates over whether a woman can do anything an unordained man can do, is the only difference between men and women. And with respect to church office, the fact of the office one can be ordained and the other can’t, but there’s no divine design underneath God’s commands. You see it in the ACNA, they’ve got dual practices, they’ve got some churches that have female priests and some that don’t. And it’s untenable in the long run, it’s going to go disaster.
Every church faces some version of this kind of pressure to have women in the room where it happens to let them make, let’s have them in the room, let’s have them making decisions. We won’t call them pastors, at least initially, but once you started down that road, you’ve effectively seeded the ground that men and women are interchangeable. We don’t know why the Bible says that only men can be pastors. And until we can twist that verse, we’ll hold the line on that one little thing, but it’s a complimentarian thread that’s trying to hold up an egalitarian boulder, and it will not hold in the long run.
Albert Mohler:
No, and the argument about hermeneutics is I think amply, tragically demonstrable. I don’t know of a single body that has genuinely affirmed women in the pulpit that has not eventually affirmed the LGBTQ revolution. Because if you can take the plain teachings of Scripture, and by the way, reflected all the way through creation order, and you can deny that when it comes to a woman as a pastor of a church, and it’s not that women don’t have many of the gifts, it’s that women, it’s ontologically forbidden by scripture.
And so I don’t even think it’s up to us to come up with a list of reasons why it’s up to us to obey the Word of God, which is very clear on this. But my goodness, if you go down the path of saying the Scripture doesn’t have to say that when it comes to gender relations, you’re eventually going to say, or your children are going to say, these days, it may be even quicker than that next week, you’re going to say, we have to take the same approach when it comes to prohibitions of same-sex relationships.
Joe Rigney:
That’s right. Yeah. That’s what cancer does when it’s left untreated. And it is, the logic works its way through the system, the leavens, the lump as the Bible tells us, and it is a real cancer. I think the other reason that conservatives sometimes struggle with this is that even faithful folks who are trying to resist it sometime adopt the framing. And so we’ll find conservatives who think, if I’m faced with a female Bible teacher who’s teaching bad stuff, who’s teaching falsehoods, I need to find a faithful female Bible teacher to answer her. So if it’s a she-wolf, I need a she-shepherd to answer it. And in doing so, I jokingly refer to this as the “Call Rosaria Option” because it’s what a lot of even ostensibly conservative groups do when they’re faced with, here’s a female Bible teacher who’s very popular in our women’s ministry or something, and we need to try to get rid of it or clear it out, rather than shepherds taking responsibility for their own flock and saying, we’re going to shepherd our people, we’re going to teach them what God says. Instead it’s we’re going to outsource it.
The challenge with that is you’ve already bought into the framing. You’ve already bought into that female error must be answered by female truth. When God does not care. God says, you’re the shepherd, you’re the pastor. But the other thing that you’ve done is there’s never going to be enough female, faithful female Bible teachers to answer every unfaithful female Bible teacher. There’s not. And the reason is, is because most of the faithful women are too busy doing what God has called them to do. They’re raising children, they’re serving God in all of the appropriate ways in God’s people in the church. They’re too busy doing their calling to shepherd the flock. That’s the calling of the pastors.
Albert Mohler:
Joe, I’ve been doing a lot of work just looking at the deconstruction pattern. Because I get so many people in the national media and otherwise who ask me about it. And my judgment from the beginning has been sustained by reading these narratives. And it plays right into this thing of empathy. I did not feel empathy either in the message of the congregation or in what was preached from the pulpit or in congregational life itself. And so I left, and at least some of them are going so far as to actually deconstruct the central true claims of Christianity, saying that’s a part of the oppressive pattern that I eventually detected in once detecting it, I became one of the righteous ones leaving and of course, writing a memoir on the way out.
Joe Rigney:
That’s right. That’s exactly right. Well, and this is another place where Lewis is actually really helpful. His novel, Till We Have Faces, is a great example of a character who narrates their story one way, tells the story in such a way that they’re the victim, that they’re the one who’s been wronged, that they’re actually, they’re both the hero and they’re the victim because that’s the way that we love to tell the story. We want to be one of those two roles, hero or victim. And in a modern world, those are the same. The most heroic is the greatest victim. And there’s actually a kind of perversion of Christianity you can hear underneath that, right? Christ the great victim who’s elevated as the hero who kills the dragon and gets the girl. It’s a twisting of that. But the reality is that re-narration of our story and that inability that we engage in that papers over our own complicity, our own responsibility for our own actions and our own behaviors is one that is very compelling to sinners.
Sinners want to think of themselves that way. And if you don’t have people clinging to the Word of God that says, no, we’re all sinners, you too. You too aren’t just victim, You, not just sinned against, you also sin. And that’s the first and fundamental thing you have to address is your own sinfulness. That’s a message that doesn’t sit well with the world and as long as the world’s waiting with a cottage industry of books saying, come tell your story of how you were harmed. And in saying this, I don’t deny that in some cases there may be truth to these situations. Maybe people really were awful to you. Maybe there really was abuse that happened. The issue became is that part of the reason that I cared so much about this is that I actually care about real victims. And so when fake victims try to piggyback on the care and compassion that they have by inflating and exaggerating their own pain and struggle in order to get attention and steer the ship, honestly, it makes me a little bit angry.
Because I know people who’ve really been hurt and who have weathered it with grace and compassion, who have offered the forgiveness of Christ, who have showed incredible courage. And I want to honor them by not having this flopping. One of the reasons I’ve never been able to stand the sport of soccer is that part of the way the sport works is if a player runs by you, you flop and act like you’re dying in hopes that the referees will give him a penalty. And I think we’ve seen a number of these things over the last 15 years or so where that’s been the play that’s been run. And Christians for far too long have been used by it. They’ve been manipulated by it. And I want to say no more care about real victims and resist the manipulation of the flatterers and the advocates.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, my frustration with soccer is perhaps less theoretical than yours. I just find it very difficult to watch anything in which no one scores.
Joe Rigney:
It’s true. It’s very boring. Very, very boring.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Alright, so I want to make another assertion and test this with you. I think the key, or maybe the better metaphor is this. I think there was a piece of a puzzle missing for much of the modern age. And so the puzzle was coming together with all the leftist ideologies, but there was a piece in the middle. And until that piece was in place, a lot of other things couldn’t get connected and a lot of synergy and energy couldn’t come. I think that one thing is identity politics.
And so you look at ideological leftism in the 19th century coming into the 20th century and put Marxism at the center of that, but also put other secular ideologies, revolutionary ideologies. In the United States, a lot of this didn’t catch any traction until the development of identity politics. You break everybody down into identity groups and then it’s a matter of who’s more oppressed than someone else. Oppression is the dynamic. And then you add to that intersectionality where you get a higher score. I don’t mean to make fun here, but a handicapped, African-American, lesbian points of intersectional oppression and thus more credits in this system in terms of voice than someone else. And so I want to start by saying I’m not trying to make fun of it, but honestly, you can’t help but make fun of it in terms of how the structure comes about. But until then, you really didn’t have the ability, for instance, in the United States or something like critical theory to get much traction. Critical theory didn’t get much traction in this country until the identity politics construct really took hold. And I’m going to argue the empathy is what drove that.
The reason why you have to hear this claim, the reason why you have to validate this claim, the reason why you can’t argue against this claim, the reason why you can’t actually do anything to help except adopt some unilateral set of claims, it’s driven by the empathy principle.
Joe Rigney:
That’s absolutely right. So you’re hitting on, there’s an ideological dimension, which is what critical theory provided, and then there’s an emotional dimension, which is what empathy fueled. And then there’s a third thing that kind of came into play, I think in a number of places, which was credibility. So if you think about, because for a lot of folks, I think a number of folks who did get steered over the last 10 to 15 years by this sort of stuff, where wokeness really did get far enough in, it wasn’t that they were necessarily seeking to cater to the world directly, but it was rather that all of the good Christians that they knew were doing so and so they went along because that’s what credible respectable Christians did. And so those three things, an ideology of victimhood, the intersectionality and critical theory, empathy and compassion for the oppressed classes, however defined, and then the desire for respectability and credibility from other soft hearted kind and winsome Christians, it was that those three together that got us where we are.
And that led us, so much destruction, division and harm. And I think what’s ironic is how many people who went along with it thought that they were pursuing unity while they were sowing the seeds for incalculable division because of this identity politics, who’s allowed to speak in the room. I’ve been in rooms where we’re going to finally have the hard conversation say about race, but there are unspoken rules in the room, and it depends on what skin color you have about whether or not you’re able to say things. There’s times where someone says, “Hey, well, can we talk about white fragility?” when this was a big issue. And I remember hearing about that concept and thinking, I think I know, I’ve seen that I’ve seen white peoples be so uncomfortable by the topic of race that they want to run away, that they want to just shut it down and not have any conversation.
I know white fragility. But then my question was, are we allowed to talk about black fragility? And if you raise that question, you can immediately in the room that you just stepped in it. And so now we’re not actually going to have a hard conversation about race. We’re going to avoid a hard conversation about race because it depends on what color your skin is. It depends on what gender you are. It depends on all of these identity politics factors to determine what can be said and what cannot be said and who’s in charge and who’s not. And it was incredibly destructive.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Years ago, Joe, I was invited into a conservative think tank in Washington and invited to look at this crisis. And so people were trying to offer suggestions about how we define the crisis, and I’m not going to define it further except to say the crisis. And so thinking in what I believe are mandatory biblical categories, I said, I don’t think we can talk about how to fix this problem without, for example, marriage
And identifying the union of a man and a woman as the only proper context. And by the way, the chief issue here was illegitimacy in the African-American community, what is the source of poverty? All kinds of good historical arguments to be made here. But Daniel Patrick Moynihan, two generations ago, came back and said, it’s the lack of the necessary structures that lead to human flourishing, and that included the family and marriage and all the rest of flourishing neighborhoods. But again, we understand those things follow in an order and the order doesn’t go from the neighborhood to the family, it goes from the family to the neighborhood. But anyway, when that was brought up, and this is before, this is probably 30 years ago, this is before some of the contemporary language, but it was the same impulse. People came back and said, you can’t say that. And I said, why can’t you say that? And they said, because it’s never going to be heard as loving and as concerned. I think, well, this is how we lose the whole world.
Joe Rigney:
That’s exactly right. It’s never going to be heard as loving, which what you’ve just established there is that human beings are the judge and jury of what’s true and good and right. You’ve said their opinions, it doesn’t matter if it’s objectively true, what matters is what’s subjectively true from their vantage point. And as soon as you do that, there’s no breaks. You’ve just removed any sense of order and stability, which God has provided for our good because you’ve ruled it out. And the other thing is it leads inevitably to a kind of censorship regime, self-censorship, right? You can’t talk about the elephant in the room. There are certain things that may not be said, certain aspects of the problem that cannot even be discussed. And yet we’re going to still spend inordinate amounts of times trying to solve a problem when we can’t name the elephant.
And I’m a little bit hopeful at the moment. You mentioned the present administration who seems to have gotten the memo on this and has realized that many of these manipulative tactics are just that—manipulative tactics. And instead are going to say, no, it’s just not true that men can become women and women can become men. It’s just not true. So we’re just not going to do that anymore. And when people screech, you get JD Vance with his classic, I don’t really care, Margaret. And that’s precisely, that’s actually leadership to say, we’re going with what’s true. This is where we’re headed. Anybody can come, but we’re not getting derailed.
Albert Mohler:
And with someone like JD Vance, the Vice President, you’re looking at someone who can honestly be described as having tried those ideologies of the left, seen them. I don’t mean actually personally embracing them, but certainly was surrounded by them and saw them, and quite frankly, came to much greater clarity on these issues through the structures of historic Christian thought, and which he acknowledges and I think rightly cites as a matter of fact, as in Ordo Amoris. And so we are in an interesting place, a very, very interesting place. Everything’s getting smoked out. So Joe Rigney writes this book and already David French today when we’re having this conversation, predictably, predictably, I just want to say you should feel like you’ve reached a certain benchmark in the necessity of this book when David French comes out and argues against it, and not just the fact that he did it, but the fact he did it as he did it.
Joe Rigney:
That’s exactly right. Well, and I am actually going to put in my biography now, David French’s favorite right wing theologian, because I think that’s kind of where you want to live, I think.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and it doesn’t take anything these days to be put there.
Joe Rigney:
That’s right.
Albert Mohler:
You don’t have to be the most courageous theologian on planet earth to be put there.
Joe Rigney:
Yeah, that’s true.
Albert Mohler:
And what we see right now is the strangest thing, and it’s heartbreaking in so many ways. But on the issue, say let’s say LGBTQ issues, I think we need to call out the fact that an awful lot of people who are trying to speak on behalf of evangelical Christianity won’t squeak on that issue anymore. And it is because they live in a world in which they’re going to lose all the credibility at the New York Times if they come out and really be clear about this kind of thing, or they’re going to have to be really clear. And in the case of David French, he’s now publicly in support of same sex marriage. It is one of these things where, okay, let’s just remind evangelicals of what we’re dealing with here.
Joe Rigney:
That’s right. Well, and I think the two big issues, if there is a backlash that we’re seeing develop, the real test case will be on Obergefell and Sodomite marriage as well as feminism. When you have someone like Nancy Mace, the congresswoman from South Carolina, leading the charge against transgenders female bathrooms and trying to guard female spaces. But when she is an avowed supporter of same-sex marriage, and she’s a self-described feminist who was the first graduate of the female graduate of the Citadel, someone like that is basicly, she’s in the position—the feminist seeds that were sown and that she was a part of sowing and now defending, she simply doesn’t like the seeds, the fruit that’s grown from those particular trees. And the real test is whether or not as a nation, as a church, first judgment begins with God’s house, we’re willing to repent all the way down of all the compromises down to the ground.
Albert Mohler:
And once again, it’s a rebellion against creation order and divine revelation. So those two are not separated. Both are actually demonstrated in all of this, and we can’t acknowledge that in one place as being sickness unto death and then turn to another manifestation of the same thing and say, well, we’re going to have to come to peace with that.
Joe Rigney:
That’s right.
Albert Mohler:
That’s just not allowable.
Joe Rigney:
My question, you may have a vantage on this, do you think, I think that there’s, as the federal government dismantles some of the DEI hierarchy that had grown up there, I actually think that a lot of Christians are going to be slower to dismantle it. Do you think that there are a lot of Christian institutions that have imbibed that DEI mindset will shift with the vibes, or will they continue to double down in various sorts of ways in that kind of DEI framework?
Albert Mohler:
I think to make your point, there are an awful lot of those identified as evangelical who bought into that. To the extent that they feel the mandate is not just a secular mandate based upon the humanitarian principle or an anthropological principle, they add a biblical and theological impetus to this, and that’s much harder to unwind. It kind of gets back to liberation theology of the preferential option for the poor. You have to privilege the poor in every situation regardless of the claim that’s being made. And honestly, you and I both know there’re just not lot of space is designated as evangelical that operate by those rules.
Joe Rigney:
Right. Well, it’s interesting too, even on that, right? The Bible itself explicitly says you may not give partiality to the poor.
Albert Mohler:
Explicitly, as in words.
Joe Rigney:
As in, that’s the word is, hey, you may not give partiality. We would expect, oh no, partiality the rich, which it also says, but it says you may not give partiality to the poor. And you wonder why did God feel the need to put that into his book? And he said, because with all of the commands for compassion and kindheartedness and tenderheartedness and care for the poor, that he also included in his words, the temptation will be to fall off so far that the poor are kind of deified. That those who are hurting are deified in a certain kind of way and their word becomes God. And you’ll show partiality to them regardless of the situation or facts on the ground.
Albert Mohler:
That is pure Pope Francis. Pope Francis is just, you touch him, I haven’t touched him, but what just oozes from him at every point is this incredible sympathy for all the peoples of the world, for all the migrants, for all this and that. And that’s supportive, supposedly every leftist regime. But they don’t follow those rules at the Vatican.
Joe Rigney:
No, they don’t. They have a border. There is a wall they build, built a big, beautiful wall, I think in the ninth century and they still use it.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. By the way, I had a conversation the other day with someone in the larger intellectual community and they said, all these executive orders, there’s too much at one time. It’s just too much at one time. And I said, I think it’s, if anything, just in time, hopefully not too late. But I said, I hope there are a hundred more executive orders along these lines. But I said, if you think it’s too extreme to say that the male gender is the sex of the large, excuse me, the small reproductive cell and the female gender is the sex of the large reproductive cell. If you think that’s too extreme, I have no hope. I have no hope whatsoever.
Joe Rigney:
That’s a low bar to clear I think, guys, I think we should be able to say, you know what, we’re just not going to castrate kids anymore. And it’s like, wow, that’s a start. But man, there’s so much more to be done. I actually think that the executive order strategy is brilliant. It’s a flood the zone. Don’t give them time to regroup. Don’t hit all the things that you want to hit and keep them guessing about what you’re going to hit next in order to move the ball forward and hopefully undo some of this incredibly destructive policy and ideology that has infected our nation. So I think it’s a brilliant, brilliant move.
Albert Mohler:
And I want to point out, and I did extensively on The Briefing, it’s not just flood the zone, it is that, but it’s far more than that. And that is that President Trump is operating on a very solid constitutional basis of the claim of a unitary executive. And I spent about 30 minutes talking about this. And so it is also the fact that you exercise executive authority, and it’s not just flooding the zone, it is also positing the constitutional role of the president in the vesting clause and in the take care clause and making very clear there’s not a fourth branch of government in some administrative state out there. So anyway, that’s another conversation. But yeah, it’s all driven by empathy in terms of the response coming from the left. But empathy, just to make your point in conclusion, I’ll give you the final word on this. Empathy can actually be a cover for things that are a lot more sinister
Joe Rigney:
At some level. The bottom line question is who’s God? Is our feelings God or is God God? And if God is God, then we should do what he says and he’s going to set boundaries in order and he’s going to govern our minds and our minds will govern our passions. On the other hand, the deep root here is in our fallen state, our passions lead us and they lead us astray and they guide us to all sorts of folly and destruction if we let them run. And if we join together into a big blob of emotion, you don’t just destroy yourself, but you destroy your family, you destroy your church, you destroy your community. So there is a deep fundamental theological question behind all of this, and it is, is God God or our feelings God?
Albert Mohler:
Okay, one final thought and you could just respond to it. As we come to a close, you look at some of the great hymns of the faith. You look at some of the best spiritual songs being sung in the church. Perhaps you’ve noticed not one of them celebrates the divine empathy towards us. It just doesn’t fit the category: for while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Joe Rigney:
Right. That’s right. And this is a fundamental thing and a sign of the shift is that in every biblical translation that I’m aware of, Christ is our sympathetic high priest. There’s one exception. The NIV made a shift to say an empathetic high priest, but I think in doing so is accommodating the cultural moment. But Christ is a sympathetic high priest who identifies with us all the way down yet, and this is the key, without sin. And it’s because of that, Christ sacrificed, it’s because of his perfection that he’s able to be a merciful and faithful high priest, but also to not join us in that sin, and therefore we ought to imitate him in that.
Albert Mohler:
Alright, Joe, prepare for it. The response is going to be hot, and I hope we fueled a little bit of it right here. Thank you for joining me today for Thinking in Public.
Joe Rigney:
Thanks for having me.
Albert Mohler:
I really appreciate Joe Rigney for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you’ll find more than 200 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com.
Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public, and until next time, keep thinking.