May 15, 2025 • 34 mins
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's that time, time, time, time, luck and load. The
Michael Verie Show is on the air.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Before we begin, I'd like to do something important. I'd
like to acknowledge the land that were gathered on and
the first peoples who have gathered on this land, who
were and still are the stewards of this land.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
This country is going straight to hell.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
America is infected with a disease, and that disease is
called racism. It often is utilized to support economic benefits
of corporations, the economic benefits of those who used such
divisions in order for their personal profit. This country has
had a longstanding labor practice that is despicable at best,
(00:57):
and so the idea of make America great again, we
don't see a country that has gone wrong, in my opinion,
we see a country that has never been right.
Speaker 5 (01:04):
When they're running down my countryman, they're walking on the
fight side, be y'll walk in on the fighting side
of running down, we're life by fighting a duskey?
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Did you don't love to de leaded?
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Let this song I'm.
Speaker 5 (01:28):
Singing be morning? Did you running down my countryman?
Speaker 6 (01:34):
You walk in on the fighting.
Speaker 7 (01:36):
Side, be.
Speaker 8 (01:52):
You can't can't get your fast USA.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
I'm marry up you.
Speaker 8 (01:58):
You try it, you can't get get you fast as USA.
I'll say one more time, I let it up you.
You can't can't get you fast as the USA.
Speaker 5 (02:11):
I never running down my co host walking on this
fight inside, they.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Walking off my inside, me.
Speaker 5 (02:25):
Running down were lined by fighting. The cart dot.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Today is peace of love. It Memorial Today song, which
is why I came up early to Washington, d C.
Or the honor bestowed upon my brother. Peace Officers Memorial
Day is to honor with a national wall of honor
(02:53):
officers who have died or were disabled in the line
of duty. My brother was so classified on January twenty fifth,
twenty twenty two, a day I will never forget when
his chief called me to tell me about my brother
(03:13):
had died, and it was an incredible honor to be
invited to be here today. There are several reasons I'm
in Washington, d C. But that was one of those
reasons that I chose today that I came up. This
is a good opportunity to thank the men and women
(03:37):
who wear the uniform to protect our communities. It's also
a good opportunity to thank their families who live in
fear that they'll be harmed, who pray for them, who
share them with us day in and day out. It's rough.
It's rough on the families, very rough on the family.
(04:00):
Harvey perhaps the greatest storyteller in radio history. So good,
so good, such a master at storytelling. He wrote his
own stuff. His delivery is execution flawless, incredible, unique, special, effective.
(04:20):
He would talk about the farmer, you talk about if
I were the devil. But a particularly powerful piece that
he delivered was about the police officer. And you may
not know, but Paul Harvey was only three years old
(04:42):
when his father, a Tulsa police officer, was murdered. A
lynch mob of over one thousand men surrounded the jail
where the murderers were being held. They were smoke willed
out to prevent the jail being burned to the ground,
(05:04):
so that their lives could be ended. Perhaps a little justice.
So of all of Paul Harvey's storytelling, tribute the pain
to his father, who he scarcely remembered because, as I said,
he was only three years old. The tribute to his
(05:26):
father as a policeman. I think there's just a little
something in his voice paying tribute to police officers is
just a little something in his voice that was special.
A policeman is a composite of what all men are.
Speaker 6 (05:43):
I guess, a mingling of Satan, center, dust, and deity
called statistics waved the fan over stinkers underscore instances of
dishonesty and brutality because they are news.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
What that really means is that they are exceptional.
Speaker 6 (05:58):
They are unusual, They are not common place buried under
the fraud is the fact, and the fact is the
less than one half of one percent of policemen mispit
that uniform, and that is a better average than you'd
find among clergymen. What is a policeman? He, of all men,
is at once the most needed and the most wanted,
(06:20):
a strangely nameless creature who is served to his face
and pig or worse behind his back. He must be
such a diplomat that he can settle differences between individuals
so that each will think he won. But if a
policeman is neat, he's conceited. If he's careless, he's a bum.
If he's pleasant, he's a flirt. If he's not, he's
a grouch. He must make instant decisions which would require
(06:42):
months for a lawyer. But if he hurries, he's careless.
If he's delivered, he's lazy. He must be first to
an accident, infallible with a diagnosis. He must be able
to start breathing, stop bleeding, tye splints, and above all,
be sure the victim goes home without a limp or
expect to be sued. The police officer must know every
(07:02):
gun draw on the run and hit where it doesn't hurt.
He must be able to whip two men twice his
size and half his age without damaging his uniform and
without being brutal. If you hit him, he's a coward.
If he hits you, he's a bully. A policeman must
know everything and not tell. He must know where all
of the sin is and not partake. The policeman from
(07:26):
a single human hair must be able to describe the crime,
the webman, the criminal and tell you where the criminal
is hiding. But if he catches the criminal, he's lucky.
If he doesn't, he's a dunce. If he gets promoted,
he has a political poll. If he doesn't, he's a dullard.
The policeman must chase bum leads to a dead end
stake out ten nights to tag one witness who saw
(07:49):
it happen, but refuses to remember. He runs files and
writes reports until his eyes ache. To build a case
against some felon who will get dealed out by a shameless,
shamous or an honorable who isn't honorable. The policeman must
be a minister, a social worker, a diplomat, a tough guy,
(08:09):
and a gentleman. And of course he'll have to be
a genius because he'll have to feed a family on
a policeman's salary.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
You have that, allow me to introduce myself.
Speaker 6 (08:24):
My name is Mitta michael Berry, genius.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
You have often heard me say that I think the
greatest challenge in our whether you want to call them
cultural wars, a cultural collapse, political environment, our country, or society,
whatever that may be, is a conversation I always have
with good, honest, decent, honorable people who play by the rules,
(08:51):
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
(09:11):
dogs and they're going to if they've raped once, they're
going to rape a hundred times, or they're a pedophig
going to do one 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 Hobbs and how all that
comes down. I am a believer. I believe everyone is
(09:32):
a child 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
(09:55):
of theology 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
(10:16):
on the 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
(10:36):
in total. 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. Hey, thanks for having me. So
let's talk about the sin of empathy. You caught my attention.
(11:00):
Have a naive neighbor theory that I pause it often,
and I think they're probably at least some overlap in
that Venn diagram.
Speaker 7 (11:10):
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 it the idea that virtues when they become untethered
and unmoored from truth and reality and what is good
become highly destructive. And we see this in a whole
(11:32):
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,
(11:52):
meaning when a human love, a natural love, becomes a god,
it becomes a demon and it destroys everything and it's
and Lewis of course illustrated this in a number of
ways with things like mother love. We're all familiar with.
Other love is a good thing, but mother love can
become possessive, suffocating, it can caudle, It can rather than
(12:14):
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 to 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
(12:37):
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
(12:59):
saw was if you do that, if you totally immerse
yourself with the feelings and pains and sufferings of others,
you can lose touch with reality.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
You can get swept off your feet.
Speaker 7 (13:09):
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 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 you know, grab a branch on the other
(13:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
Right 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
(13:58):
of money you've saved with them so they can use
it 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
at Moscow, Idaho, and a fellow theology at the New
Saint Andrew's College, how did you get interested in this
(14:21):
particular issue because so often members of the clergy preach
that love 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 it's a very rational theology, and obviously he was
(14:44):
such a proficient and wonderful writer. But talk to me
about how you got into this.
Speaker 7 (14:50):
Yeah, I was teaching classes on leadership at a Christian
college and I read a book by Jewish rabbi named
Edwin Friedman, 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 Freedment among others in order to put
(15:10):
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 particular was the
danger of empathy. And he noted this this way, that
empathy often was a disguise. They became the power tool
in the hands of the sensitive. That was his phrase,
a power tool in the hands of the sensitive, where
(15:32):
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.
(15:55):
The naive neighbors would actually exert the pressure on the
people attempting to draw a line 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
(16:18):
to prove.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Treatment's point hold the witness died. Now let's get into examples.
Coming up Joe Rigney, the Sin of empathy subject. I'm
quite impress. I'm not sure what your question was the
Michael Berrish I lost the plot somewhere, did you did?
(16:40):
And doctor Joe Gigney is I guess. 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 think we've seen it written large. I'm going to
(17:00):
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 Soros owned district
attorneys who were putting murderers back out on the street
(17:22):
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 in parenting, where
(17:42):
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 overtaken our culture
(18:02):
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.
Speaker 7 (18:16):
Though, yes, 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
in an American society basically gave us what I affectionately
(18:38):
call the victimhod Olympics, 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,
(18:59):
other example would be things like Obergefel and the push
for so called gay marriage. And then now we've seen
where that has led even farther into the trans movement,
which demands that people's feelings can trump biological reality and
that all of society, which they just passed the bill
in Colorado which you know, ascribes penalties for those who
(19:24):
would mis gender someone who not use the preferred pronouns
or the name uh that deranged 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.
(19:46):
Lewis once again. Lewis, and this applies on things to
a number of the examples you gave about progressive cities
in the way that they empathy for criminals, Trump's safety
for citizens and illegal immigration. Lewis once wrote that mercy,
this is a similar principle. Mercy detached from justice grows unmerciful.
(20:09):
It's a paradox because he says, as there are certain
plants which flourish only in mountain soil. Mercy will flower
only when it grows in the crannies of the rock
of justice. When you transplant it to the marshlands of humanitarianism,
it becomes a man eating weed. And it's all the
more dangerous because it's still called by the name of
(20:31):
the mountain variety.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
That's right.
Speaker 7 (20:33):
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 3 (20:50):
But if I may interject from justice, yeah, 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
(21:14):
seen that happen so many times. I love what you're
talking about. This is fantastic. Keep going, I interrupted you.
Speaker 7 (21:21):
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 that. Your naive neighbor think, oh, this.
Speaker 6 (21:33):
Is just mercy.
Speaker 7 (21:34):
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 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,
(21:57):
they become highly destructive. And we're swept away by our
pass And one of the ironic things I think that
people don't appreciate. You'll hear people these 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 other social scientists
are actually bearing this out regularly, that it's actually the
most empathetic who are the most cruel. And again Lewis
(22:19):
was helpful for me to understand this. He went to
He again wrote that a good emotion like pity, 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.
(22:41):
You have pity for this group, and therefore you hate
their oppressors. And their oppressors may be real oppressors, or
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
(23:02):
than what is true and what is good and what
is right.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
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
(23:30):
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.
Speaker 7 (23:49):
To me.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
I think that's a big part of it.
Speaker 7 (23:53):
Yeah, I think that's acolutely 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
(24:15):
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,
(24:37):
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
(24:59):
based on any more world standards. So it was an
emotion that was detached from the moral framework and in doing,
and then certain groups were elevated as worthy objects of
the passion and other groups were ignored. That's one of
the other things about.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Hold right there. We're gonna we're gonna discuss that with
doctor Joe Rigney coming up The Sin of Empathy, and
we'll get to his next book after that, Leadership and
Emotional Sabotage. Michael very glad from the system Lack of
two Modern Robin Rigney is our guest. He's Fellow of
(25:35):
Theology at New Saint Andrew's College, pastor at Christ Church
in Moscow, Idaho, the author of eight books. We were
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 are being left out. I
think you're about to make a very very crucial point.
Speaker 7 (25:59):
Yeah. So, one of the things about untethered empathy, when
it's 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 daye
ten or fifteen years, so called oppressed groups, whether it's
minorities or the LGBTQ or illegal immigrants, compassion for them
(26:20):
demands that we reorganize society around their felt needs and
desires and agendas, whereas others who may be equally suffering
can be safely ignored. 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
(26:45):
justified is compassion or empathy for a woman in desperate circumstances.
Maybe she's poor, maybe she's single and she's unmarried, or
maybe in the worst case scenarios, you see political advertised
to this effect. Say she was raped, and therefore she's
put forward as an object of compassion and empathy. And
(27:06):
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
(27:27):
to her unborn child. Because our empathy 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,
(27:48):
emotional distress, and I would 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
rely 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
(28:09):
kind of narrows our focus. It becomes myopic, and therefore
enables us to do things that are highly highly destructive.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
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? Yeah?
Speaker 7 (28:28):
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 to
(28:49):
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 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 we're
(29:13):
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 with parenting,
(29:34):
but also that we should expect as we form our
nation's laws and seek to the good of society.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
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 a household, or a teacher or a coach. It's
not all just you know, compliments and kindness. There has
(30:08):
to be reasoned, difficult decisions and conversations. And we want
it to be so easy. We want it to I
see parents 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 society the child has,
(30:31):
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 mother love at the very
(30:52):
beginning of the show, and I see it by people
with the best of intentions. I see it all the time.
That's that's the right.
Speaker 7 (31:01):
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 3 (31:11):
Don't you finished this answered, we'll pivot to that. Yeah,
let's let's do that.
Speaker 7 (31:16):
So in that book, I'm talking about the sort of
agitation and angst that we see around us, the sense
that 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.
(31:38):
And what I argue in the book, this is the
result of a failure of nerve, a an abdication among leaders.
And I actually draw this back in fact, then 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
(32:02):
move from a 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 blaspheming his God and questioning his wife,
Adam remains silent.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
He's passive.
Speaker 7 (32:21):
He abdicates, and he lets the serpent lead 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 Bible's term for this
is idolatry. So his abdication and passivity leads idolatry. But
(32:43):
then when he's called to account, 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 is fault
but mine. But that pattern abdication to rebellion, to blame
(33:05):
shifting is one that we say we see 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 3 (33:23):
Very interesting. What is your writing process? Hold on, Hold
on just a moment. We're up against a 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,
(33:44):
Leadership 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
It's that time, time, time, time, luck and load. The
Michael Verie Show is on the air.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Before we begin, I'd like to do something important. I'd
like to acknowledge the land that were gathered on and
the first peoples who have gathered on this land, who
were and still are the stewards of this land.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
This country is going straight to hell.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
America is infected with a disease, and that disease is
called racism. It often is utilized to support economic benefits
of corporations, the economic benefits of those who used such
divisions in order for their personal profit. This country has
had a longstanding labor practice that is despicable at best,
(00:57):
and so the idea of make America great again, we
don't see a country that has gone wrong, in my opinion,
we see a country that has never been right.
Speaker 5 (01:04):
When they're running down my countryman, they're walking on the
fight side, be y'll walk in on the fighting side
of running down, we're life by fighting a duskey?
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Did you don't love to de leaded?
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Let this song I'm.
Speaker 5 (01:28):
Singing be morning? Did you running down my countryman?
Speaker 6 (01:34):
You walk in on the fighting.
Speaker 7 (01:36):
Side, be.
Speaker 8 (01:52):
You can't can't get your fast USA.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
I'm marry up you.
Speaker 8 (01:58):
You try it, you can't get get you fast as USA.
I'll say one more time, I let it up you.
You can't can't get you fast as the USA.
Speaker 5 (02:11):
I never running down my co host walking on this
fight inside, they.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Walking off my inside, me.
Speaker 5 (02:25):
Running down were lined by fighting. The cart dot.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Today is peace of love. It Memorial Today song, which
is why I came up early to Washington, d C.
Or the honor bestowed upon my brother. Peace Officers Memorial
Day is to honor with a national wall of honor
(02:53):
officers who have died or were disabled in the line
of duty. My brother was so classified on January twenty fifth,
twenty twenty two, a day I will never forget when
his chief called me to tell me about my brother
(03:13):
had died, and it was an incredible honor to be
invited to be here today. There are several reasons I'm
in Washington, d C. But that was one of those
reasons that I chose today that I came up. This
is a good opportunity to thank the men and women
(03:37):
who wear the uniform to protect our communities. It's also
a good opportunity to thank their families who live in
fear that they'll be harmed, who pray for them, who
share them with us day in and day out. It's rough.
It's rough on the families, very rough on the family.
(04:00):
Harvey perhaps the greatest storyteller in radio history. So good,
so good, such a master at storytelling. He wrote his
own stuff. His delivery is execution flawless, incredible, unique, special, effective.
(04:20):
He would talk about the farmer, you talk about if
I were the devil. But a particularly powerful piece that
he delivered was about the police officer. And you may
not know, but Paul Harvey was only three years old
(04:42):
when his father, a Tulsa police officer, was murdered. A
lynch mob of over one thousand men surrounded the jail
where the murderers were being held. They were smoke willed
out to prevent the jail being burned to the ground,
(05:04):
so that their lives could be ended. Perhaps a little justice.
So of all of Paul Harvey's storytelling, tribute the pain
to his father, who he scarcely remembered because, as I said,
he was only three years old. The tribute to his
(05:26):
father as a policeman. I think there's just a little
something in his voice paying tribute to police officers is
just a little something in his voice that was special.
A policeman is a composite of what all men are.
Speaker 6 (05:43):
I guess, a mingling of Satan, center, dust, and deity
called statistics waved the fan over stinkers underscore instances of
dishonesty and brutality because they are news.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
What that really means is that they are exceptional.
Speaker 6 (05:58):
They are unusual, They are not common place buried under
the fraud is the fact, and the fact is the
less than one half of one percent of policemen mispit
that uniform, and that is a better average than you'd
find among clergymen. What is a policeman? He, of all men,
is at once the most needed and the most wanted,
(06:20):
a strangely nameless creature who is served to his face
and pig or worse behind his back. He must be
such a diplomat that he can settle differences between individuals
so that each will think he won. But if a
policeman is neat, he's conceited. If he's careless, he's a bum.
If he's pleasant, he's a flirt. If he's not, he's
a grouch. He must make instant decisions which would require
(06:42):
months for a lawyer. But if he hurries, he's careless.
If he's delivered, he's lazy. He must be first to
an accident, infallible with a diagnosis. He must be able
to start breathing, stop bleeding, tye splints, and above all,
be sure the victim goes home without a limp or
expect to be sued. The police officer must know every
(07:02):
gun draw on the run and hit where it doesn't hurt.
He must be able to whip two men twice his
size and half his age without damaging his uniform and
without being brutal. If you hit him, he's a coward.
If he hits you, he's a bully. A policeman must
know everything and not tell. He must know where all
of the sin is and not partake. The policeman from
(07:26):
a single human hair must be able to describe the crime,
the webman, the criminal and tell you where the criminal
is hiding. But if he catches the criminal, he's lucky.
If he doesn't, he's a dunce. If he gets promoted,
he has a political poll. If he doesn't, he's a dullard.
The policeman must chase bum leads to a dead end
stake out ten nights to tag one witness who saw
(07:49):
it happen, but refuses to remember. He runs files and
writes reports until his eyes ache. To build a case
against some felon who will get dealed out by a shameless,
shamous or an honorable who isn't honorable. The policeman must
be a minister, a social worker, a diplomat, a tough guy,
(08:09):
and a gentleman. And of course he'll have to be
a genius because he'll have to feed a family on
a policeman's salary.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
You have that, allow me to introduce myself.
Speaker 6 (08:24):
My name is Mitta michael Berry, genius.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
You have often heard me say that I think the
greatest challenge in our whether you want to call them
cultural wars, a cultural collapse, political environment, our country, or society,
whatever that may be, is a conversation I always have
with good, honest, decent, honorable people who play by the rules,
(08:51):
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
(09:11):
dogs and they're going to if they've raped once, they're
going to rape a hundred times, or they're a pedophig
going to do one 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 Hobbs and how all that
comes down. I am a believer. I believe everyone is
(09:32):
a child 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
(09:55):
of theology 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
(10:16):
on the 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
(10:36):
in total. 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. Hey, thanks for having me. So
let's talk about the sin of empathy. You caught my attention.
(11:00):
Have a naive neighbor theory that I pause it often,
and I think they're probably at least some overlap in
that Venn diagram.
Speaker 7 (11:10):
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 it the idea that virtues when they become untethered
and unmoored from truth and reality and what is good
become highly destructive. And we see this in a whole
(11:32):
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,
(11:52):
meaning when a human love, a natural love, becomes a god,
it becomes a demon and it destroys everything and it's
and Lewis of course illustrated this in a number of
ways with things like mother love. We're all familiar with.
Other love is a good thing, but mother love can
become possessive, suffocating, it can caudle, It can rather than
(12:14):
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 to 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
(12:37):
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
(12:59):
saw was if you do that, if you totally immerse
yourself with the feelings and pains and sufferings of others,
you can lose touch with reality.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
You can get swept off your feet.
Speaker 7 (13:09):
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 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 you know, grab a branch on the other
(13:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
Right 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
(13:58):
of money you've saved with them so they can use
it 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
at Moscow, Idaho, and a fellow theology at the New
Saint Andrew's College, how did you get interested in this
(14:21):
particular issue because so often members of the clergy preach
that love 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 it's a very rational theology, and obviously he was
(14:44):
such a proficient and wonderful writer. But talk to me
about how you got into this.
Speaker 7 (14:50):
Yeah, I was teaching classes on leadership at a Christian
college and I read a book by Jewish rabbi named
Edwin Friedman, 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 Freedment among others in order to put
(15:10):
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 particular was the
danger of empathy. And he noted this this way, that
empathy often was a disguise. They became the power tool
in the hands of the sensitive. That was his phrase,
a power tool in the hands of the sensitive, where
(15:32):
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.
(15:55):
The naive neighbors would actually exert the pressure on the
people attempting to draw a line 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
(16:18):
to prove.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Treatment's point hold the witness died. Now let's get into examples.
Coming up Joe Rigney, the Sin of empathy subject. I'm
quite impress. I'm not sure what your question was the
Michael Berrish I lost the plot somewhere, did you did?
(16:40):
And doctor Joe Gigney is I guess. 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 think we've seen it written large. I'm going to
(17:00):
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 Soros owned district
attorneys who were putting murderers back out on the street
(17:22):
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 in parenting, where
(17:42):
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 overtaken our culture
(18:02):
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.
Speaker 7 (18:16):
Though, yes, 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
in an American society basically gave us what I affectionately
(18:38):
call the victimhod Olympics, 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,
(18:59):
other example would be things like Obergefel and the push
for so called gay marriage. And then now we've seen
where that has led even farther into the trans movement,
which demands that people's feelings can trump biological reality and
that all of society, which they just passed the bill
in Colorado which you know, ascribes penalties for those who
(19:24):
would mis gender someone who not use the preferred pronouns
or the name uh that deranged 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.
(19:46):
Lewis once again. Lewis, and this applies on things to
a number of the examples you gave about progressive cities
in the way that they empathy for criminals, Trump's safety
for citizens and illegal immigration. Lewis once wrote that mercy,
this is a similar principle. Mercy detached from justice grows unmerciful.
(20:09):
It's a paradox because he says, as there are certain
plants which flourish only in mountain soil. Mercy will flower
only when it grows in the crannies of the rock
of justice. When you transplant it to the marshlands of humanitarianism,
it becomes a man eating weed. And it's all the
more dangerous because it's still called by the name of
(20:31):
the mountain variety.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
That's right.
Speaker 7 (20:33):
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 3 (20:50):
But if I may interject from justice, yeah, 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
(21:14):
seen that happen so many times. I love what you're
talking about. This is fantastic. Keep going, I interrupted you.
Speaker 7 (21:21):
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 that. Your naive neighbor think, oh, this.
Speaker 6 (21:33):
Is just mercy.
Speaker 7 (21:34):
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 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,
(21:57):
they become highly destructive. And we're swept away by our
pass And one of the ironic things I think that
people don't appreciate. You'll hear people these 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 other social scientists
are actually bearing this out regularly, that it's actually the
most empathetic who are the most cruel. And again Lewis
(22:19):
was helpful for me to understand this. He went to
He again wrote that a good emotion like pity, 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.
(22:41):
You have pity for this group, and therefore you hate
their oppressors. And their oppressors may be real oppressors, or
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
(23:02):
than what is true and what is good and what
is right.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
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
(23:30):
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.
Speaker 7 (23:49):
To me.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
I think that's a big part of it.
Speaker 7 (23:53):
Yeah, I think that's acolutely 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
(24:15):
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,
(24:37):
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
(24:59):
based on any more world standards. So it was an
emotion that was detached from the moral framework and in doing,
and then certain groups were elevated as worthy objects of
the passion and other groups were ignored. That's one of
the other things about.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Hold right there. We're gonna we're gonna discuss that with
doctor Joe Rigney coming up The Sin of Empathy, and
we'll get to his next book after that, Leadership and
Emotional Sabotage. Michael very glad from the system Lack of
two Modern Robin Rigney is our guest. He's Fellow of
(25:35):
Theology at New Saint Andrew's College, pastor at Christ Church
in Moscow, Idaho, the author of eight books. We were
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 are being left out. I
think you're about to make a very very crucial point.
Speaker 7 (25:59):
Yeah. So, one of the things about untethered empathy, when
it's 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 daye
ten or fifteen years, so called oppressed groups, whether it's
minorities or the LGBTQ or illegal immigrants, compassion for them
(26:20):
demands that we reorganize society around their felt needs and
desires and agendas, whereas others who may be equally suffering
can be safely ignored. 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
(26:45):
justified is compassion or empathy for a woman in desperate circumstances.
Maybe she's poor, maybe she's single and she's unmarried, or
maybe in the worst case scenarios, you see political advertised
to this effect. Say she was raped, and therefore she's
put forward as an object of compassion and empathy. And
(27:06):
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
(27:27):
to her unborn child. Because our empathy 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,
(27:48):
emotional distress, and I would 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
rely 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
(28:09):
kind of narrows our focus. It becomes myopic, and therefore
enables us to do things that are highly highly destructive.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
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? Yeah?
Speaker 7 (28:28):
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 to
(28:49):
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 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 we're
(29:13):
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 with parenting,
(29:34):
but also that we should expect as we form our
nation's laws and seek to the good of society.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
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 a household, or a teacher or a coach. It's
not all just you know, compliments and kindness. There has
(30:08):
to be reasoned, difficult decisions and conversations. And we want
it to be so easy. We want it to I
see parents 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 society the child has,
(30:31):
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 mother love at the very
(30:52):
beginning of the show, and I see it by people
with the best of intentions. I see it all the time.
That's that's the right.
Speaker 7 (31:01):
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 3 (31:11):
Don't you finished this answered, we'll pivot to that. Yeah,
let's let's do that.
Speaker 7 (31:16):
So in that book, I'm talking about the sort of
agitation and angst that we see around us, the sense
that 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.
(31:38):
And what I argue in the book, this is the
result of a failure of nerve, a an abdication among leaders.
And I actually draw this back in fact, then 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
(32:02):
move from a 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 blaspheming his God and questioning his wife,
Adam remains silent.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
He's passive.
Speaker 7 (32:21):
He abdicates, and he lets the serpent lead 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 Bible's term for this
is idolatry. So his abdication and passivity leads idolatry. But
(32:43):
then when he's called to account, 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 is fault
but mine. But that pattern abdication to rebellion, to blame
(33:05):
shifting is one that we say we see 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 3 (33:23):
Very interesting. What is your writing process? Hold on, Hold
on just a moment. We're up against a 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,
(33:44):
Leadership 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
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.