I need you to sit with a sentence, because a few years ago it would have read as satire and today it’s a book title you can buy on Amazon.

The Sin of Empathy.

That’s a real book, published by Canon Press in 2024, written by a pastor and theologian named Joe Rigney. It is not a fringe pamphlet stapled together in a basement. It got reviewed in the religious press, discussed on the podcast of Al Mohler, who runs the flagship seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the country. Alongside it sits Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, by the popular conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey, published by Penguin’s Sentinel imprint in 2024. Two books. Same year. Same thesis. Empathy, the plain human act of feeling what another person feels, is being recategorized, in real time, from virtue to vice.

And I want to be careful and fair here, because they’ll accuse me of strawmanning, so let me steelman them first. Their actual argument, stripped of charity, is that empathy “untethered” from truth becomes manipulation. That when you fully enter someone’s pain you lose the ability to judge whether their pain is justified, and so you get bullied into affirming things you shouldn’t. Rigney prefers older words, compassion, sympathy, pity, and says empathy is the counterfeit that makes you a sucker. Fine. That’s the version they’d sign off on.

Here’s why it’s poison anyway, and here’s who it’s poisoning.

Watch what the “untethering” is actually for

The tell is always in the examples. You can dress an argument in Aristotle, and Rigney’s defenders do, calling it a careful distinction between deficiency and excess of pity. But ideas reveal themselves by what they’re deployed against. So look at what the empathy these men want you to switch off is always, conveniently, pointed at.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks this stuff for a living, traces the “sin of empathy” framing back to Rigney starting around 2019 and lays out plainly what it does: it licenses the withdrawal of compassion from exactly the people the Gospel spends the most time commanding compassion toward. The stranger. The immigrant. The poor. The prisoner. The SPLC’s read is that for the Christian-nationalist version of this, empathy is to be reserved for people who share your race, your religion, your politics, and that feeling for the outsider gets reframed as something “disordered.” They tie the whole project to anti-feminist ideology and male supremacy, and note it caught fire precisely as it became useful, in the early months of the second Trump term, when the administration’s executive orders were drawing fire for, specifically, lacking empathy. Stuckey, for her part, has worked with groups designated as anti-LGBTQ hate organizations.

So the “untethering” is not a neutral philosophical caution. It is a permission slip. It teaches you to feel the catch in your chest when you see a suffering stranger, and then to identify that catch itself as the enemy, a manipulation, a sin, a weakness being exploited by your political opponents. It takes the single most reliable moral instrument a human being has, the involuntary flinch at someone else’s pain, and reclassifies it as a malfunction.

And the call is coming from inside the house

Here’s the part that should detonate the “this is just faithful Christianity” defense: some of the loudest objections are coming from conservative Christians themselves, because the argument is a betrayal of their own book.

David French, no one’s idea of a leftist, wrote a column with the dry title “Behold the Strange Spectacle of Christians Against Empathy,” and made the obvious point that Christianity’s entire central event is an act of empathy. The whole theological claim is a God who refused to stay untethered and safe above human suffering, who climbed down into a body, felt hunger and grief and pain and death, and did it specifically to be with people in their darkness. “Joining people in their distress” is not the counterfeit these pastors warn against. By their own scripture, it’s the thing the central figure of their faith actually did. You have built a theology of empathy-avoidance and named it after a man who is, on the page, the most empathetic figure in your entire tradition. That’s not heresy I’m alleging. That’s just reading.

When the critique of your movement is being led by people inside your own pews citing your own founder, “the left hates God” stops working as a shield.

Now follow it downhill, to the boys

This is where it stops being a seminary squabble and becomes the thing that’s actually reshaping a generation.

There is a real, measurable crisis among young men. Withdrawal from work, from school, from connection, the “lost boys” framing that even the people exploiting it use. The loneliness is real. The lack of direction is real. And into that vacuum, a very specific message has been poured: that the problem is that the world went soft. That empathy, compassion, “being nice,” sensitivity, all of it is the feminizing rot that took your birthright. That what a man needs is not to feel more but to feel less, to harden, to dominate, to obey strong men and despise weak ones.

Elon Musk, the richest man alive, said it to Joe Rogan’s audience of tens of millions in the plainest possible terms: “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Not a pastor in an Idaho seminary. The owner of the platform your nephew scrolls at 1 a.m., telling him that the capacity to care about other people is the weakness that’s killing the West.

Connect it to what we know about how authoritarianism actually recruits. The research on authoritarian followers is clear: they’re defined by submission to in-group authority, aggression toward rule-breakers and outsiders, and rigid devotion to tradition. Now look at what the anti-empathy gospel installs. It tells a lonely, directionless young man that his compassion is a defect. It tells him that hardness is virtue and feeling is manipulation. It tells him to despise the weak and obey the strong. That is not adjacent to authoritarian psychology. That is authoritarian psychology, taught as a moral curriculum, with a Bible verse taped over the part where the cruelty goes.

You cannot spend a decade telling boys that empathy is a sin and then act bewildered when they grow into men who can watch other people suffer and feel nothing but contempt. You built that. You wrote the textbook, recorded the podcast, sold the book. Charlie Kirk and the campus operation he founded were a major engine of that delivery system, pumping the harden-up, the-left-made-you-weak, dominance-is-destiny message onto campuses for over a decade. The machine he built is still running. The message metastasized exactly as designed.

Here’s the actual sin

Let me give them their own framework back, since they like the language of sin so much.

They say empathy untethered from truth is dangerous. There’s a real grain there, I’ll concede it: feeling without judgment can be manipulated, sure. But watch what they did with that grain. They didn’t teach discernment. Discernment would be “feel deeply, and think clearly about what the feeling is asking of you.” That’s the hard, adult version, and it keeps the empathy.

Instead they taught amputation. They told a generation the safest thing to do with the instrument that lets you recognize another person’s humanity is to cut it out. And an amputated conscience doesn’t make you discerning. It makes you useful, to anyone selling dominance, to any strongman who needs followers that can look at cruelty and feel nothing.

If you want to talk about sin, here it is: they took the thing that makes us human to each other, the thing their own God supposedly came down and bled to demonstrate, and they convinced frightened, lonely people that it was a disease. They pathologized the cure and prescribed the poison. And they did it to children.

Empathy isn’t the sin. Empathy is the whole assignment, the entire thing every serious moral tradition, theirs included, has ever been about.

What they built isn’t a defense against manipulation. It’s a generation of young men taught to mistrust the one signal that was trying to keep them good.

That’s not a counterfeit of compassion.

That’s the real counterfeit. And they’re the ones selling it.