When they warn against "toxic empathy," they're talking about women
Misogyny is friends with gnosticism, with some enlightenment rationalism thrown in for good measure
Fellow Pilgrims,
Women, amiright?
Emotional.
Untrustworthy.
Hormonal.
We need objective, rational men to put us right.
The recent idea that empathy is “toxic”—or even sinful—is code for just this. Bashing empathy is closely linked to misogyny, to the heresy of gnosticism, and to a deeply unbiblical way of thinking about biblical truth.
John William Waterhouse (1849–1917), The Siren (1900), oil on canvas. Wikimedia Commons.
Joe Rigney and Allie Beth Stuckey have both released recent books asking Christians to steer away from “toxic”—or even “sinful”—empathy.
Here’s a characteristic word from Stuckey:
“… toxic empathy is a dangerous guide for our decisions, behavior, and public policy … Feelings are often misaligned with reality and can actually blind us from—rather than lead us to—wisdom.” ― Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy
Rigney launched his anti-empathy brand with a piece published at John Piper’s site, “The Enticing Sin of Empathy: How Satan Corrupts Through Compassion.”1 The piece is an attempt to write in the style of The Screwtape Letters, a feat I don’t recommend trying.
I’ll quote from an interview Rigney did with Al Mohler:2
“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.”
As with most problematic arguments, there’s some truth here. The passions, on their own, are not a reliable guide for faith and theology. Scripture is our norm. But Rigney is running with a number of deeply problematic assumptions. Why does he find the passions so off-putting in the first place? Why does he trust reason and not passion? Why is he so confident that he knows right from wrong?
The scriptures speak to what, in theology, we call “the noetic effects of sin” (that is, sin damages our ability to think and reason well). Under the condition of sin, we become “futile” in our thinking (Romans 1:20). “Claiming to be wise, they became fools,” (Romans 1:22), says Paul.
Yet Rigney’s distrust (and disgust?) is not for reason but for the passions.
Among Rigney’s errors is hierarchical dualism, which was also embraced in the ancient heresy of gnosticism. This dualism splits reality into two: the spiritual vs. the material. It values the spiritual and devalues the material. It values reason and devalues emotion.
This kind of dualism is an easy partner for misogyny, which paints the male as spiritual and rational and the female—breasts, womb, blood, and hormones—as physical and emotional. The rational male is to be trusted; the irrational woman is untrustworthy.
(For more on the links between complementarianism and gnosticism, see my piece here.)
The truth, of course, is that both men and women are both spiritual and material, both rational and emotional. (More, the rational is both material and spiritual, as is the emotional.)
And the bigger truth is that this is good.
For gnostic dualism, only the spiritual realm belongs to God, while the physical is sinful, error, a symptom of the fall.
But biblical faith knows God is the creator of everything, of “all that is, seen and unseen.”3 God made the heavens and the earth. God created humans with bodies and souls. The bodily and the emotional is not inherently bad.
“For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:4).
Everything God made—emotions included—is good. Emotions, not just for women, are God’s good design. And yes, emotions are subject to sin. But so is reason. Women are not more sinful or less trustworthy than men. Jesus trusted women to be the first to receive the news of his resurrection.
Do hormones influence my thinking, feeling, reasoning, and emotions? Absolutely. As they do for men. And God made hormones and loves them and works in and with them. There is no real, rational me divorced from the bodily, the emotional, and the hormonal. God created me, an embodied soul, and works in and through my embodied life. And the same is true for every human, regardless of sex or gender.
Rigney, like many others who make modernist assumptions about how to read scripture, assumes he has the tools to govern the passions and those tools come in rationally finding the correct meaning of the biblical text. But the text is not a set of rational propositions. The text is a story into which we’re invited, body and soul, so that we can live in and through that story and be transformed, body and soul, by the God whose revelation the text is.
Rigney commends Job for chastising his wife as “a foolish woman” and complains that current Christian leaders and husbands would lack the “fortitude” to correct such a wife.
But in the text of Job, the wife’s error is not empathy. It is blasphemy, hearkening to the fool in Psalm 14:1 who “said in his heart, There is no God.”
In dualist terms, her error is more rational and less emotional. The fool is wicked, blasphemous, and even stupid, but there is no textual reason to suppose that said fool is empathetic. If anything, Job’s wife seems rather lacking in empathy for Job. Rigney is importing his assumptions about women and foolishness and the nature of the foolishness of women into the text.
Job and his Wife by Albrecht Durer (1504)
In the Mohler/Rigney interview we find this strikingly stated. Rigney says:
“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.
There are plenty of stereotypical, cultural, misogynist, and even racist4 reasons to believe this about women, but there is no biblical reason to do so. There are lots of emotional men in scripture, for good and for ill. A man, Jesus, surely, is the strongest example of compassion we meet in the scriptures. He is the one who, in his passion, gave himself up for us.
To speak of “God’s design” is an enormous, weighty theological claim, and if someone is going to make it, they’d better bring receipts.
And that “glorious design feature” Rigney attributes to women? He doesn’t actually think it’s that great.
“that same gift, if you try to put it in other contexts, particularly contexts 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.”
This supposedly God-designed female empathy/liability explains why women can’t be leaders. More, it explains why women are ruining our society.
“There is a reason that the empathetic sex … 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.”
Holy moly. There is so much going on here that I don’t have time for today. Let’s just notice this: the panic about empathy is about women.
It’s an outbreak! Caused by feminism! By emotional women! We need the rational men with their correct readings of scripture to rein us in!
I thank God that the calling is not to set “the perimeter for what is in and out.” It’s also worth noting that “pastor,” “minister,” and “elder” are not clear cut New Testament offices. There are no “pastors” in scripture. Though, in the New Testament, women minister alongside men. Just look at Phoebe, Junia, and Priscilla.
To imagining the calling primarily as gatekeeping is to move far away from scriptures like this:
“Do not lord it over those in your charge, but be examples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:3).
and this:
“equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12).
I’m not denying that Christian leaders are called to sort truth from falsehood and to help others do so, but “in and out” are seriously concerning categories for thinking through pastoral leadership.
Odysseus and the Sirens By John William Waterhouse - Google Art Project: Public Domain
Rigney’s “bottom line:”
“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 and 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?”
But, loves, God can work through our feelings. And, yes, our feelings can be twisted. As can our minds. And our interpretations of scripture.
But God made and loves our bodies and our emotions and our hormones and our passions and, yes, our minds. And God made and loves and trusts women. Our God became one of us so that we would know that he shares in our passions. Our God is compassion in the person of Jesus Christ, who has shown us the Father in the Spirit.
“we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:15-16).
And we are called to have the compassionate mind of this same Jesus.
In C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Lewis has the demon Screwtape say, to his demonic protégée [the “Enemy,” here, is God, as the speaker is a demon]:
you can … teach a man to surrender benefits not that others may be happy in having them but that he may be unselfish in forgoing them. That is a great point gained. Another great help, where the parties concerned are male and female, is the divergence of view about Unselfishness which we have built up between the sexes. A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others. As a result, a woman who is quite far gone in the Enemy’s service will make a nuisance of herself on a larger scale than any man except those whom Our Father has dominated completely; and, conversely, a man will live long in the Enemy’s camp before he undertakes as much spontaneous work to please others as a quite ordinary woman may do every day. Thus while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people’s rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.
Now, this business from Lewis about men and women is quite questionable, but it is nowhere nearly as nonsensical as Rigney’s argument that women are emotional by divine design.
The key point here is this: Lewis’s demon Screwtape knows that if there is such a difference between male and female, it is something the demons “have built up between the sexes.”
It’s nurture, not nature, and it’s diabolical nurture at that.
More, the woman who serves God (the demon’s “Enemy”) by “taking trouble for others” is recognized as a large scale nuisance to the forces of darkness. That is, her empathy in action is godly.
In the fourth chapter of Ephesians, we get a portrait of the way sin damages our reason. How does it do so? Among other things, the sinful mind goes to “hardness of heart.”
“Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer walk as the gentiles walk, in the futility of their minds; they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. That is not the way you learned Christ!” (Ephesians 4:17-20)
Sin causes us to lose “all sensitivity,” that is, in sin, we are ἀπηλγηκότες: callous, without feeling. But in the truth of Jesus, feeling is regained, and we are empowered to compassionate new life.
Reading scripture well isn’t about sorting “in” from “out,” and it isn’t about epistemological certainty separated from an embodied, emotional, active life in Christ, one in which we are transformed and learn to share in the passions of Jesus.
“Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter!” — Isaiah 5:20
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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Here’s a broken link to the piece: https://ww w.desiringgod.org/articles/the-enticing-sin-of-empat hy
Another broken link: htt ps://albertmohler.co m/2025/02/19/joe-rigney/
To quote the Nicene creed.
The 19th century “cult of true womanhood” constructed white women as pure and separate from the evils of the man’s world. She was to be domestic, the “angel in the house.” Inasmuch as this ideal was realized, it was often enabled by the work of women of color.
See “The Cult of True Womanhood” by Jeanne Boydston; “hidden by the ‘cult of true womanhood’ was women’s extensive participation in labor directly in the cash economy. ‘The cult of true womanhood’ did not protect the millions of enslaved African-American women from the back-breaking labor that built the cotton economy of the South and propelled the industrial development of the North.”
Today, domestic ideals about gender roles continue to mask the reality of women’s labor, both paid and unpaid, and the often underpaid domestic labor of poor women and women of color for wealthy and white households.