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. Ali Beth Stuckey is the host of Relatable, a podcast about culture, politics, and theology aimed at helping women build their worldview on God’s word. After graduating from Furman University, Allie Beth started a blog entitled Conservative Millennial, which garnered an audience of hundreds of thousands. She has appeared on many programs including Fox News, Prager University, and The Daily Wire. She’s also the author of two books. You’re Not Enough (and that’s okay), that book is on escaping the toxic culture of self-love. Her second book is Toxic Empathy, How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, and that book is the topic of our conversation today. Allie Beth Stuckey, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Albert Mohler:
You really are talented at knowing how to start and direct an argument, so congratulations to that.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Well, thank you. My parents would agree.
Albert Mohler:
Going to call that a new spiritual gift.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Well, thank you. Yeah, I was trying to convince my parents of that when I was a toddler trying to persuade them of my point of view. They would say, I’ve had that knack for arguing since birth.
Albert Mohler:
I think we’re living in a cultural moment in which if you don’t push back really hard, and don’t ask fundamental questions of what in the world’s going on, then you just become a part of the blob and a part of the problem. And you wrote your latest book – Toxic Empathy, How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion – at a specific time. And I think it’s incredibly well timed when all of a sudden the word empathy has become an issue of cultural controversy. I think for good reason. But I want you to tell me why.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yes. So I started noticing this a few years ago, especially in the summer of 2020. That was a convergence of a lot of different issues. We had Covid going on trying to figure out not just what the government’s role was, but what’s the church’s role, what’s the individual’s role as a Christian. But then of course we had the George Floyd incident, and we had a lot of Christians who would agree with us on a variety of issues who probably can call themselves conservative evangelicals taking on, what I would call, a progressive definition of justice and matching their response to what happened to George Floyd, really with the rhetoric of organizations like Black Lives Matter, whom we know were diametrically opposed to our Christian values. And a lot of that time was people really truly trying to figure it out. But when I had conversations with Christian leaders who I felt were very prominently and persistently saying things that simply were not true, were not factually true about race and policing in America, were not biblically true when it comes to the Christian definition of what justice is – when I had those conversations, I kept on hitting a wall that, I would say, was the empathy wall. What I kept on being told when I would say, okay, but it’s not true that riots are the voice of the unheard. It’s actually not true – some of the numbers that you’re sharing about police and their interactions with black Americans. And I would hear, “No, well, actually you’re wrong,” or, “Actually, here’s my source.” It was, “Well, just have some empathy.” And it seemed that the implicit definition of empathy in those conversations was agreement with certain voices because they were a certain color or they had certain prominence or they had a certain background, and that agreement was empathy, and empathy was the most important thing you could do in that moment. I took issue with that, not because I lack compassion, not because I don’t want to hear someone else’s perspectives, not because I negate the evil of racism, but because truth actually matters. And I just started exploring that theme of how this idea of empathy really hinders people from seeing what is both factually and biblically true.
Albert Mohler:
Words are our business and words are a stewardship. And a part of the problem with the modern confusion of words is that there’s more at stake than just words. So when you use the word empathy, give me a definition and some context.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yes, empathy – how I would actually define it, a dictionary definition of empathy, or even if you look at the etymology of what empathy means – it literally means to be in someone’s feelings. Whereas compassion, if you break that word down with suffering, you’re suffering with someone. But to have empathy for someone, it’s not just to say, I feel bad for you, but it is to put your feelings on my feelings, to feel what you feel. And my argument is, and of course we can get into this and the arguments of others that I’ve read as well, is that, that can lead you maybe to a good place. Maybe it can lead you to suffer with someone, to have true compassion, to be kind to them, to love them in the way that Christ calls us to love our neighbor. But it can also be extremely blinding because feelings are powerful for better and for worse. And if I am so entrenched in someone else’s feelings, I could actually obscure reality and morality. And that is, my argument is, that that is when it can become toxic.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I think that’s very helpful. And of course this is now a part of our cultural conversation. I went into a deep dive just in anticipating this conversation, looking at the use of empathy in book titles, and in cultural conversation. And as you know, it’s a fairly recent word, in terms of the English language. You’re not going to find empathy in Jane Austen’s writings. You’re not going to find anything like that. It’s a modern word, and it is intended – at least, I think the advertising about the word, the politics about the word are that – this is a better word than sympathy. It’s a better word than compassion because it is not enough to suffer with or to feel someone’s pain and be sympathetic or compassionate moving to action, you need to, more or less politically and psychologically, enter into their experience. And so here’s the problem. Let’s say we’re talking about a car accident. Someone’s in the hospital having suffered a car accident. Well, we would feel compassion for them. We feel sympathy with them, and we might even feel empathy with them in that we can sort of feel their pain just visiting with them. But what if it’s a situation in which the claim is about something that isn’t an objective fact, but is actually a subjective experience? I think that gets really dangerous. Does that make sense?
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yes. And that’s a really important distinction, and that’s actually why I opened the book the way that I do with telling a story of seeing a mom at an airport who was struggling with her toddler, with her car seat, with all of her luggage. And I was able to know exactly what she needed in that moment, because I had been there and I was able to very easily feel the stress and the pain that she felt in that moment, and that compelled me to help her. And I had been in a similar situation where I needed help traveling with my toddler, and I remember a woman came along to help me with my luggage and said, “I’m a mom too.” So that form of empathy where there’s not really any moral subjective claim hanging in the balance can be good, but other people might say that’s not empathy at all. That’s just kindness. You can do that whether or not you can put yourself in someone’s shoes. But it becomes a lot more complicated when as you said, there are moral claims hanging in the balance. And when you are trying to decide whether something is true, whether something is right, whether something is helpful.
An analogy I like to give is, all of us parents have had this experience of our child coming into our room in the middle of the night and saying, “There’s a monster, or there’s something, there’s a sound and I’m scared that it’s something that’s going to harm me.” We go up to their room and what do we do? We turn the light on and we say, “No, sweetie, that’s not what it is, it’s actually just this pile of clothes, it’s not a monster.” Let me show you what the reality is. And you sympathize with their fears. You put them back to bed.
Now, what I think what I call the empathy mongers would say in this analogy is basically what they want us to do. If someone says, “I’m scared of this monster in the corner of my room”, to say, “Yes, it is a monster, you’re absolutely right, that is real, you don’t think it’s a pile of clothes – I won’t tell you it’s a pile of clothes, I won’t turn the light on, I’ll keep you in the dark, I’ll send you back to bed.” And that is why I don’t think that empathy is: 1) the foremost virtue that we need to be seeking, but it’s also not helpful when it means simply affirming someone’s feelings.That can either lead to a bad place, like what I just described. It could maybe lead you to kindness, but more often than not, it’s destructive.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I can think of several points in my life in which it was kind of a wake up moment. For instance, I can still remember pretty much where I was sitting when algebra started to make sense. Before that, none of it made sense. All of a sudden I began to understand: okay, there’s an equal sign, what’s on this side has to equal that side and everything else can be broken down.
The moment when this became very evident to me as a problem was backstage at a major evangelical conference. It was in the middle of all of this. And I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’d seen some of this for what it was until, as you say, there are some catalyst moments, some controversies that all of a sudden broke into the public square. And I was in a situation in which I was getting ready to get up and speak, give a keynote address, and someone said to me, made a reference to one of these recent events, and I said, that’s not true. It’s just patently not true. And they said, it doesn’t matter. That’s the way they feel.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Exactly.
Albert Mohler:
And I was just struck there. Honestly, it set me off at the wrong moment. I was getting ready to get up and speak, because of course it does matter. I can understand how a perceived problem can be very hurtful, but entering into the confusion can’t be helpful. Right?
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Exactly. That’s true in parenting. It’s true in politics. It’s true in our interpersonal relationships as well. There is of course, a time and a way to tell the truth. Of course, there’s a time simply to sit and to rejoice with someone or to mourn over something. But when we’re talking about the issues that are discussed in this book, the issues that you talk about so much, whether you’re talking about abortion or gender, all forms of identity, when you’re talking about justice, even immigration, all of these issues that have a real impact on the image bearer of God, have a real impact on our country – what is actually true, factually true, scientifically true, biblically true – really matters. Because what you’ll find if you simply affirm the feelings of the purported victim that the media wants you to feel sorry for, you’ll end up affirming lies. You’ll end up validating sin, and you’ll end up supporting policies that are ultimately destructive.
Albert Mohler:
I think the intellectual architecture of your book, the moral architecture of your book, is just excellent. I think the chapters are even better. And I think one of the smartest things you did in this book is that you’ve taken five statements that sound to the world so sensical, but are in every case – untrue, and you take them apart. And honestly, I think you did so with great skill, but I think the very best thing about the way you organize the book is the fact that you isolated these five statements that are just so near universal in the cultural air and water around us. The first one is: abortion is healthcare.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yes. And I wanted to pick the myths that were said, In a way that was meant to evoke emotions and compassion, because that’s the best kind of propaganda. There’re circular mantras that make you feel something, that if you don’t think about sound really true. And I really didn’t have to dig very far to think about what these mantras are. Abortion is healthcare – is a refrain that we heard all throughout the election, and a lot of people believe that. And I start each chapter actually not by dismantling the lie, but actually trying to affirm it. So I start with a heart-rending story that people have heard from the media in the abortion chapter. I tell a really sad story of a woman named Samantha who was pregnant with a baby named Halo. She was diagnosed with a life limiting diagnosis when she was 20 weeks gestation. The State of Texas wouldn’t allow her to have an abortion. And when NPR tells that story, they’re telling the story so that you will feel so sad and so angry for the mother Samantha, that by the end of the story you come to the conclusion that they want you to come to.
And that I really, actually hoped my reader would be tempted to come to, at the end of me telling that story. And that is, “Wow, pro-life laws are evil, it’s draconian, I can’t believe this poor mother had to go through labor and delivery and pain for a funeral and all of that.” And then in every chapter I do the same kind of thing, and then I turn it over and I tell the story from the other side. I tell the story as if I were writing from the perspective of the baby Halo, and what does it look like when we look at the other person on the other side of the moral equation that the media wants us to ignore? Who is the real victim in this situation when it comes to abortion in particular? It’s not Samantha, it’s the baby. So what would abortion have looked like for her at 20 weeks gestation?
What does that procedure entail? Instead, because of this pro-life law, what did she actually get to experience: delivery, love, meeting her mother and father, being named, being buried with dignity rather than thrown away like toxic trash. And when you simply shift your perspective to who the victim actually is, and then of course the rest of the chapter is outlining what abortion is, the history of abortion, the history of Planned Parenthood, what the Bible has to say about this, even going into some evangelical wishy-washiness of being pro-all-life, which is really just being pro-choice and anti-death penalty. I want the reader to see, okay, wow. Not only have I not been thinking about this from the baby’s perspective, but I also didn’t realize that there really is no biblical or moral position for abortion. And that’s where I hope to lead people to, in different ways at the end of every chapter.
Albert Mohler:
I think it’s a very smart strategy. I want to share with you something else. I have been involved in the fight against abortion for a half century more than that actually. And that dates back to when I was 13, Roe v. Wade was handed down and my mother was a very early pro-life activist. And so guess what? I was too. And it was just a self-evident moral fact to me, and it still is. The pro-abortion movement in the United States had a very, very hard time for decades trying to figure out how to advance their cause, because once the anti-abortion movement focused on the word, they were in a very disadvantageous situation. And so even you had major cover stories in news magazines on the 20th and 30th anniversaries, and after that, of Roe saying, the pro-abortion movement just hasn’t found a vocabulary that works, because when the pro-lifers have the word pro-life, it doesn’t leave much room for being anti-life, as a winning strategy.
So I really think what you put your finger on here is the strategy that might be working in terms of the larger culture for the pro-abortion movement, but I guess even more interesting right now is they’re sure it’s working, they’re sure this is their best strategy, is to rename abortion as healthcare. They used to say, by the way, a woman’s reproductive healthcare, now they’ve left off “woman’s reproductive”, now they just want to advance the cause by saying healthcare. So you put your finger on it in the book. What is the most demonic nature of that sentence?
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yes. Well, it’s simply that it is an upside down view of what abortion actually is. I mean, it is the exact opposite of what abortion is doing. Not only it is literally poisoning, starving, dismembering, a vulnerable image bearer of God in the only home he or she has ever known, but it is also not “health” for the mother. And that’s the thing with all abortion euphemisms is that they don’t really mean things in a literal sense. They’re talking about in an abstract metaphorical sense. So when they’re saying abortion is healthcare, they’re not even really talking about the medical healthcare that you or I would talk about. They’re talking about in some weird, abstract, ethereal sense that this is better for the woman’s liberation for her future, for her peace, for her health. And of course, Doe v. Bolton actually defined the health of the mother as even mental and emotional health and financial situation.
That’s what they’re talking about. They’re not saying that she has some kind of disease that is being cured. It’s that she has a desire that needs to be fulfilled, and that is to be autonomous. And without the constraint of the sacrifice of motherhood, they’re actually talking in political terms. It’s true when they say reproductive, even when they say birth control, even Planned Parenthood is itself a euphemism. And this PR problem that you’ve described goes all the way back to Margaret Singer, because Americans did not have an appetite for eugenics when she was trying to push things like the Negro Project, and trying to take out who, she thought, were imbecile at the time through sterilization. And so they’ve always had a PR problem. And as you’ve said, the advantage of the truth is that it’s true. And pro-lifers actually have a very easy – I mean, I should say – simple endeavor in defending what is simply, and so obviously true,
Albert Mohler:
I think you’re really onto something here. Back when the ultrasound was developed, it was a game changer. When you could put up an ultrasound image of an unborn child in development, and brother and sister could see the picture taped on the refrigerator. You can no longer deny the personhood of that baby. And as a matter of fact, one very famous feminist spoke of the ultrasound and said, “The fetus beat us.” In other words, when you can see the fetus, you can’t deny it. Allie Beth, I think one of the most interesting things about this particular chapter in your book is that, when you say abortion is healthcare, you have pretty effectively, strategically, intentionally just denied the existence of the unborn child. So you just say – abortion is healthcare – the unborn child just disappears from the equation, which is the whole point.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Right? I mean, there is no other kind of medical procedure that is called a life-saving medical procedure or healthcare procedure that intentionally kills the person, intentionally kills someone else in the procedure. And really, I talked to so many people about this subject, and it’s actually really sad how many women who call themselves Christians, that this is the one topic that they get hung up on. They understand the other stuff, that this is the one topic that they really get hung up on. And they really, it is as simple as they forget about the baby. They forget about the baby. And when I am asked by pro-lifers, “What do I say to X, Y, Z argument?” Because I get those kind of messages a lot, really, it’s very simple: in every argument, in every kind of refutation that you might hear to the pro-life cause, bring it back to the baby. Always ask, what about the baby? Because you’ll notice, that is the thing that they do that NPR does that all of these media outlets do. They’ve ignored the existence of the baby every single time. All you have to ask is, “What about the baby?”
Albert Mohler:
That’s right. Yeah. The moment you bring the baby into the picture, you bring a moral agent into the picture.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Right.
Albert Mohler:
The moment you do that, you have to talk about the healthcare of two persons, not of one. And of course, that ruins the whole argument for the pro-abortion side.
Albert Mohler:
They’ve been very effective, but it does play on empathy. And Allie, when they often deal with this, what they’ll say is, “Oh, but here’s a woman in Texas who was brought near death simply because she couldn’t get the healthcare she needed.” And in your book, you point out that we need to be very careful not to talk about that kind of unintended secondary effect – to save a mother’s life as abortion – that is not abortion.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yes, that’s exactly right. We believe more so than of course, the pro-abortion movement does that. That woman matters because we know that she’s made in the image of God. Her life matters. She’s precious, she has an eternal soul. We want her to live, and we believe that the doctor should do everything possible to save the lives of both of those human beings. Sometimes when it comes to, for example, an ectopic pregnancy, or other kinds of things that might happen before the moment of viability, that baby has to be delivered. And that is a tragedy. That baby should be delivered whole by any means possible. It should be buried, should be named, should be cared for, should be given that dignity, but that mother must be saved. The child cannot be saved and the mother can be saved, then the mother must be saved. That’s what we believe. But truly, most of those stories that we were hearing, especially during the election of this person in Texas, or this person in Georgia – they weren’t true. They weren’t true stories or they had nothing to do with abortion. They had nothing to do with abortion laws. They were simply tragedies, that someone tried to get an abortion. The abortion pills actually caused complications or something else. Again, that’s what propagandists do. They lie, and they use the dead bodies of women and children to lie. And that’s how it’s really demonic.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Allie, the argument you made there, it’s a classic argument based on biblical ethics. That has been part of the pro-life movement since it has begun. And the secular media, the abortion rights movement, they all just want to trample it underground. But the fact is, there has never been a time when the pro-life movement has said, “We’ll sacrifice the mother’s life in order to try to save the baby.” That has never been a part of the pro-life movement. Never been a part of historic Christian ethics.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
No, of course not. And I mean, if you go all the way back 2000 years to the inception of Christianity when Christians were invading the Roman Empire with the gospel and with this upside down ethic that said, “No, actually, it’s not just the adult free male with the fullness of the logos that has worth, it’s the woman, it’s the child, it’s the elderly, it’s the slave, it’s the poor – they all have equal worth.” That has been the history and legacy of Christianity. Not of course, that every Christian for all of time has always gotten that perfectly, but when you look at Christian movements, we are championing the dignity of people, women and children. And I really encourage, because I even hear professing Christians say things like that, “Well, in order to be pro-life or in order to vote pro-life, I need the government to start doing X, Y, Z or pro-lifers to do more for women.”
And what I always ask those people, I say, “But what are you doing?” Or, “Have you checked, have you checked?” Because chances are there is a pregnancy center in your community that you have not visited that is doing that work for the women and children. I work with a lot of pregnancy centers. Every single one of those centers that I’ve worked with, whether it’s in Spokane, WA or Houston, TX – they are loving and serving the mom and their baby. And a lot of those moms show up at the pregnancy centers after they have been told they have no other option, but abortion from Planned Parenthood. That’s not serving women.
Albert Mohler:
And I spoke to just a couple of those groups recently. They’re doing brave, courageous work.
Albert Mohler:
I want to point to one other thing that I find in this particular situation, and that is that when you have people making the argument, as you point out even falsely during the presidential campaign in particular, a part of what I find has clarified the issue with some people, is when I say to them, “Well, how many fetuses have to be destroyed before we’re in a situation in which this would not be conceivable or necessary?” And they’ll look, “Well, I don’t think we’ll ever get there.” And I said, “Well, precisely.” It’s not an honest conversation. You say it’s not true – that’s true. It is dishonest.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yes. And that is such a good way to think of it. You hear that a lot. Well, I want abortion to be unthinkable. Yes. We all want abortion to be unthinkable because we realize, going back to the sonogram conversation, we know what a baby is now, and people are just denying it. They do not have eyes to see or ears to hear. So it is a heart issue, but it’s also a law issue. It’s also a legal issue. Because those babies have the same legal right as you or I do to the most fundamental, and that is the right to life. And so how you framed that is so important. It’s not only unthinkable, it must be illegal too.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. And the US Constitution, the 14th Amendment makes that abundantly clear. You have to literally actually, you have to directly deny the words in order to somehow justify abortion.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yep, that’s absolutely right.
Albert Mohler:
Okay, so your second statement is, “Trans women are women.” And again, you’re identifying lies. You’re identifying the lies based in this false sense of empathy, but that one may be spreading faster than any other and then sort of not. Do you understand what I mean by that?
Allie Beth Stuckey
Yes, yes, I absolutely do.
Albert Mohler:
It seems to be working perfectly according to their plan on the college campus, but not so much in the swimming pool.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yeah, that’s absolutely right. Well, it has. I mean, it’s come so quickly because when you think about a Obergefell only being, what, 10 years ago?
Albert Mohler:
2015.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yeah, so 10 years ago this year. And that was, well, gay people just want the same right to be married as everyone else. And we went from that, to not even being able to define what a woman is. I mean, Justice Ketanji Jackson, during her confirmation hearing saying, “I’m not a biologist, I can’t define woman for you.” Obviously the documentary, What Is a Woman? highlighted this, that you’re caught in this conundrum. “Trans women are women, but what is a woman?” And if a trans woman is a woman, why do you have to put “trans” in front of it? Of course, it’s a whole logical problem. It’s a scientific problem. But I start the chapter with a story about a woman who felt that she was born in the wrong body – Laura Perry Smalts – who is an amazing Christian now. But I try to go through those real feelings, that I think people get caught up in this empathy trap of: “she felt always that she was a boy named Jake.”
She thought she’d be loved, she thought she’d be fulfilled. She thought that she would finally be confident, that she’d be able to escape the trauma of her past if she became a man. So she took all the steps to do that, and still she looked in the mirror after her double mastectomy and she said, “I will never be a man.” And of course, that’s where her delusions found her. And so then we look at the other side of that: the pain that it’s caused, the pain that it’s causing women and girls whose spaces are being invaded, the pain that it’s causing the young people who go through these procedures only to find that they’re not fulfilled. They’re even more suicidal than they were before. But then of course, again, we look at the factual, the scientific reality that men are not women and vice versa and never can be. And of course, very easily we can look at the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, in Genesis 1:27 and see what God thinks about that.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. Early in this current controversy, I got pulled into a pastoral situation, and it was very much like what you described, only it was the other way. It was a man who had had surgery to present as a woman, and there was horrible, horrible pain, lots of complications, a horrible sense of self hatred. And that man came to know the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior.
Albert Mohler:
And just a wonderful picture of the gospel. But I got the call because the pastor of this church was confronted with a question he wasn’t prepared for, and that is to have a man who had been surgically mutilated, who has now been baptized as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, and turns to the pastor and the leaders of the church and says, “Okay, what now?” And that was not a part of his evangelical playbook. That was not an issue that was imaginable when he had attended seminary.
Allie Beth Stuckey
Of course.
Albert Mohler:
And so I appreciated the fact that he called, but I was in that situation and I was just looking at it and I said, “If America could just have a view somehow surreptitiously of this conversation for five minutes, I think we could just about stop that movement in its tracks.” When you have a person who just goes, “Okay, I am actually a man, I’m now a man who has been surgically mutilated, but I now know God meant me to be a man, and so what now?” And this lie is leading to so much human pain.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
And I really hope that pastors right now need to be ready for that, because there are going to be more people than ever – detransitioner, as we call them – even that’s a little bit of a misnomer, because it’s impossible to transition. But they attempted to transition to the opposite sex, and many of them, I have talked to many of those detransitioner, and they realize the lie that has been sold to them, they’re not satisfied. And many of these have turned to God and have realized, “Okay, yeah, I am a man or I am a woman.” Pastors do need to be equipped for that conversation to meet these people with compassion and love and truth, and to help them see that they need to present themselves, as a man or a woman as much as they possibly can. And so there is such a high human cost to this, and it doesn’t help both when we were talking about the empathy conversation just in general among evangelicals, but it doesn’t help when we have evangelicals who say that actually telling the truth to someone who thinks they’re the opposite sex is impolite, and it’s not kind or hateful and it’s not loving, it’s hateful.
So we should use pronoun politeness or we should basically use their delusion and their sin as a tool of evangelicalism, or evangelism rather. And I don’t think that’s the way to go. We can be kind in our tone, but telling someone the truth about being made in God’s image, which is in part to be made male or female, as we see in Genesis 1:27, is the most loving thing we can do, because the most loving thing we can do in every situation is agree with God.
Albert Mohler:
That is so well said. There’s another angle on this issue that you hit directly in the book, and I appreciate that. And to give some background to that, let me just tell you that I was in a conversation years ago, an academic conversation about the ethics of aesthetic surgery. Okay, that’s a different issue, but it was an argument about the ethics of aesthetic – well, it used to be called plastic surgery. But the entire ethical question is about something for which there’s no medical necessity. It is entirely elective.
And when we were in that conversation, one of the surgeons simply said, “I just need to put on the table the money.” Every new procedure is the opportunity to buy a vacation home and make millions of dollars truthfully over time. And then you actually have a medical practice that says, how can we afford not to do this? And then you advertise this, and then you move into it. And one of the things you point out, it’s diabolical, and that is that we’re talking about potential billions of dollars in medical charges that will be flowing into someone’s pockets with all of these surgeries.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Oh yeah. And it’s not just the individual surgeons. Planned Parenthood is the number one distributor of these cross-sex hormones for young people. So in addition to our hundreds of millions of dollars of or tax money every year, they are also making a lot of money from abortion. They’re making a lot of money from getting teenagers on opposite sex hormones. And so it’s not just the plastic surgeons, although we have seen admissions from places like Vanderbilt and different hospitals under the Kaiser Permanente branch across the country. These surgeons say, these psychiatrists say, these endocrinologists say, “Yeah, this is big money for us.” So it’s not just that they’re ideologically captured that they may be scared of political activists – they want to make money. I mean, the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. We know that, which is exactly why we need to make it more costly for them to do these surgeries than for them not to do them, which means that all the lawsuits have to be on the table. I’m so thankful for the brave detransitioners who are suing the doctors that did this to them when they were minors, and we need to make sure – President Trump, whatever he can do in his capacity – but we need to make sure we’re doing whatever we can to say You’re going to lose your medical license. I think people should be put in jail for doing these kinds of surgeries, but we should be making it as costly as possible to inflict this kind of pain on any person, but especially children.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, no, amen to that. And I think this is very clearly a part of what’s behind the administration’s recent announcement, about a cutoff in funds for family planning. By the way, that’s an urgent moral issue on its own. When people hear family planning, they think about contraception, birth control, abortion, and all the rest. But some of those funds are also being directed at – with organizations like Planned Parenthood in particular – towards the very things we’re talking about here.
Albert Mohler:
One other issue I just want to mention, and you mentioned this in your book, and by the way, bravely, I want to say thank you, thank you, thank you, for saying you can’t use someone’s quote preferred pronouns when it’s a violation of their ontological reality and how God made them. And that means you were entering into the effort to rob God of his glory, according to Paul. But I just want to point out one other thing. I was asked to read a document a few months ago, and this was not the issue. It was not discussing transgender issues, an academic paper, and it was on a completely different issue, but evidently one of the subjects was trans. I could no longer tell which it is. If you’re going to mess with the pronouns, you can’t write a decent news story anymore. Who does “their” refer to here? I would dare you, if someone’s life was on the line to determine the meaning of that sentence, they’re not going to be able to do it. That should tell us something.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yes. Well, it defies all clarity. I mean, common language and common understanding of our language is a huge part of the social contract. It’s how any of us get along. And we know that Satan loves chaos. He loves discord. I mean, the Tower of Babel and everything that happened after the Tower of Babel was a curse. It wasn’t a blessing that everyone spoke different languages after that. It was meant to cause confusion. And now we’re at a point where we don’t even know if “they” is singular or plural or who is referred to as what, and if it actually correlates to a biological reality or just a diluted stated identity. So it’s a lot of confusion and chaos. And I think for Satan, that’s the point.
Albert Mohler:
No, amen to that. Lie number three you identify is: love is love. And I think of all the statements you make, that’s probably the longest duration. In other words, I think that goes back to the 1960s even. But it’s now just a part of the orthodoxy of the culture around us.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
And once again, once you start digging into it and asking the question just like, what is a woman? What is love? You see the problem with that? Well, is lust love, is stalking love, is predation love, are all forms of affection love? Or does love actually have a meaning?
Albert Mohler:
Is it even just to be honest, not even affection in sense, but just sexual interest.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yeah, just desire is just desire, love. And of course they would maybe say yes until you start pushing the bounds. Okay, well, what about the different forms of so-called love like pederasty or pedophilia? And then of course you see them squirm and get uncomfortable, and their consent based morality structure that just says, “As long as people are consenting” it starts to fall apart when you pick it apart like that. But for Christians, it’s really simple. Really, all of these are very simple. We try to make it complicated, but God is so gracious to reveal so much clear wisdom through his word. 1 John 4:8: “God is love.” He created it. He is it. And so he gets to define it. He defines it in lots of ways, but 1 Corinthians 13 gives us a lot of really good adjectives of what love is. And in one Corinthians 13:6, we read that love never rejoices in wrongdoing and rejoices in the truth, and who gets to decide what wrongdoing and truth is: the God that created both of those things. And the Christians who, especially on this issue, this is tough even for Christians to be strong on and to be clear on, they simply, I think, believe that they’re nicer than God and that they’re actually more loving than God, that they can out compassion God, out empathy God, and that if they can disagree with God on this one subject, then maybe they have finally out loved Christianity and it just doesn’t work that way.
Albert Mohler:
No. Allie, a recent controversy over ordered love enters into this because this is such a fundamental Christian concept. We don’t have a Christian concept of love other than ordered love, and that means that the creator orders our loves and has the right to order us. First of all, our primary love is to be for the creator himself, and then our human loves are to be rightly ordered. But one of the principles of that Christian thinking is that a disordered love points to the reality of an ordered love. And so, when we have, say, two homosexual men – let’s just use that example. People say, well, love is love, they should be able to marry or whatever. The Christian response to that is that it is not loving to condemn persons into their sin, to celebrate the, and affirm their sin nor to destroy marriage, which is part of the order of creation. But we’re not saying that there’s nothing in that, points to something real. We’re pointing to the fact, that it’s pointing to the fact that marriage is a good thing, but it’s not that.
Albert Mohler:
We’re pointing to a fact that friendship is a good thing, but it’s not that. But these distinctions are what the world hates right now. And I think one of the strengths of what you do is to help people who think they’re Christians, and I think are Christians and want to think Christianly, to understand you can’t follow that way of thinking.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yes. Right. And it goes back to a lot of progressives believe themselves to be moral relativists, although no one is actually a relativist, but what is good for you? What is true for you? That’s fine as long as it doesn’t hurt me. And quite frankly, a lot of people who call themselves conservatives, also say that they feel that way. But as C. S. Lewis outlines very well in Mere Christianity, everyone’s a moral relativist until someone steals your bike, then all of a sudden theft is objectively wrong. And he also paints this picture of the reality of just objective morality when he says, “If I paint a picture of New York, you will know that it looks nothing like New York because I’m not a good artist, but if a professional artist paints a picture of New York, you will say, yes, that looks like Times Square.” There is a real New York, and we are all trying to get closer to that. And really that underlies all of the arguments that I make in this book, or any argument that any Christian is making. It first goes back to can we agree that there is an objective reality, that there is a right and wrong? Can we all agree that the Holocaust was wrong? There is something wrong somewhere. If we can agree on that, then let us ask ourselves how we know that, where that right and wrong comes from, and then we can have the conversation about all of the different issues that we’re discussing.
Albert Mohler:
So well said. The current book I’m working on, I’m writing, one of the things I’m tracking is how, for example, on the issue of love, people say, well, “You’re wrong to say I can’t do that, and the only line I will draw is consent.” Well, the thing is, and you rightly point out that that’s all they have left, but there is no obstacle when it comes to say, polyamory or polygamy with consent. So it’s very interesting that the current argument against it on the part of some on the left is simply, “We can’t afford.”
Albert Mohler:
In other words, it would upend our tax policy, it will upend our insurance policies. Well, that’s not going to last. And as a matter of fact, that’s probably the easiest court case to predict in the line of Obergefell, et cetera. So you just go back to that and say, this is absolutely ridiculous. You might be able to say, consent might hold for a while on pedophilia, might hold a while on pedophilia, but when it comes to something polyamory, I mean if you say all is left is consent, that’s gone.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yes, and I think that the whole gender tragedy really shows us that consent based morality is just really like a lean tooth shack, that can be blown over with any kind of gusts of cultural wind. Because if a child at 10 years old is mature enough to say, I was born in the wrong body, give me puberty blockers, and then eventually cross-sex hormones – if a doctor is saying that a child is mature enough at that age to say that they never want kids, that they’ll never think anything differently about their body and so they can go down this road that might render them permanently sterile, then why aren’t they mature enough to choose to be in a relationship with an adult? Of course, I believe that’s wrong across the board, but you can already see that their logic is extremely slippery and you just see where it’s going.
Albert Mohler:
“No human is illegal.” You’re going to get into trouble on this one.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yeah, I know the first three that we talked about were creation order issues. This one’s a little bit different and Christians can disagree in good faith on particular policy. What I don’t think that we can disagree on – as you’ve talked about so well many times too – is the validity of borders and the validity of a nation’s sovereignty that is biblical. The establishments of governments and their responsibility to their own people, that is biblical. And just the principle of God being a God of order who wants human flourishing and really the love that we have, I’ve heard you talk about this before, we really don’t have the capacity to extend our love and our allegiance much further beyond our own borders. Of course, for the universal church, that’s Holy Spirit empowered, but when we’re talking about the natural ordering of loves, God has not given us the capacity to have full love full allegiance to all countries everywhere.
Albert Mohler:
I used this example the other day, Allie, in talking about this with some Christians, so I think we’re pretty confused on the issue. I said, we have a biblical mandate to care for the widow and the orphan and the alien in our midst. And so by the way, in our midst is a crucial biblical context there.
Allie Beth Stuckey
Yeah, true.
Albert Mohler:
In other words, this is not saying all the widows and orphans and aliens on the planet, but I just used the orphan one. I say, this is easy for us to understand. So let’s say that we want to be totally faithful before God, and so we start an orphanage. Well, if we say we’re welcoming all the orphans of the world, we can’t take care of any. And so just insanity, you have to say, well, we have to draw a line somewhere. Well, that’s exactly for one reason why you have borders. And in a fallen world, this is where Augustine, the great Christian theologian comes in and says, without borders, no one is going to protect your life. And so I’ll update it and say, there’s not going to be any 911 to call. There’s no global 911. And so as you point out, the whole thing falls apart. I really admire your bravery in this. I’m taking this issue on as well, as you know, and I think you do exactly the right thing in saying, look, here’s a biblical responsibility, but nation is a biblical concept.
Allie Beth Stuckey
Yes, absolutely.
Albert Mohler:
I’m going to argue it’s not a racial concept, but it is a biblical concept.
It requires, I mean right down to the Book of Genesis, it requires something like a common tongue, a common language, a common culture. And the founders of this country clearly understood it to be a nation based upon a national idea and a national creed, a national consensus, even a national constitution. And it’s in our nation’s interest, and frankly, I think it’s just morally and theologically right for us to have a good immigration policy, because after all, this nation has been greatly strengthened by immigrants at different times in its history. And by the way, right now, we’re going to need some very highly skilled immigrants and others to come, and we want to be in the right sense, in the right proportion, a refuge, even a temporary refuge for people who are in trouble, but not all the people of the world. I find so much dishonesty on this issue. I assume you’re finding the same.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yes. And just as you said, a lot of confusion, this idea that in order to love our neighbor, we really cannot prioritize American interests. And this idea that having borders or putting the interest in the wellbeing of the American citizen first in our government is some radical Christian nationalist position. And if you appeal to Scripture, any of the things that we have talked about, if you say, for example, everywhere walls are depicted in Scripture, either metaphorically or literally their depictions of God’s protection and his provision and order, and again, staving off chaos. And so we can at least see the principle of wisdom in borders just from those verses. But if you appeal to that, then of course you get the Christian nationalist moniker. But it’s interesting because those very same people who will say that’s an extreme nationalist whatever position, they will appeal wrongly to decontextualize Scripture in the Old Testament, the law giving to Old Testament Israel in which they’re told to take care of the foreigner because you were once so generous. We don’t deny that that exists, but if you want to appeal to Old Testament immigration policy to inform our current American immigration policy, let’s go all the way, because it was much stricter than what a lot of people here in America are proposing. Even on the conservative side, there were rules and regulations around foreigners and sojourners in the Old Testament that a lot of the open borders people seem to miss.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. One of the things I point out, and I did this at a point of frustration in a recent encounter, where someone was just talking about a very liberalized, hypothetical understanding of Jesus and went directly to what Jesus did teach, and that is to some degree, everyone is our neighbor. But as I pointed out, Jesus fed 5,000 people in one of the most remarkable of his miracles for his glory. He fed 5,000 people right before him. There were a lot of hungry people around the world at that moment. I think that it doesn’t work the way the liberals want it to work. It doesn’t work the way progressivists want it to work. No, the Bible is particular in so many ways that just run absolutely counter to that kind of argument. And by the way, no human is illegal. That doesn’t mean that border laws are not legal.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yes, of course. And it’s a very nonsensical mantra. Again, when you define what do you mean by illegal? We of course believe all these people, whether they’re illegally here or not, are made in the image of God. We want well for them, but I want, well, for every nation, I want Zimbabwe to put the interest and the wellbeing of its people first. I want them to have strong immigration law, whether it’s France or Brazil. I want that for all people. What I realize is that having no borders and no government that is not interested at all in the well-being advancement of its own people leads to a lot of danger for everyone. Maybe a lot of wealth to the people at the top of that scheme, but a lot of danger and vulnerability for the rest of us.
Albert Mohler:
You know Allie, I’ll just say honestly, I think what’s behind this is a coalition of socialists and globalists, but also, I mean some hyper capitalists, who see borders as the problem, they want to turn the entire world into a disequilibrium of active consumers. And so when you look at the situation, you’ll say, are you really telling people that they legally should be able to go anywhere on planet earth? Borders don’t matter? So it’s one thing because you’re talking about this particular group, but if you really make your argument there should be no borders, and borders are always wrong, and borders are always drawing lines, then that’s absolute mayhem according to Scripture. That doesn’t lead to human happiness. It leads to, I mean, open warfare.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
And Republicans have been guilty of this too. Now, I think the Trump administration is really strong on it, but Republicans prioritizing economic prosperity above all else and saying, we just need more workers. We just need more workers. And I’m not saying we need none, but prioritizing that above all else to where a person all of a sudden they look around and they say, “Oh, I have two mosques right outside my neighborhood, those used to be two churches, oh, I go to the park with my kids and none of the other moms speak English, I can’t even have a relationship with these people.” You are told you cannot care about that. If you care about that, then you’re some sort of racist or bigot. And everyone is kind of bullied into silence, into thinking that having a culture or having a shared culture as a country is wrong and immoral. I think a lot of Christians especially, as people who are part of a global church, are scared to talk about that.
Albert Mohler:
You document some things in your book, and actually it was a catalyst for putting some greater urgency in my mind about some things. So just to give an example. Some of the statements made by evangelicals, some of the statements made by even a group like the Southern Baptist Convention – that’s rather personal to me – there are statements that don’t age so well. And a part of it is because the immigration refugee issue to which those statements were addressed 30 years ago has nothing to do with what we’re looking at now. It’s a very different situation. And so even just reading your book, I was thinking there needs to be some good updating and clarification on some of these statements, because it’s very different to look at what was the issue in 1991 or 1985, and then look at what we’re looking at, especially with the chaos at the border in the last 10 years.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
And we also kind of had a different mentality. I mean, I love Ronald Reagan. I know you love Ronald Reagan too. We all kind of had this idea that when someone comes to American soil, almost this kind of magical process happens where they leave the values of their country behind and they take on American values, but that’s not an automatic process. We believe that can happen, that no matter your background or the color of your skin, you can become an American just as much of an American as me. But I think that we did not realize the huge cultural differences between say, China and us, or the Middle East and us. And that if you import a lot of people with completely diametrically opposed values when it comes to freedom and autonomy and human rights and religion, morality, and you bring them over here, that is going to change your culture, that is going to make things much harder. I don’t know that we realized that in the eighties and nineties as much as we realized in post 9/11 America.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I think, and I’ll speak a word of support for President Reagan here, I appreciate your comments about him, but he was governor of California in the 1960s. And he was president of the United States in the 1980s. That is a world to ago in terms of this question,
Albert Mohler:
I can guarantee you that Ronald Reagan as governor and as president firmly believed when he talked about persons coming into the United States that they were buying into and being educated into the American experiment, the American constitutional order. That’s not what we’re talking about right now.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yeah, yeah. I think certainly we’re seeing, especially when you look at college campuses, some people who are here on visas, maybe some people here who are actually citizens, literally rallying for a terrorist regime that has promised to genocide Jews and Christians, and I think that the Trump administration is doing the right thing saying, these visas are a privilege, and you don’t get to be here, if you’re supporting those kinds of causes. But yeah, we’re dealing with something very, very different, especially when you’re talking to the Islamification of the Western world, which is a whole different conversation. Different threats, certainly than 40 years ago.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and I think it is very telling that so many of the most liberal governments around the world are teetering and barely holding onto power, and in some places being toppled simply over this issue. If you’re in Germany, if you’re in Italy or in Hungary, you are awakened to what is going on here. And I do not believe, by the way, that the left is going to win on this one. They may have inflicted permanent damage, and it is certainly an ongoing struggle, but I think all the momentum right now is in recognition of the fact that this is not working. When you have the French police who won’t even go into entire districts in Paris, by definition this isn’t working.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
And you would hope that people would see that but there is a fear to have any kind of national identity or cultural identity at all. But again, just like on every issue, Christians have to lead the charge because there’s a moral imperative for it.
Albert Mohler:
That’s right. And by the way, Allie, as you know, I’m not afraid to be called names. If people want to call me a Christian nationalist, that’s not what I’m going to call myself.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
So be it.
Albert Mohler:
I’m a Christian who believes in the importance of the nation, and no apology for that.
Allie Beth Stuckey
Amen.
Albert Mohler:
The last thing you really take on is social justice, and as you say, social justice isn’t justice. I will say, I could only add to your sentence social justice is justice that’s an injustice.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yes, exactly. Exactly. And Thomas Sowell has written about this for so long and really opened my eyes into the lie that social justice is justice. He calls it cosmic justice.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
It’s this idea that the government acts as a God to try to ensure equal outcomes, and in order to ensure equal outcomes, you have to hold certain groups back, push other groups forward through preferential treatment, a difference in treatment, and they call that equity, which is really the opposite of biblical equity, which is to treat everyone the same under the law. We saw this with Ibram X. Kendi, his book How to Be an Anti-racist. In order to have an anti-racist future, we have to be racist currently against white people. And so that’s what I try to tackle in this particular chapter. Not to say that there aren’t problems with our justice system that should be addressed, and I talk about that in the chapter, but social justice and biblical justice are two very different things.
Albert Mohler:
We must not give up on the word justice. It’s one of the attributes of God. It is a biblical mandate, but the biblical concept of justice has nothing to do with the ideological concept of social justice.
Allie Beth Stuckey
No.
Albert Mohler:
It actually, in many ways, turns the biblical concept of justice on its head. It removes all the moral content of the biblical understanding of justice.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Yeah, biblical justice. If we look, especially in God’s law giving in the Old Testament, we see that it’s truthful, that it’s proportionate, and that it is direct. A lot of what we hear is, well, this group who has maybe a similar melanin count to people who lived 200 years ago and might’ve done that, they need to pay for the sins of those people. And these people who have this kind of melanin, they basically don’t have agency and they’re not even responsible for the things that they do themselves. We saw a lot of that in 2020 with BLM, and that’s not God’s definition of justice, and we should be very thankful for that. God gives rights to both the accused and the accuser, and we see over and over again that he hates partiality. He hates partiality. It is a sign of chaos and a lack of wisdom, and we should be grateful for that. We are beneficiaries of that impartial justice.
Albert Mohler:
Allie, I want to ask you one direct question.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Sure.
Albert Mohler:
What have you learned from the response to this book?
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Oh, that people are going to criticize a book without even, not just not reading the book, not even reading the subtitle. I’ve had people in the pages of the Atlantic, the New York Times, and NPR, people who call themselves Christians, say that this is a book that tells Christians not to have empathy ever for anyone. And that is not what the book is about. It is about the exploitation of Christian compassion for destructive and sinful means those people are not dumb people. They know very well, but I think it tries to really hit at the heart of their best and most effective manipulation tactic, especially for women. And maybe that makes them upset. I’m not sure. But yeah, so there’s a lot of laziness out there, and maybe a lot of malice too.
Albert Mohler:
Well, as an older leader told me when I was very young, “If they respond to you with this much energy, they certainly are hearing you talk.” And you are pushing an argument and just with great effectiveness. And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you, and I appreciate this book, and I commend it to all listeners to Thinking In Public, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. It’s a brave book.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Thank You, Dr. Mohler.
Albert Mohler:
And I thank you for this conversation, Allie.
Allie Beth Stuckey:
Thanks very much.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Allie Beth Stuckey for joining with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking In Public, you’ll find well more than 200 of these conversations at albertmohler.com, under the tab, Thinking In Public. For 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, you know what I’m going to say. Keep thinking.