Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Comedian Greg Warren I had never heard of before, and
I came across a bit that he did and it
appealed to me. And I have to give you a
little context. First, we had a girl on the show
a couple of years ago. She had one state in
bass fishing in Texas. I am a fan of this.
(00:25):
They are now making life skill competitions for high school kids. Look,
I like to watch high school football as much as
the next guy. But what about all the kids that
don't do that? What about shop? What about shooting? What
about fishing? What about all sorts of other things that
young people can do and compete in? Competition is healthy?
(00:47):
So we had this girl and she was a state
champion and she's a fisherman, and comedian Greg Warren asked
a very funny question that made me think back to
that interview with her. It's pretty funny.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Do you know the state of Illinois has high school fishing?
There's gotta be fishing coaches. I'm gonna guess they're similar
to the coaches I had. You boys embarrass yourselves out
there on that lake today.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Hey, he's got his hook caught in the train. Jansen
pulled a shoe out of the lake and Martin. You
couldn't catch a fish in the secret department at.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
The grocery store.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
If I was a fish, I feel safe out every lord.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
If there's a high school fishing coach somewhere out there,
there is an assistant high school fishing coach. And I
never wanted to meet somebody so bad in my life.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Gods, we're going to have a tackle box inspecting at
nine a m. And you better have all your hoops
and you better have all your lords or you're not
going to get all that fool bus.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
I can tell you that Roden Island.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
That's all I got. Coach back to you. You think
they have fishing cheerleaders.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Be be patient, be be be patient.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
So when you're scaring the.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Fish cat this crappie, swum out gass, you're outboard motors, hold.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
No gas, bang bane.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Shoot you train, come mon, angles, do that.
Speaker 5 (02:35):
Time puffy wheeling?
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Wait not blow it back? Bane, Shoot you tracks?
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Do that pad.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Since we're on the subject of sports, ESPN's Kate Fagin says,
trans kids deserve to play sports too, And I agree
they deserve to play sports. I'm all for competition. No
one is trying to stop them. They should align with
(03:12):
the sport that aligns with their I'm sorry, they should
play the sport that aligns with their biological sex. What
shouldn't happen is that men who are bigger, stronger, faster
be allowed to play against women who are biologically smaller, weaker, slower.
You ever notice you never see a girl who thinks
(03:32):
she's a man trying to compete in men's sports. Wonder
why that is? Wonder why that is?
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Well?
Speaker 6 (03:41):
Listen, being on this show has been a privilege in
a platform, and I know it's my last time on it,
and I want to say something worthy of that privilege
and platform, and that is this that trans kids deserve
to play sports. Think about what you remember from your
time playing sports, Like ninety nine percent of it is
finding that jersey for the first time and your favorite number, community,
(04:02):
joy those high fives. It's that moment when you have
a great play with a teammate. It's the feeling of belonging,
and it does not no gender and trans kids deserve
that the same as everybody else does. And Tony, this
space has on around the horn. It's been about diversity
and inclusion, lifting up new voices because sports is joy
(04:25):
and sports is humanity, and the more people who have that,
the better.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
The college basketball coach who defeated the University of Virginia
in nineteen eighty two, ranked number one at the time,
is not a household name. In fact, I bet you
most folks don't remember his name. They probably don't remember
(04:52):
the university, but basketball fans will remember the university because
it's considered it. It's been called, quote, the greatest upset
never seen, and the reason was it didn't get primetime
billing because UVA was supposed to just plow through right
(05:14):
but they didn't. The team, you can say it out
loud and impress everybody around you, was the Shamanad Silver Swords,
and they beat number one UVA. Ralph Sampson was a
seven to four big man. The tallest player for Shamanad
(05:37):
was sixty six. The Silver Swords athletic complex was called
the Shack. The athletic director at the time secured towels
for the team from yki Key Hotels. He started at
two thousand dollars a season. That was his pay. The
(06:01):
local car dealership helped out with the pay for the
coach so that they could have a coach who wouldn't
have to work other jobs and could focus on being
a basketball coach and the little engine that could. The
Shamanad Silver Swords won seventy seven seventy two. Do you
remember his name? Well, he passed away this past weekend.
(06:26):
This was an NBC nineteen NBC News nineteen eighty two
report about one of the most famous games in all
of sports history, Shamanad beating UVA. See if you can
remember it.
Speaker 5 (06:38):
Shamanad is not among the big time college ranks. The
athletic facility here a shack built more than forty years ago,
but coach MERV Lolts knows his team is now etched
in basketball history.
Speaker 4 (06:50):
The strategy was for us to go out there and
give the people who came to watch the number one
the team in the nation, you know, some good basketball
known lose. It wasn't so much our plan. Our plan
was put to go out there and uh and play
the best basketball we can. That's about it.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
It's the day after the game.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
How you feel you have you come back from the
cloud yet? Oh yeah, I feel fine. I'm happy for
the guys and happy for the program, and I'm okay.
Speaker 5 (07:17):
Shamanas Tony Randolph took a tall assignment in College Player
of the Year Ralph Samson. But two are old friends
from back home in Virginia. In fact, Randolph dated Samson's sister.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
We just play streetball the time, and you know, it
was just choking him guarding me.
Speaker 5 (07:33):
And so I think he didn't really take it seriously
in the game that I could shoot. You know, he
was sagging back.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
He was you know, let me take the nineteen foot jumper.
You know I was taking it.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Was just falling so happy.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
It was hot.
Speaker 5 (07:46):
These boosters felt confident from the start.
Speaker 7 (07:48):
I thought they had a.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Chance of being him.
Speaker 6 (07:50):
If it was going to be a UVA victory, would
be a close game.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
But I think they didn't have a chance.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
To be UVA.
Speaker 7 (07:57):
And those chances you look at a books admit them.
Speaker 5 (08:00):
Michael Berry almost god motile.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
You have often heard me say that I think the
greatest challenge in our whether you want to call them
cultural wars, cultural collapse, political environment, our country, our society,
whatever that may be, is a conversation I always have
with good, honest, decent, honorable people who play by the rules,
(08:30):
raise their kids, pay their taxes, work hard, help others,
worship at church, and some of them refuse to admit
that bad things are done by bad people. They refuse
to admit or believe that some people are like rabid
(08:50):
dogs and they're going to If they've raped once, they're
going to rape a hundred times, or they're pedophig going
to a hundred times. Or if they're a murderer, they're
a wife beater, or whatever else, if they're a financial
fraud or whatever else. I don't want to go around
believing that everyone has a dark heart. You know. I'm
somewhere between Locke and Hobbes and how all that comes down.
I am a believer. I believe everyone is a child
(09:12):
of God. I am also a protector and a sheep
dog for my family and my flock, and so I'm
mindful that we have to understand that man is imperfect,
and he sins, and he can be evil. I came
across something I found to be very interesting by a
fellow I did not know of before, by the name
of doctor Joe Rigney, and he's a fellow of theology
(09:34):
at New Saint Andrew's College and a pastor at Christ
Church in Moscow, Idaho. He's the author of eight books.
But what caught my attention is a book that he's
published this year called The Sin of Empathy. And I
saw that and I gave it a great deal of
thought because it is you've heard my theory on the
(09:56):
naive neighbor that our greatest challenge is not the people
who want to destroy our society. There have always been
those people. Our challenge is the naive neighbor who will
allow the trojan horse inside their home until it's too
late to defend it. He's also a written leadership and
emotional sabotage and more, eight books I believe in total,
(10:17):
and it seemed like a great person to have on
our show. You know, I don't do very many guests,
but when someone is offering proffering a theory or a
position or an experience that I think is interesting to me,
I share it with you. So, Joe Rigney, welcome to
the program.
Speaker 7 (10:34):
Hey, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
So let's talk about the sin of empathy. You caught
my attention. I have a naive neighbor theory that I
posit often, and I think they're probably at least some
overlap in that Venn diagram.
Speaker 7 (10:49):
Yeah, I think that's probably right. It is a provocative title,
so I'm glad it did catch your attention, and it's
getting at the idea that virtue, when they become untethered
and unbored from truth and reality and what is good,
become highly destructive. And we see this in a whole
(11:11):
host of different ways. But I think that compassion, which
is a virtue, something that modeled for us by Christ,
it's core to the Christian faith, is a really glorious virtue.
But one of the things I learned from C. S.
Lewis many years ago is that when love becomes a god,
(11:32):
meaning when a human love, a natural love, becomes a god,
it becomes a demon and it destroys everything in its path.
And Lewis of course illustrated this in a number of
ways with things like mother love. We are all familiar with.
Mother love is a good thing. But mother love can
become possessive, suffocating, It can coddle. It can rather than
(11:53):
help people grow up, it can keep them in an
infantile state. And so mother love, when it's not governed
by what is true and good and right, becomes destructive.
Lewis illustrated this in a number of different ways. What
I began to see over the last fifteen years or so,
and I was helped in this by a number of
other authors, was that compassion was undergoing the same kind
of transformation. But the difference here was that compassion people
(12:16):
often presented a new word, a sort of upgraded compassion,
which they called empathy. Empathy was supposed to be an
improvement on the old Christian virtue of sympathy or compassion,
and in the process, the way that it was described
was a sort of total immersion in the feelings and
pain and suffering of others. And the danger that I
(12:39):
saw was if you do that, if you totally immerse
yourself in the feelings and pains and sufferings of others,
you can lose touch with reality. You can get swept
off your feet. So I often use the illustration if
you see someone drowning in quicksand apathy, which is a
bad response, would just turn around and walk the other way,
much like the guy in the Good smiritan parable who
(12:59):
walks along on the other side of the road. The
proper response is to reach in with one hand and
hold on to them, and then hold on to the
shore to get a grab a branch on the other
side in order to help them get out of the pit.
But what empathy demands is you need to jump in
here with me, and now you have two people drowning, right.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Joe Rigney. I am so glad you used that example
because it is an example I don't claim, and it's
been around for a long time that I have used often,
and that I imagine of sometimes helping someone does not include
sharing their heroin addiction or sharing the little bit of
money you've saved with them so they can use it
(13:40):
on their heroin addiction. You're helping both of you drown.
I think that is such a perfect, perfect analogy, and
analogies can be so incredibly powerful. Let me take a
step back and ask you, as pastor at Christ Church
in Moscow, Idaho, and a fellow theology at the New
Saint Andrew's College, how did you get interested in this
(14:01):
particular issue because so often members of the clergy preach
that love will will handle all, love will conquer all.
Just love, love, love, and this is a very I'm
glad that you quoted C. S. Lewis, because I think
that is a next level Christian author and his theology
which appeals a great deal to me. It's a very
(14:21):
it's a very rational theology. And obviously he was such
a proficient and wonderful writer. But talk to me about
how you got into this.
Speaker 7 (14:29):
Yeah. I was teaching classes on leadership at a Christian
college and I read a book by a Jewish Rabbi
named Edwin Friedman, a book called A Failure of Nerve,
and he talked a lot of it's the basis. It's
one of the key themes in my book, Leadership and
Emotional Sabotage. I essentially plunder Freedman among others in order
(14:50):
to put them in a more Christian framework and describe
the challenges of leadership in our anxious, angsty, agitated world.
But one of the dangers that Freeman highlighted in PORTI
was the danger of empathy. And he noted this this way,
that empathy often was a disguise. It became a power
tool in the hands of the sensitive. That was his phrase,
a power tool in the hands of the sensitive. Where
(15:12):
whole communities were expected to adapt to the most reactive, immature,
and destructive members of the community. And if anyone said,
you know, I don't think this is a good idea,
I don't think that we should be caddling this right.
I think that that's an unacceptable way to behave. The
person who was having demanding responsibility was the person who
would get policed by, in your phrase, the naive neighbors.
(15:35):
The naive neighbors would actually exert the pressure on the
people attempting to draw lines and boundaries, rather than call
the person who's immature and reactive to take responsibility for themselves.
And he said that this was done under the banner
of empathy. And I read that, found it helpful. And
then it seemed to me that over the last I
don't know ten or fifteen years, American culture conspired to
(15:58):
prove Freedman's point. Hold that.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Let's get into examples. Coming up, Doctor Joe Rigney, the
sin of empathy subject, I'm quite interested.
Speaker 7 (16:10):
I'm not sure what your question was, Michael Berry.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
I lost the plot somewhere, did you did. Doctor Joe
Brisney is our guest. He is the pastor at Christ
Church in Moscow, Idaho, author of eight books. The one
that caught my attention is the sin of empathy. And
I think that we've seen that sin individually, and I
(16:38):
think we've seen it written large the idea I'm going
to say things that he might not agree with. I'm
going to offer my perspective. I'm not putting words in
his mouth. I think the sin of empathy dragged us
down the path of mass scale illegal immigration. I think
the sin of empathy dragged us into the sous sorows
(16:59):
owned district atorneys who were putting murderers back out on
the street with a recognizance bond, and they're committing more murders.
We've just seen this in Houston multiple times in the
last month. They're committing more murders while they're waiting for
the trial of their own because we don't want to
believe that people are bad. The sin of empathy a
lack of consequences, a lack of accountability. We see it
(17:21):
in parenting, where you see parents that cannot tell their
child no, parents that cannot say you can't do this,
or there are going to be consequences when you do this.
We see the sin of empathy in saying that nobody
should be fired even if they show up drunk or
do whatever else. I think this sin of empathy has
(17:41):
overtaken our culture and made us a weak people and
made us a vulnerable people, and I think that is
very dangerous. Doctor Joe Rigney, I don't know how much,
if any of my examples you agree with, but I'd
be curious to know.
Speaker 7 (18:00):
I think you gave a number of very excellent examples
in which maybe I would add a few. I think
that the entire what we now call wokeness, the entire diversity,
equity inclusion complex that sort of institutionalized an American society,
basically gave us what I affectionately call the victimhood Olympics,
(18:21):
where people began to compete to see who could be
the greatest victim, because under an empathetic mindset, when an
untethered empathy mindset, the greatest victim sets the agenda for
the entire community, and everybody is expected to reorganize all
of society around them. Of course, other examples would be
things like Obergefel and the push for so called gay marriage.
(18:47):
And then now we've seen where that has led even
farther into the trans movement, which demands that people's feelings
in trump biological reality and that all of society would
They just passed a bill in Colorado which you know,
ascribes penalties for those who would misgender someone who would
not use the preferred pronouns or the name that deranged
(19:10):
individuals want to use and that they intend to use
to catechize and groom vulnerable children into castrating themselves. So those,
all of this kind of demented mentality was enabled and
empowered by this untethered empathy, and it did so, I'll
quote C. S. Lewis once again, Lewis, and this applies
on things to a number of the examples you gave
(19:32):
about progressive cities in the way that they empathy for criminals,
Trump's safety for citizens and illegal immigration. Lewis once wrote
that mercy is a similar principle. Mercy detached from justice
grows unmerciful. That it's a paradox because he says, as
(19:52):
there are certain plants which flourish only in mountain soil.
Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crane
of the rock of justice. When you transplant it to
the marsh lands of humanitarianism, it becomes a man eating weed.
And it's all the more dangerous because it's still called
by the name of the mountain variety.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
That's right.
Speaker 7 (20:14):
So, when mercy is detached from justice. Everybody says, isn't
mercy a great thing? And you want to say, of
course it does. Of course it is. The Bible teaches
mercy everywhere. God is merciful and gracious to us. But
his mercy is tethered to his justice. His mercy and
justice meet together, in fact, in the cross of Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
But if I may interject from justice, if I may interject,
the great economist and philosopher, the Scotsmen who in seventeen
seventy six wrote The Wealth of Nations, famously said, mercy
to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. So mercy
without consequences is cruelty to the innocent. And I've seen
(20:55):
that happen so many times. I love what you're talking about.
This is fantastic. When I interrupted.
Speaker 7 (21:00):
You, no, that's fine. And so Lewis's notion, though, is
that mercy, when it's detached from justice, grows unmerciful because
it becomes this man eating and destructive weed, and people
don't recognize it. Your naive neighbor thinks, oh, this is
just mercy. I'm called to be merciful. The Bible tells
me to be merciful and it does, but the biblical
mercy has hard edges. It's anchored in what is true
(21:22):
and what is good. It's anchored to God. This was
Lewis's entire point and saying, when when our passions, when
our emotions are in submission to God, when they obey God,
they're good. They help human beings to flourish. But when
we cut them off from God, when we cut them
off from reality, they become highly destructive, and we're swept
away by our passions. And one of the ironic things
I think that people don't appreciate. You'll hear people these
(21:44):
days say things like we live in such a cruel age.
There's cruelty everywhere, and they say we need more empathy,
and I actually want to argue, and I think there's
social scientists are actually bearing this out regularly, that it's
actually the most empathetic who are the most cruel. And
again Lewis was helpful for me to understand this. He
went to He again wrote that a good emotion like pity,
(22:05):
if not controlled by charity and the moral law, by
charity and justice, he says, leads through anger to cruelty.
And if you think about it, you can think about
the way that pity, say for the so called oppressed classes, leads,
by a very natural process, to a reign of terror.
You have pity for this group, and therefore you hate
they're oppressors, and their oppressors may be real oppressors, or
(22:27):
they may be so called alleged oppressors. But it's amazing
how much cruelty you can do in the name of pity, empathy,
and compassion, because your emotions are in the driver's seat.
They are the thing that is leading the way rather
than what is true and what is good and what
is right.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
I like it. I like it a great deal. How
do you think we got into this state? Do you
think people just really wanted to do the right thing
and they lost touch that the right thing is not
always the easy thing. Because I often say of parenting,
when we have to make a tough decision with our
kids and it's silly little things. You know, we have
(23:12):
to give up your phone a certain hour every night.
It's a different hour for each of the kids, and
sometimes one or the other, you know, wouldn't like it,
And my wife would say, you know it, really, I
think he feels like we don't trust him, and I
would say love. If being a good parent was easy,
everybody would do it. You're sticking to the rules. Now
he's handing over the phone, and I think that's part
of it. To me, I think that's a big part
(23:32):
of it.
Speaker 7 (23:34):
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Well for over one,
you know, pity parties are as old as dirt. I
think that Adam and Eve coming out of that garden
immediately sought to manipulate each other by pity. And anybody
who's been on the receiving end of a guilt trip
knows the temptation of the sin of empathy, where you're
tempted because someone is putting on a sad face or
pretending to be a martyr, to indulge them and coddle
(23:57):
them and refuse to call them to take responsibility for themselves.
So this is a universal human phenomena. What's different is
that in a Christian society, I think that people discovered
it was a very potent weapon to get their way,
became a very palpable tool of social manipulation, and then
it was institutionalized, I think, particularly by the left, because compassion,
(24:18):
at least in our society is a what you might
call a left coded virtue. It's one that people associate
with us. So what they did was they were able
to define a good biblical virtue but use their own definitions.
To be empathetic or compassionate to someone means that you
must affirm everything that they think, you must agree with
everything that they say. You can't question or challenge them
(24:40):
based on any moral standards. So it was an emotion
that was detached from a moral framework and in doing
and then certain groups were elevated as worthy objects of
compassion and other groups were ignored. That's one of the
other things about.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
We're going to discuss that with doctor Joe Rigney coming up,
The Sin of Empathy. We'll get to his next book
after that, Leadership and Emotional seventh.
Speaker 5 (25:04):
Michael Berryn't Change Black in the System.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
Back two Modern d.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Doctor Joe Rickney as our guest. He's Fellow of Theology
at Saint Andrew's College, pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho,
the author of eight books. We're working our way through them.
The first which caught my attention, which just came out
this year, The Sin of Empathy. If you could start back,
I'll rewind you about thirty seconds before where I had
to cut you off because you said some of those
(25:36):
are being left out. I think you're about to make
a very, very crucial point.
Speaker 7 (25:41):
Yeah. So, one of the things about untethered empathy, an
excessive empathy, is it becomes highly myopic. Certain groups are
judged to be worthy of empathy. So you can think
about the way that over the last day, ten or
fifteen years, so called apressed groups, whether it's minorities or
the LGBTQ or illegal immigrant, the compassion for them demands
(26:02):
that we reorganize society around their felt needs and desires
and agendas, whereas others who may be equally suffering can
be safely ignored. This is because empathy acts like a spotlight.
It highlights certain people rather than others, and I think
a clear example of this often shows up in our
debates about abortion. So frequently the way that abortion is
(26:27):
justified is compassion or empathy for a woman in desperate circumstances.
Maybe she's poor, uh, maybe she she's single and she's unmarried,
or maybe in the worst case scenarios, you see political
advertisements to this effect, say she was raped and therefore
she's put forward as an object of compassion and empathy.
(26:48):
And if she was raped, she absolutely is. But what
gets lost is compassion for her means that we are
now free to terminate her unplanned pregnancy, or to terminate
a fetus, which is a dehumanizing way to refer to
her unborn child. And so compassion for her means indifference
and even cruelty to her unborn child. Because our empathy
(27:11):
becomes myopic, we focus only on one person rather than
the needs of all. In fact, we frequently will focus
on the immediate feelings of the person who's hurting rather
than their long term good. And again the trans movement
provides a perfect example. I have no doubt that someone
who feels that they are in the wrong body undergoes
a lot of psychological distress, emotional distress, and I would
(27:32):
like to help them, but it does not help them.
To castrate them, or to mutilate them, or to put
them on puberty blockers. That's not the way to help.
But it's an attempt to relieve what they say is
their immediate feelings, rather than looking at their long term
good and the good of society. And so I think
these are different ways that empathy kind of narrows our focus,
(27:53):
it becomes myopic and therefore enables us to do things
that are highly highly destructive.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
So what's the answer to that? In short, what is
the answer writ large? You know, not just for I
guess it's where a collection of individuals. But how do
we change this?
Speaker 7 (28:10):
Yeah? I think one of the ways is you must
all of your emotions must become obedient. We know this
with every other emotion. Everybody knows that if you let
your anger guide you in every decision, that you're probably
going to be led into some pretty bad places. If
you let your desires, say, your sexual desires lead you,
and they lead the way, you're going to be led
(28:32):
to some pretty dark places. The same thing is true here.
Our emotions must be tethered to what is true. They
have to be on a leash, and they need to
be and I think, and I'm a Christian, I think
they need to be tethered to Christ. I think Christ
must be the anchor for all of our emotions. And
when he is, we're actually freed to use them in
the way that God intended us to use them. Our
compassion becomes in service of people's ultimate good, and therefore
(28:55):
we're able to act wisely, and to actually help relieve
the problems rather than simply make them worse by emoting
into them and so tethering our compassion, anchoring it to
what is true and what is good, having them be
governed by our reason and not let loose. That would
be the fundamental thing that all of us should do
as individuals and in our homes, as you're talking about
(29:15):
with parenting, but also that we should expect as we
form our nation's laws and seek to the good of society.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
It's interesting because it's not all butterflies and rainbows. It's
tough decisions with consequences, whether that's being a pastor of
a church or the head of household, or a parent
in the household, or a teacher or a coach. It's
not all just you know, compliments and kindness.
Speaker 7 (29:49):
There.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
There has to be reasoned, difficult decisions and conversations. And
we want it to be so easy. We want it
to I see p Rents who I think are raising
little terrors because their child can never do anything wrong,
their child is so wonderful. And then when the child
does begin acting out and finding there are guardrails in
(30:11):
society the child has. It's it's the officer's fault, it's
the teacher's fault. It's always someone else's fault because their
child is such an angel. And I think to myself,
you are setting your child up for incredible failure and
suffering by doing this. It's so easy to do. But
we talked about the sin of love, and you mentioned
(30:34):
mother love at the very beginning of the show, and
I see it by people with the best of intentions.
I see it all the time.
Speaker 7 (30:42):
That's that's absolutely right. And actually those examples you just gave,
do you know, come up quite nicely in Leadership and
Emotional Sabotage, the other book that you mentioned, Because.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Then why don't we Why don't you finish this answer
and we'll pivot to that.
Speaker 7 (30:57):
Yeah, let's let's do that. So in that book, I'm
talking about the sort of agitation and angst that we
see around us, the sense that our culture is sitting
on a powder keg, that there's this gas in the
air and somebody's gonna light a match and the whole
thing is going to blow up. And we know that
our social media amplifies this, but there seems like there's
something deeply volatile in our society, and what I argue
(31:22):
in the book is this is the result of a
failure of nerve a an abdication among leaders. And I
actually draw this back. In fact, the examples you were
using just then mirror very well the fundamental story in
the Bible in Genesis chapter three, when Adam and Eve
rebel against God. Because there's a sort of three step
process that they go through as they move from a
(31:45):
situation of paradise to being kicked out of God's sanctuary,
and it begins with abdication. Adam was charged to guard
this garden, that was the task that God gave to him,
and instead of guarding it from this serpent who is
blast his God and questioning his wife, Adam remains silent.
He's passive. He abdicates, and he lets the serpent lead
(32:07):
the way. And then when he's faced with the moment
of choice that abdication leads him to rebel, he seizes
the fruit that he was told not to eat from.
He listens to the voice of his wife who offers
it to him. He chooses her over God. This is
the Bible's term for this is idolatry. So his abdication
and passivity leads idolatry. But then when he's called to account,
(32:27):
when God comes and says, what have you done? Adam
immediately points fingers at other people. He says, the woman
that you gave me. And I think this is somewhat
comical because there are three people in existence at this point,
There's God, Adam, and Eve. And Adam's position is it's
everybody's fault but mine. But that pattern abdication to rebellion
(32:47):
to blame shifting is one that we say he played
out again and again in the scriptures, and one that
we see played out again and again in our homes,
in our institutions and our schools, in our society, and
in our churches. And so that pattern is one that
that book was written to arrest.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Very interesting. What is your writing process? Hold on, Hold
on just a moment world begins to break. Stay tuned
with me. We are talking to doctor Joe Rigney. His
latest book is The Sin of Empathy, and we're talking
now about the book of his from last year, Leadership
(33:28):
and Emotional Sabotage. We're going to go through, depending on
our time and schedule and how long it takes. Several
of these his writings came to my attention, and I've
been looking forward to this conversation, as you can imagine,
and we will continue that
Comedian Greg Warren I had never heard of before, and
I came across a bit that he did and it
appealed to me. And I have to give you a
little context. First, we had a girl on the show
a couple of years ago. She had one state in
bass fishing in Texas. I am a fan of this.
(00:25):
They are now making life skill competitions for high school kids. Look,
I like to watch high school football as much as
the next guy. But what about all the kids that
don't do that? What about shop? What about shooting? What
about fishing? What about all sorts of other things that
young people can do and compete in? Competition is healthy?
(00:47):
So we had this girl and she was a state
champion and she's a fisherman, and comedian Greg Warren asked
a very funny question that made me think back to
that interview with her. It's pretty funny.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Do you know the state of Illinois has high school fishing?
There's gotta be fishing coaches. I'm gonna guess they're similar
to the coaches I had. You boys embarrass yourselves out
there on that lake today.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Hey, he's got his hook caught in the train. Jansen
pulled a shoe out of the lake and Martin. You
couldn't catch a fish in the secret department at.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
The grocery store.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
If I was a fish, I feel safe out every lord.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
If there's a high school fishing coach somewhere out there,
there is an assistant high school fishing coach. And I
never wanted to meet somebody so bad in my life.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Gods, we're going to have a tackle box inspecting at
nine a m. And you better have all your hoops
and you better have all your lords or you're not
going to get all that fool bus.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
I can tell you that Roden Island.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
That's all I got. Coach back to you. You think
they have fishing cheerleaders.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Be be patient, be be be patient.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
So when you're scaring the.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Fish cat this crappie, swum out gass, you're outboard motors, hold.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
No gas, bang bane.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Shoot you train, come mon, angles, do that.
Speaker 5 (02:35):
Time puffy wheeling?
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Wait not blow it back? Bane, Shoot you tracks?
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Do that pad.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Since we're on the subject of sports, ESPN's Kate Fagin says,
trans kids deserve to play sports too, And I agree
they deserve to play sports. I'm all for competition. No
one is trying to stop them. They should align with
(03:12):
the sport that aligns with their I'm sorry, they should
play the sport that aligns with their biological sex. What
shouldn't happen is that men who are bigger, stronger, faster
be allowed to play against women who are biologically smaller, weaker, slower.
You ever notice you never see a girl who thinks
(03:32):
she's a man trying to compete in men's sports. Wonder
why that is? Wonder why that is?
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Well?
Speaker 6 (03:41):
Listen, being on this show has been a privilege in
a platform, and I know it's my last time on it,
and I want to say something worthy of that privilege
and platform, and that is this that trans kids deserve
to play sports. Think about what you remember from your
time playing sports, Like ninety nine percent of it is
finding that jersey for the first time and your favorite number, community,
(04:02):
joy those high fives. It's that moment when you have
a great play with a teammate. It's the feeling of belonging,
and it does not no gender and trans kids deserve
that the same as everybody else does. And Tony, this
space has on around the horn. It's been about diversity
and inclusion, lifting up new voices because sports is joy
(04:25):
and sports is humanity, and the more people who have that,
the better.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
The college basketball coach who defeated the University of Virginia
in nineteen eighty two, ranked number one at the time,
is not a household name. In fact, I bet you
most folks don't remember his name. They probably don't remember
(04:52):
the university, but basketball fans will remember the university because
it's considered it. It's been called, quote, the greatest upset
never seen, and the reason was it didn't get primetime
billing because UVA was supposed to just plow through right
(05:14):
but they didn't. The team, you can say it out
loud and impress everybody around you, was the Shamanad Silver Swords,
and they beat number one UVA. Ralph Sampson was a
seven to four big man. The tallest player for Shamanad
(05:37):
was sixty six. The Silver Swords athletic complex was called
the Shack. The athletic director at the time secured towels
for the team from yki Key Hotels. He started at
two thousand dollars a season. That was his pay. The
(06:01):
local car dealership helped out with the pay for the
coach so that they could have a coach who wouldn't
have to work other jobs and could focus on being
a basketball coach and the little engine that could. The
Shamanad Silver Swords won seventy seven seventy two. Do you
remember his name? Well, he passed away this past weekend.
(06:26):
This was an NBC nineteen NBC News nineteen eighty two
report about one of the most famous games in all
of sports history, Shamanad beating UVA. See if you can
remember it.
Speaker 5 (06:38):
Shamanad is not among the big time college ranks. The
athletic facility here a shack built more than forty years ago,
but coach MERV Lolts knows his team is now etched
in basketball history.
Speaker 4 (06:50):
The strategy was for us to go out there and
give the people who came to watch the number one
the team in the nation, you know, some good basketball
known lose. It wasn't so much our plan. Our plan
was put to go out there and uh and play
the best basketball we can. That's about it.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
It's the day after the game.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
How you feel you have you come back from the
cloud yet? Oh yeah, I feel fine. I'm happy for
the guys and happy for the program, and I'm okay.
Speaker 5 (07:17):
Shamanas Tony Randolph took a tall assignment in College Player
of the Year Ralph Samson. But two are old friends
from back home in Virginia. In fact, Randolph dated Samson's sister.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
We just play streetball the time, and you know, it
was just choking him guarding me.
Speaker 5 (07:33):
And so I think he didn't really take it seriously
in the game that I could shoot. You know, he
was sagging back.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
He was you know, let me take the nineteen foot jumper.
You know I was taking it.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Was just falling so happy.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
It was hot.
Speaker 5 (07:46):
These boosters felt confident from the start.
Speaker 7 (07:48):
I thought they had a.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Chance of being him.
Speaker 6 (07:50):
If it was going to be a UVA victory, would
be a close game.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
But I think they didn't have a chance.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
To be UVA.
Speaker 7 (07:57):
And those chances you look at a books admit them.
Speaker 5 (08:00):
Michael Berry almost god motile.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
You have often heard me say that I think the
greatest challenge in our whether you want to call them
cultural wars, cultural collapse, political environment, our country, our society,
whatever that may be, is a conversation I always have
with good, honest, decent, honorable people who play by the rules,
(08:30):
raise their kids, pay their taxes, work hard, help others,
worship at church, and some of them refuse to admit
that bad things are done by bad people. They refuse
to admit or believe that some people are like rabid
(08:50):
dogs and they're going to If they've raped once, they're
going to rape a hundred times, or they're pedophig going
to a hundred times. Or if they're a murderer, they're
a wife beater, or whatever else, if they're a financial
fraud or whatever else. I don't want to go around
believing that everyone has a dark heart. You know. I'm
somewhere between Locke and Hobbes and how all that comes down.
I am a believer. I believe everyone is a child
(09:12):
of God. I am also a protector and a sheep
dog for my family and my flock, and so I'm
mindful that we have to understand that man is imperfect,
and he sins, and he can be evil. I came
across something I found to be very interesting by a
fellow I did not know of before, by the name
of doctor Joe Rigney, and he's a fellow of theology
(09:34):
at New Saint Andrew's College and a pastor at Christ
Church in Moscow, Idaho. He's the author of eight books.
But what caught my attention is a book that he's
published this year called The Sin of Empathy. And I
saw that and I gave it a great deal of
thought because it is you've heard my theory on the
(09:56):
naive neighbor that our greatest challenge is not the people
who want to destroy our society. There have always been
those people. Our challenge is the naive neighbor who will
allow the trojan horse inside their home until it's too
late to defend it. He's also a written leadership and
emotional sabotage and more, eight books I believe in total,
(10:17):
and it seemed like a great person to have on
our show. You know, I don't do very many guests,
but when someone is offering proffering a theory or a
position or an experience that I think is interesting to me,
I share it with you. So, Joe Rigney, welcome to
the program.
Speaker 7 (10:34):
Hey, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
So let's talk about the sin of empathy. You caught
my attention. I have a naive neighbor theory that I
posit often, and I think they're probably at least some
overlap in that Venn diagram.
Speaker 7 (10:49):
Yeah, I think that's probably right. It is a provocative title,
so I'm glad it did catch your attention, and it's
getting at the idea that virtue, when they become untethered
and unbored from truth and reality and what is good,
become highly destructive. And we see this in a whole
(11:11):
host of different ways. But I think that compassion, which
is a virtue, something that modeled for us by Christ,
it's core to the Christian faith, is a really glorious virtue.
But one of the things I learned from C. S.
Lewis many years ago is that when love becomes a god,
(11:32):
meaning when a human love, a natural love, becomes a god,
it becomes a demon and it destroys everything in its path.
And Lewis of course illustrated this in a number of
ways with things like mother love. We are all familiar with.
Mother love is a good thing. But mother love can
become possessive, suffocating, It can coddle. It can rather than
(11:53):
help people grow up, it can keep them in an
infantile state. And so mother love, when it's not governed
by what is true and good and right, becomes destructive.
Lewis illustrated this in a number of different ways. What
I began to see over the last fifteen years or so,
and I was helped in this by a number of
other authors, was that compassion was undergoing the same kind
of transformation. But the difference here was that compassion people
(12:16):
often presented a new word, a sort of upgraded compassion,
which they called empathy. Empathy was supposed to be an
improvement on the old Christian virtue of sympathy or compassion,
and in the process, the way that it was described
was a sort of total immersion in the feelings and
pain and suffering of others. And the danger that I
(12:39):
saw was if you do that, if you totally immerse
yourself in the feelings and pains and sufferings of others,
you can lose touch with reality. You can get swept
off your feet. So I often use the illustration if
you see someone drowning in quicksand apathy, which is a
bad response, would just turn around and walk the other way,
much like the guy in the Good smiritan parable who
(12:59):
walks along on the other side of the road. The
proper response is to reach in with one hand and
hold on to them, and then hold on to the
shore to get a grab a branch on the other
side in order to help them get out of the pit.
But what empathy demands is you need to jump in
here with me, and now you have two people drowning, right.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Joe Rigney. I am so glad you used that example
because it is an example I don't claim, and it's
been around for a long time that I have used often,
and that I imagine of sometimes helping someone does not include
sharing their heroin addiction or sharing the little bit of
money you've saved with them so they can use it
(13:40):
on their heroin addiction. You're helping both of you drown.
I think that is such a perfect, perfect analogy, and
analogies can be so incredibly powerful. Let me take a
step back and ask you, as pastor at Christ Church
in Moscow, Idaho, and a fellow theology at the New
Saint Andrew's College, how did you get interested in this
(14:01):
particular issue because so often members of the clergy preach
that love will will handle all, love will conquer all.
Just love, love, love, and this is a very I'm
glad that you quoted C. S. Lewis, because I think
that is a next level Christian author and his theology
which appeals a great deal to me. It's a very
(14:21):
it's a very rational theology. And obviously he was such
a proficient and wonderful writer. But talk to me about
how you got into this.
Speaker 7 (14:29):
Yeah. I was teaching classes on leadership at a Christian
college and I read a book by a Jewish Rabbi
named Edwin Friedman, a book called A Failure of Nerve,
and he talked a lot of it's the basis. It's
one of the key themes in my book, Leadership and
Emotional Sabotage. I essentially plunder Freedman among others in order
(14:50):
to put them in a more Christian framework and describe
the challenges of leadership in our anxious, angsty, agitated world.
But one of the dangers that Freeman highlighted in PORTI
was the danger of empathy. And he noted this this way,
that empathy often was a disguise. It became a power
tool in the hands of the sensitive. That was his phrase,
a power tool in the hands of the sensitive. Where
(15:12):
whole communities were expected to adapt to the most reactive, immature,
and destructive members of the community. And if anyone said,
you know, I don't think this is a good idea,
I don't think that we should be caddling this right.
I think that that's an unacceptable way to behave. The
person who was having demanding responsibility was the person who
would get policed by, in your phrase, the naive neighbors.
(15:35):
The naive neighbors would actually exert the pressure on the
people attempting to draw lines and boundaries, rather than call
the person who's immature and reactive to take responsibility for themselves.
And he said that this was done under the banner
of empathy. And I read that, found it helpful. And
then it seemed to me that over the last I
don't know ten or fifteen years, American culture conspired to
(15:58):
prove Freedman's point. Hold that.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Let's get into examples. Coming up, Doctor Joe Rigney, the
sin of empathy subject, I'm quite interested.
Speaker 7 (16:10):
I'm not sure what your question was, Michael Berry.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
I lost the plot somewhere, did you did. Doctor Joe
Brisney is our guest. He is the pastor at Christ
Church in Moscow, Idaho, author of eight books. The one
that caught my attention is the sin of empathy. And
I think that we've seen that sin individually, and I
(16:38):
think we've seen it written large the idea I'm going
to say things that he might not agree with. I'm
going to offer my perspective. I'm not putting words in
his mouth. I think the sin of empathy dragged us
down the path of mass scale illegal immigration. I think
the sin of empathy dragged us into the sous sorows
(16:59):
owned district atorneys who were putting murderers back out on
the street with a recognizance bond, and they're committing more murders.
We've just seen this in Houston multiple times in the
last month. They're committing more murders while they're waiting for
the trial of their own because we don't want to
believe that people are bad. The sin of empathy a
lack of consequences, a lack of accountability. We see it
(17:21):
in parenting, where you see parents that cannot tell their
child no, parents that cannot say you can't do this,
or there are going to be consequences when you do this.
We see the sin of empathy in saying that nobody
should be fired even if they show up drunk or
do whatever else. I think this sin of empathy has
(17:41):
overtaken our culture and made us a weak people and
made us a vulnerable people, and I think that is
very dangerous. Doctor Joe Rigney, I don't know how much,
if any of my examples you agree with, but I'd
be curious to know.
Speaker 7 (18:00):
I think you gave a number of very excellent examples
in which maybe I would add a few. I think
that the entire what we now call wokeness, the entire diversity,
equity inclusion complex that sort of institutionalized an American society,
basically gave us what I affectionately call the victimhood Olympics,
(18:21):
where people began to compete to see who could be
the greatest victim, because under an empathetic mindset, when an
untethered empathy mindset, the greatest victim sets the agenda for
the entire community, and everybody is expected to reorganize all
of society around them. Of course, other examples would be
things like Obergefel and the push for so called gay marriage.
(18:47):
And then now we've seen where that has led even
farther into the trans movement, which demands that people's feelings
in trump biological reality and that all of society would
They just passed a bill in Colorado which you know,
ascribes penalties for those who would misgender someone who would
not use the preferred pronouns or the name that deranged
(19:10):
individuals want to use and that they intend to use
to catechize and groom vulnerable children into castrating themselves. So those,
all of this kind of demented mentality was enabled and
empowered by this untethered empathy, and it did so, I'll
quote C. S. Lewis once again, Lewis, and this applies
on things to a number of the examples you gave
(19:32):
about progressive cities in the way that they empathy for criminals,
Trump's safety for citizens and illegal immigration. Lewis once wrote
that mercy is a similar principle. Mercy detached from justice
grows unmerciful. That it's a paradox because he says, as
(19:52):
there are certain plants which flourish only in mountain soil.
Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crane
of the rock of justice. When you transplant it to
the marsh lands of humanitarianism, it becomes a man eating weed.
And it's all the more dangerous because it's still called
by the name of the mountain variety.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
That's right.
Speaker 7 (20:14):
So, when mercy is detached from justice. Everybody says, isn't
mercy a great thing? And you want to say, of
course it does. Of course it is. The Bible teaches
mercy everywhere. God is merciful and gracious to us. But
his mercy is tethered to his justice. His mercy and
justice meet together, in fact, in the cross of Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
But if I may interject from justice, if I may interject,
the great economist and philosopher, the Scotsmen who in seventeen
seventy six wrote The Wealth of Nations, famously said, mercy
to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. So mercy
without consequences is cruelty to the innocent. And I've seen
(20:55):
that happen so many times. I love what you're talking about.
This is fantastic. When I interrupted.
Speaker 7 (21:00):
You, no, that's fine. And so Lewis's notion, though, is
that mercy, when it's detached from justice, grows unmerciful because
it becomes this man eating and destructive weed, and people
don't recognize it. Your naive neighbor thinks, oh, this is
just mercy. I'm called to be merciful. The Bible tells
me to be merciful and it does, but the biblical
mercy has hard edges. It's anchored in what is true
(21:22):
and what is good. It's anchored to God. This was
Lewis's entire point and saying, when when our passions, when
our emotions are in submission to God, when they obey God,
they're good. They help human beings to flourish. But when
we cut them off from God, when we cut them
off from reality, they become highly destructive, and we're swept
away by our passions. And one of the ironic things
I think that people don't appreciate. You'll hear people these
(21:44):
days say things like we live in such a cruel age.
There's cruelty everywhere, and they say we need more empathy,
and I actually want to argue, and I think there's
social scientists are actually bearing this out regularly, that it's
actually the most empathetic who are the most cruel. And
again Lewis was helpful for me to understand this. He
went to He again wrote that a good emotion like pity,
(22:05):
if not controlled by charity and the moral law, by
charity and justice, he says, leads through anger to cruelty.
And if you think about it, you can think about
the way that pity, say for the so called oppressed classes, leads,
by a very natural process, to a reign of terror.
You have pity for this group, and therefore you hate
they're oppressors, and their oppressors may be real oppressors, or
(22:27):
they may be so called alleged oppressors. But it's amazing
how much cruelty you can do in the name of pity, empathy,
and compassion, because your emotions are in the driver's seat.
They are the thing that is leading the way rather
than what is true and what is good and what
is right.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
I like it. I like it a great deal. How
do you think we got into this state? Do you
think people just really wanted to do the right thing
and they lost touch that the right thing is not
always the easy thing. Because I often say of parenting,
when we have to make a tough decision with our
kids and it's silly little things. You know, we have
(23:12):
to give up your phone a certain hour every night.
It's a different hour for each of the kids, and
sometimes one or the other, you know, wouldn't like it,
And my wife would say, you know it, really, I
think he feels like we don't trust him, and I
would say love. If being a good parent was easy,
everybody would do it. You're sticking to the rules. Now
he's handing over the phone, and I think that's part
of it. To me, I think that's a big part
(23:32):
of it.
Speaker 7 (23:34):
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Well for over one,
you know, pity parties are as old as dirt. I
think that Adam and Eve coming out of that garden
immediately sought to manipulate each other by pity. And anybody
who's been on the receiving end of a guilt trip
knows the temptation of the sin of empathy, where you're
tempted because someone is putting on a sad face or
pretending to be a martyr, to indulge them and coddle
(23:57):
them and refuse to call them to take responsibility for themselves.
So this is a universal human phenomena. What's different is
that in a Christian society, I think that people discovered
it was a very potent weapon to get their way,
became a very palpable tool of social manipulation, and then
it was institutionalized, I think, particularly by the left, because compassion,
(24:18):
at least in our society is a what you might
call a left coded virtue. It's one that people associate
with us. So what they did was they were able
to define a good biblical virtue but use their own definitions.
To be empathetic or compassionate to someone means that you
must affirm everything that they think, you must agree with
everything that they say. You can't question or challenge them
(24:40):
based on any moral standards. So it was an emotion
that was detached from a moral framework and in doing
and then certain groups were elevated as worthy objects of
compassion and other groups were ignored. That's one of the
other things about.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
We're going to discuss that with doctor Joe Rigney coming up,
The Sin of Empathy. We'll get to his next book
after that, Leadership and Emotional seventh.
Speaker 5 (25:04):
Michael Berryn't Change Black in the System.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
Back two Modern d.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Doctor Joe Rickney as our guest. He's Fellow of Theology
at Saint Andrew's College, pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho,
the author of eight books. We're working our way through them.
The first which caught my attention, which just came out
this year, The Sin of Empathy. If you could start back,
I'll rewind you about thirty seconds before where I had
to cut you off because you said some of those
(25:36):
are being left out. I think you're about to make
a very, very crucial point.
Speaker 7 (25:41):
Yeah. So, one of the things about untethered empathy, an
excessive empathy, is it becomes highly myopic. Certain groups are
judged to be worthy of empathy. So you can think
about the way that over the last day, ten or
fifteen years, so called apressed groups, whether it's minorities or
the LGBTQ or illegal immigrant, the compassion for them demands
(26:02):
that we reorganize society around their felt needs and desires
and agendas, whereas others who may be equally suffering can
be safely ignored. This is because empathy acts like a spotlight.
It highlights certain people rather than others, and I think
a clear example of this often shows up in our
debates about abortion. So frequently the way that abortion is
(26:27):
justified is compassion or empathy for a woman in desperate circumstances.
Maybe she's poor, uh, maybe she she's single and she's unmarried,
or maybe in the worst case scenarios, you see political
advertisements to this effect, say she was raped and therefore
she's put forward as an object of compassion and empathy.
(26:48):
And if she was raped, she absolutely is. But what
gets lost is compassion for her means that we are
now free to terminate her unplanned pregnancy, or to terminate
a fetus, which is a dehumanizing way to refer to
her unborn child. And so compassion for her means indifference
and even cruelty to her unborn child. Because our empathy
(27:11):
becomes myopic, we focus only on one person rather than
the needs of all. In fact, we frequently will focus
on the immediate feelings of the person who's hurting rather
than their long term good. And again the trans movement
provides a perfect example. I have no doubt that someone
who feels that they are in the wrong body undergoes
a lot of psychological distress, emotional distress, and I would
(27:32):
like to help them, but it does not help them.
To castrate them, or to mutilate them, or to put
them on puberty blockers. That's not the way to help.
But it's an attempt to relieve what they say is
their immediate feelings, rather than looking at their long term
good and the good of society. And so I think
these are different ways that empathy kind of narrows our focus,
(27:53):
it becomes myopic and therefore enables us to do things
that are highly highly destructive.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
So what's the answer to that? In short, what is
the answer writ large? You know, not just for I
guess it's where a collection of individuals. But how do
we change this?
Speaker 7 (28:10):
Yeah? I think one of the ways is you must
all of your emotions must become obedient. We know this
with every other emotion. Everybody knows that if you let
your anger guide you in every decision, that you're probably
going to be led into some pretty bad places. If
you let your desires, say, your sexual desires lead you,
and they lead the way, you're going to be led
(28:32):
to some pretty dark places. The same thing is true here.
Our emotions must be tethered to what is true. They
have to be on a leash, and they need to
be and I think, and I'm a Christian, I think
they need to be tethered to Christ. I think Christ
must be the anchor for all of our emotions. And
when he is, we're actually freed to use them in
the way that God intended us to use them. Our
compassion becomes in service of people's ultimate good, and therefore
(28:55):
we're able to act wisely, and to actually help relieve
the problems rather than simply make them worse by emoting
into them and so tethering our compassion, anchoring it to
what is true and what is good, having them be
governed by our reason and not let loose. That would
be the fundamental thing that all of us should do
as individuals and in our homes, as you're talking about
(29:15):
with parenting, but also that we should expect as we
form our nation's laws and seek to the good of society.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
It's interesting because it's not all butterflies and rainbows. It's
tough decisions with consequences, whether that's being a pastor of
a church or the head of household, or a parent
in the household, or a teacher or a coach. It's
not all just you know, compliments and kindness.
Speaker 7 (29:49):
There.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
There has to be reasoned, difficult decisions and conversations. And
we want it to be so easy. We want it
to I see p Rents who I think are raising
little terrors because their child can never do anything wrong,
their child is so wonderful. And then when the child
does begin acting out and finding there are guardrails in
(30:11):
society the child has. It's it's the officer's fault, it's
the teacher's fault. It's always someone else's fault because their
child is such an angel. And I think to myself,
you are setting your child up for incredible failure and
suffering by doing this. It's so easy to do. But
we talked about the sin of love, and you mentioned
(30:34):
mother love at the very beginning of the show, and
I see it by people with the best of intentions.
I see it all the time.
Speaker 7 (30:42):
That's that's absolutely right. And actually those examples you just gave,
do you know, come up quite nicely in Leadership and
Emotional Sabotage, the other book that you mentioned, Because.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Then why don't we Why don't you finish this answer
and we'll pivot to that.
Speaker 7 (30:57):
Yeah, let's let's do that. So in that book, I'm
talking about the sort of agitation and angst that we
see around us, the sense that our culture is sitting
on a powder keg, that there's this gas in the
air and somebody's gonna light a match and the whole
thing is going to blow up. And we know that
our social media amplifies this, but there seems like there's
something deeply volatile in our society, and what I argue
(31:22):
in the book is this is the result of a
failure of nerve a an abdication among leaders. And I
actually draw this back. In fact, the examples you were
using just then mirror very well the fundamental story in
the Bible in Genesis chapter three, when Adam and Eve
rebel against God. Because there's a sort of three step
process that they go through as they move from a
(31:45):
situation of paradise to being kicked out of God's sanctuary,
and it begins with abdication. Adam was charged to guard
this garden, that was the task that God gave to him,
and instead of guarding it from this serpent who is
blast his God and questioning his wife, Adam remains silent.
He's passive. He abdicates, and he lets the serpent lead
(32:07):
the way. And then when he's faced with the moment
of choice that abdication leads him to rebel, he seizes
the fruit that he was told not to eat from.
He listens to the voice of his wife who offers
it to him. He chooses her over God. This is
the Bible's term for this is idolatry. So his abdication
and passivity leads idolatry. But then when he's called to account,
(32:27):
when God comes and says, what have you done? Adam
immediately points fingers at other people. He says, the woman
that you gave me. And I think this is somewhat
comical because there are three people in existence at this point,
There's God, Adam, and Eve. And Adam's position is it's
everybody's fault but mine. But that pattern abdication to rebellion
(32:47):
to blame shifting is one that we say he played
out again and again in the scriptures, and one that
we see played out again and again in our homes,
in our institutions and our schools, in our society, and
in our churches. And so that pattern is one that
that book was written to arrest.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Very interesting. What is your writing process? Hold on, Hold
on just a moment world begins to break. Stay tuned
with me. We are talking to doctor Joe Rigney. His
latest book is The Sin of Empathy, and we're talking
now about the book of his from last year, Leadership
(33:28):
and Emotional Sabotage. We're going to go through, depending on
our time and schedule and how long it takes. Several
of these his writings came to my attention, and I've
been looking forward to this conversation, as you can imagine,
and we will continue that
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