Toxic Empathy

Allie Beth Stuckey begins with a question most people never stop to ask: is empathy really the highest virtue, the thing that separates good people from bad? She suspects the word has gone the way of "tolerance," "justice," and "acceptance," borrowed by people who use compassion as leverage for their own political goals. Her argument, written from a Christian perspective, is that when public life is steered by feeling instead of truth, the people who suffer most are the innocent.

Stuckey contends that left-wing activists have turned empathy into a means of pressure, leaving people feeling that love requires them to adopt progressive positions. She tests this claim against five of the most contested subjects in public debate: abortion, gender, sexuality, immigration, and social justice. In each, she looks at slogans such as "abortion is healthcare," "love is love," and "no human being is illegal," and argues that they present only half of the moral picture. Abortion, for instance, is framed as kindness toward the woman, yet the life ended by the procedure goes unmentioned.

The book does not argue for less compassion. Its case is that empathy needs to answer to God's definitions of love, goodness, and justice rather than rule over them. Stuckey lays out what she sees as the logical weaknesses and moral costs of what she calls toxic empathy, and she aims to give Christian readers research-based and biblical arguments they can use in conversation, both in the wider culture and inside the church.