May 19, 2025 • 50 mins
Dr. Joe Rigney joins Kira to talk about empathy - what is it, why is it so destructive and how have we misunderstood it both in the church and society in general? Rigney discusses his new book, “The Sin of Empathy,” and why we need to “sober-minded” rather than peddlers of pity.
“The main virtue that I commend is sober-mindedness. This is, another biblical term. And if you think about what does the word sober-minded mean, well, normally you think of sober in terms of drunkenness and alcohol, right? If you get drunk on alcohol, you're not sober, and so you need to sober up. The basic biblical claim then is you can be drunk on more than just alcohol.”
Rigney is Fellow of Theology at New Saint Andrews College. He lives in Moscow, ID with his wife and three sons. Find his book on Amazon or wherever books are sold https://www.amazon.com/Sin-Empathy-Compassion-Its-Counterfeits/dp/B0DV3L5KR3
“The main virtue that I commend is sober-mindedness. This is, another biblical term. And if you think about what does the word sober-minded mean, well, normally you think of sober in terms of drunkenness and alcohol, right? If you get drunk on alcohol, you're not sober, and so you need to sober up. The basic biblical claim then is you can be drunk on more than just alcohol.”
Rigney is Fellow of Theology at New Saint Andrews College. He lives in Moscow, ID with his wife and three sons. Find his book on Amazon or wherever books are sold https://www.amazon.com/Sin-Empathy-Compassion-Its-Counterfeits/dp/B0DV3L5KR3
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
This is the FCB Podcast network.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
A braais Mansoda day that we won't to say, and
then we won't to say, oh we got it does.
No one can take that oway. This gonna be okay,
A preassa that we won't to say, and then we
won't to say, oh we got it does.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
No one can take that away. Don't say this don't
be okay. Hi, everybody, welcome back to another episode of
Just Listen to Yourself with Kira Davis. This is the
podcast where we take hot topics, hot button issues, and
we discuss the talking points on those issues, and we
draw those talking points all the way out to their
logical conclusion. And I think today's show is going to
(00:50):
be a great exercise in critical thinking. I'm really excited
for this. Next guest, please welcome to the show. Doctor
Joe Rigney is the author of seven I'm struggling to
finish my second book. He is the author of seven books.
He starts a fellow of Theology at the New Saint
Andrew's College, and he is a pastor at City's Church
(01:12):
in Saint Paul and a teacher at Desiring God. And
his new book is the Sin of Empathy and it
breaks down the issue of college educated, white college educated
women swinging hard to the left and how empathy is
a part of that. You can find him on x
at Joe Underscore Rickney r ig n e Y Doctor Rickney,
(01:34):
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Okay, I was so fascinated by your book when I
first saw it, the sin of Empathy and the way
it was pitched to me. The way that I saw
it was, well, we're seeing a left word shift of
white college education women, and it's really connected to this
idea of empathy. We talk a lot about empathy in
(01:58):
modern Western culture, pretectularly in America, so I was immediately
attracted to that. Explain a little bit your impetus for
this book and why this topic interests you.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah. So, well, First, when you write a book with
a title like that, you better expect questions, and I've
gotten plenty of them over the years. It's something I've
been working on for actually quite a number of years,
and this is kind of the fruit of that reflection.
But the basic idea is that compassion, what we called compassion,
a love for the hurting and the broken of those
(02:31):
who are weak, is obviously a great and glorious thing.
It's commanded in the scriptures modeled for us by the
Lord Jesus himself. It's a great and glorious thing, and
like most great things, when it goes bad, it goes really,
really bad. And the problem in our modern context is
that a lot of people can't imagine how something so
(02:52):
good could become destructive, harmful, and even a sin. But
when we think about other virtues, we don't have that
same problem. So when we take a virtue like courage,
everybody recognizes you could have too little of it and
you could be a coward. But you can also have
too much of it and be reckless, and so virtues
can kind of go wrong in two directions. Well, when
it comes to compassion, you have a similar kind of challenge.
(03:12):
So everybody recognizes you could have too little of it
and you could be apathetic and indifferent and callous to
human suffering. But can it go wrong the other way?
Can you have too much of it? Can it be excessive?
And what would it mean to have too much compassion? Well,
my argument is that when compassion becomes untethered from reality,
when it becomes untethered from what is true, from what
is good from what is fruitful, it becomes very very destructive.
(03:36):
It becomes very very harmful, and great evils can be
done in the name of compassion. And the argument is
is that in the modern world the term for that
excessive compassion is empathy. Empathy was presented to it's a
modern term, it's not an ancient term. It appeared in
the twentieth century, and it was presented as a kind
of upgrade to sympathy to compassion. It was, you know,
(03:57):
sympathy is good, but we can do better. And the
better was a more total immersion in the pain and
suffering of other people, kind of untethering, let a validation
of all of their feelings and of affirmation of all
of their impulses. That was presented as a more loving response,
and the term for it was empathy. And I saw
that and said, no, that's not an upgrade. It's important
(04:18):
that our compassion and our sympathy and our sharing of
emotions be anchored to something sturdy, otherwise will be swept
off our feet by the power of our passion, the
power of our feelings. So that's the basic idea underneath it.
And then we could talk about all the kinds of
applications that we see in the world around us.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
I'm really curious about the idea that the word empathy
is a new word. This is not something I knew
I ever heard before. Can you just found on that
a little bit.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Yeah, Actually, it came into English in the early twentieth century,
and it was a term in artwork, and it was
basically the way that when you would see a painting,
you would kind of project your feelings into it. And
so interestingly, empathy was about actually, originally it was about
projecting your feelings into kind of this artwork. It kind
of migrated, The term kind of migrated and became came
(05:07):
to mean something like compassion, something like sharing the emotions
of others. But really in the last twenty or thirty
years it was presented as an upgrade. So there's a
famous video by author Brene Brown, and it went viral
about five or six years ago, I think maybe actually
maybe eight or nine years ago now, and what she
basically describes sympathy as a kind of response to human
(05:28):
suffering that is aloof apathetic cold. So she talks about
sympathy and says this breeds disconnection. It's a bad response
to human suffering. But empathy, well, that's a sacred space.
Empathy is stays out of judgment. Empathy does not do
any of those things. And it was presented as ironically
it was the sin of sympathy versus the virtue of empathy.
(05:50):
And I remember watching that and saying that there's something
funny going on here. And part of what motive motivated
me was the word sympathy is a Bible word. It
shows up many times in the script as what God
commands us to have in response to human suffering. Christ
is a sympathetic high priest. He suffers with us. That's
the word. Sympathy literally means to suffer with. He joins
(06:12):
us in our suffering. Empathy means to suffer in And
you can hear in that how it implies that more
total immersion in the pain and sorrows and suffering. Well,
what's the danger there? You're gonna get swept off your
feet now you have no anchoring. So when I've illustrated
this over the years, if you imagine that someone is
sinking in quicksand and you want to help them, how
are you gonna go about doing that? Well, sympathy says,
(06:34):
I'm gonna reach in there, and I'm gonna grab hold
of them, so I'm gonna join them in this quicksand,
but I'm also gonna remain tethered to the side. I'm
gonna grab a big branch or I'm gonna tie a
rope around my waist so that I'm anchored to the side.
That's what's gonna allow me to help pull them out.
Empathy says, just jump in there with them, and then
now you have two people stuck in the quicksand. And
so that was the kind of argument. And I've had
(06:55):
enough interaction on this over the years to know that
some people don't mean unten the empathy by that word.
They just mean sharing someone's emotions. And I don't want
to fight with people about words. What I'm really interested
in is these underlying relational and emotional dynamics that really
become forms of emotional blackmail. That's another way to talk
about what I'm after is when when emotional responses can
(07:17):
become a tool of emotional manipulation and emotional blackmail. You
don't love me if you refuse to use the process.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
What we've been seeing thrust upon us since election day, right,
which is like I mean, like many people my listeners
knowing for like many people, to relax at night, I
just watch old election like election night coverage, and so
I'm going through I'm going through some of the more
crazy responses right now the following day. And that's a
common refrain. You had the opportunity to elect this XYZ
(07:52):
you know, this person who will represent XYZ group, and
you didn't. This is why you hate us. It is
it's blackmail. It's such a good way to put it
before we move on, because I want to connect now
these two ends of this conversation, the direction of your
book and this conversation about empathy. However, you said something
(08:15):
that really just blow blew my mind because it's what
I'm exploring in my personal thought life right now and
on my podcast, which is this idea and I can
talk to you about this because you're a Christian. So
this is this idea of the enemy inverting the created order,
and how I always talk on this show a lot
about how the enemy can't create, can only imitate, and
(08:36):
that is why the imitations always feel a little bit off,
a little bit it's not quite the same. Your Disney
reboot isn't quite the same as the original Grim's fairy Tale.
You said, I wrote this down. It said, it's really
interesting that empathy is a new word. I did not
know this. I feel like how I felt when I
found out dinosaur is a new word and not an
(08:57):
engine word. It's like, okay, now I have a new framework.
And what I wrote down is length. This is a
problem of language and of the inversion of holiness. So
the idea of like sympathy is a biblical, scriptural, scriptural term.
(09:18):
Empathy is the weak imitation of that, and it's an
inversion of the holy order of sympathy.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
That's right. And so if you think about this is
the way that the devil likes to work. He wants
to an open assault. Sometimes it can be resisted, but
if you can subvert the language, if you can modify,
and I think that the shift from sympathy to empathy. Again,
I don't want to fight about words. If somebody wants
to use the word empathy to mean the good thing, great,
I would say, use ad an adjective tethered empathy, anchored empathy.
(09:47):
That's what I would command as a way to kind
of clarify that you're not doing what so many are doing.
So I don't want to fight about words, but there
is a subtle shift, and underneath it is this this
dynamic that we're talking about. And in one of the
thinkers who really influenced me on the subject is C. S. Lewis.
And obviously the word didn't it wasn't in use common
(10:07):
use in his day. So what did he call it?
He called it the passion of pity, and he said
pity can be used. He said that the pity can
be used the wrong way around. What's pity for? Why
did God give us pity? Well, pity is meant to
be a spur that moves joy to help misery. So
I have joy, I'm in a good space. I'm on
the shore and there's someone sinking, and pity is what
(10:29):
moves me to help them. Price was moved with compassion.
That's pity. But he says it can be used the
wrong way around as a tool of emotional blackmail. And
everybody's experienced this in their personal lives. Just imagine when
a family member, say, has thrown a pity party, or
you know, sulked in order to get their way right,
has wielded their suffering. They put on the long face.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
I want to interrupt you me. Never, I would.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Never never, yeah, no, but yeah, everybody always use a
family member. Did this, right, You've never done that somebody else, Right,
So there's a way we all know that that's possible,
and that soft hearted people are easily steered by that
sort of pity party, by that emotional manipulation. Right, Well,
what happened. So this is an old phenomenon. I think
Adam and Eve right after the Garden, we're probably doing
(11:16):
this to each other. Cana and Abel, we're doing this
to each other. It's an old it's a human problem.
What's different in the modern context is that it was
institutionalized at a societal scale. Right, So, for the last
twenty plus years, we were treated to various forms of
emotional manipulation revolving around ostensible victims, and in the midst
(11:37):
of those there were real victims. There were real people
who had real horrible things happened to them, but their
suffering was weaponized in order to hijack all the major
institutions of society, from the family to the church, to
the government. All of these institutions were sort of it
was a hostage situation, and what people for Christians in particular,
(11:59):
we know we want to be like Christ. We want
to be compassionate, we want to have tender mercies, and
we want to be kind and tenderhearted. And so this
was a really potent weapon against the church to mute them,
to take them off the board unless they resist where
progressives were wanting to take the country. And so they
found it was really effective to say if you don't
don't agree with us, if you don't adopt our victim
(12:19):
groups as victim groups, that you have to defer to,
or that you have to act in behalf of whether
it's immigrants, whether it's LGBT, the racial conversation, all of
these things had a common element which was basically, go
along with us, or you're a hater, you're a bigot,
you're heartless, you're cruel. And Christians don't want to be
those things. They don't like that name. And so in
(12:41):
order to save our reputation, we want to be And
so what we did is one of the ways I
put it in the book is we came to live
under the progressive gaze. It was like there was a
little progressive sitting on every Christian shoulder, evaluating what they
were doing and to see whether it was a.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Gay as in looking not the gays as in your orientation.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Correct, yeah, although that's true. Although there's a funny pun
there that you could probably make. All right, no gaze.
The idea is there's a little progressive on your shoulder
who's evaluating your behavior and saying, are you being compassionate
enough to the right groups? And if you aren't. If
you aren't, then you're condemned and we're going to reject you,
and you're and you don't have a seat at the table.
(13:21):
And Christians began to jump through hoops to try to
prove that we were compassionate enough according to a progressive
definition of compassion, and in doing so, we were hijacked.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
It's such fascinating stuff and I feel like it's all
just sort of bolstering that the period that I have.
You know that that idea, that this is all an
inversion of something that is holy. This is why we
need I talk about this a lot on the show.
This is the political podcast, but I always take it
to church. My listeners know that. But this is why
we need a moderating God. We need a moderating spirit
(13:55):
because we are we will we will necessarily default to
overreaction or passionate responses. And this is something we talk
about on the show quite a bit Doctor Rigney during
the Black Lives Matter movement, and I really did encourage
my listeners to be open minded, to listen to what
(14:16):
people were saying, to try to not respond with justified anger.
I was angry too at the violence and everything that
was going on. But as a Christian, my responses will
let let's take a step back, let's breathe, let's not
respond in kind, but let's see are there any truth?
Is there any truth underneath this anger? Is that empathy?
(14:43):
Do you think that that was that I was asking
my listeners to be empathetic or.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
No, I think that what you just described there. So,
this book Center Empathy has a companion book called Leadership
and Emotional Sabotage, And in that book, the main virtue
that I command is what I is sober mindedness. This
is again another biblical term. And if you think about
what does the word sober minded mean, Well, normally you
think of sober in terms of a drunkenness and alcohol. Right,
if you get drunk on alcohol, you're not sober, and
(15:09):
so you need to sober up. The basic biblical claim, then,
is you can be drunk on more than just alcohol.
You could be drunk on emotions. And we actually talk
this way pretty regularly about people who are blinded by anger,
or overwhelmed by grief, or paralyzed by fear. This language
of my emotions are so potent that they overwhelm my
rational faculties. And I don't see straight, I can't think clearly.
(15:30):
I'm not stable. Well, to say then we need to
be sober minded is precisely what you just said. We
need to actually step back and assess. Here's a big reaction,
there's protests, there's violence. What's going on. We need to
get to the bottom of it. We can't do that.
It's really difficult to do that. If the rules of
the game, if the pressure is whatever in anybody who
(15:51):
claims to be a victim must be affirmed, believed, never questioned,
never challenged. You can't even ask those questions, like to
do what you describe. Hey, let's step back and assess
is it true? Is it false? If you tried to
do that, people would say, you're so heartless, you're so callous.
Do you not care? Do you not see that the
people are suffering, and they would wield the emotional pain
and distress of ostensible victims to mute the discussion that
(16:16):
you think is important. Like, I'm all in favor of
let's if there's real suffering, right, then we want our
emotions to go along with reality. We want it to
We want to feel deeply, we want to feel deep
compassion and be moved by that compassion to actually help people.
But that assumes that you've taken the time and have
had the mental space, the emotional space to sober mindedly
(16:38):
evaluate what is true and false. And the last twenty
years have really been this exercise, and we short circuit that,
and it's all reactions, it's all passions, it's all emotions,
and it's amazing how much destruction can happen with that
banner of compassion being waved over it.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Let's connect this to the political reality of this, because
I think I feel like we're already there, but yeah,
there is this idea, and I think this is really
what prompted me to even get into the podcast space,
and because I was just seeing so many people talking
past each other and no one digging in. And I'm
(17:17):
very conservative, so I I I always espouse those values,
and I think I'm right, so that that's the that's
the the angle that I argue from. But I also,
you know, as a Christian, understand this need to tolerate
where people are coming from and figure out their needs
(17:40):
because that's a crisis, a need filler. So that means
that's what we have to be too. But at the
same time, the city, the all of the language around
this these topics is so heated and and I've come
to understand now that that's on purpose. And you've laid
this out very well in your book, But what is
going on with why liberal women? Then? If we've seen
(18:02):
this huge swing to the left, this is now. I
mean again, I just told you I go through my
election night, you know, my cocaine, my election night cocaine.
I take those hits a lot. And one of the
common refrains I hear about that is college educated white women.
And the way they say it is that the rest
of us are just uneducated. If you didn't go to
(18:23):
college like that college is the marker. Or if you're educated,
college educated white women and they always talk about that group,
those are the group that came that's the group that
came through. That's the group that came through for the left.
It's a very venerated position. And now we are moving
even doctor Rigney's you must know to a statistic where
(18:44):
in some communities it's already more where there are more
women in graduate programs postgraduate programs than there are men,
that there are more white women with freed white women
than men. And so there seems to be a connection
between that rise in I don't want to say quality
(19:06):
of education, but level of education and the way people vote.
What's the connection you're making? Yeah, what are you claiming here?
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Yeah? So there's let me make connect three elements there.
One is that higher education is where progressives catechize the
next generation in their ideologies. So that's what's going on there.
It's the some people go to Sunday School to learn,
you know, their deepest beliefs. Our universities have basically become
a form of They're like temples in the new civil
(19:37):
religion that kind of imparts progressive ideology and catechises people.
So that's one elements. That's where the college piece comes
into play. So what are they teaching and how does
it relate to particularly you mentioned white women. I'd say
two things going on there. One is women naturally are
the more empathetic sex. Okay, everybody intuitively knows this. Modern
ideology says, you're not allowed to say that, But men
(19:58):
and women are different, and by God's design, this is
actually a strength of women. God gave them this compassionate,
tenderheartedness in order to serve communities, and it's one of
the great blessings. It's why women are great nurturers. It's
why it's connected to their mothering, their ability to into
it and read emotions. Well, you have an infant who
can't speak, how do you know what they need? Well,
(20:19):
mothers are highly attuned to the emotional distress of their infants,
and then of their children, and then of their husbands.
And therefore they act as a kind of glue that
holds communities together, and they're ready to move towards suffering
with comfort and care. This is a great blessing. But
what's a blessing in one place becomes destructive in another
when it comes to drawing clear lines, when it comes
(20:40):
to setting boundaries and perimeters, when it comes to guarding
the doctrine worship of the church, or maintaining a border
in a nation, that same impulse of care, nurture, compassion, sympathy, empathy,
whatever word you want to use, becomes a liability because
it's more likely to justify, rationalize great evil in order.
And if someone presents as a victim and so that's
(21:01):
what's good. There's a feminine piece there. Now why, particularly
white women, I think this is where the victimhood Olympics
that we witnessed over the last ten years, where victimhood
conferred in vulnerability, and everybody was carved up into either
oppressor or oppressed, and it was just a question of
how much oppression you could pile up so that dynamic
(21:21):
once those became once those were the rules of the game.
For white women in particular, I think two things happened
for white women. On the one hand, they're a part
of the oppressor group according to society's definition, because they're white.
They've been a part of the oppressor class, and therefore
they don't want to be that. They don't want to
be the evil. They don't want to be the villain
in the story, and they don't want to be the
uncompassionate one. And so therefore they identify with and seek
(21:43):
to help whatever victim group presents itself as a way
of compensating. It's a form of guilt. It's a manipulation
by guilt and by their feelings in order to get them. Now,
you can be the good guy in the story if
you just go along with all of the progressive agenda.
The other way that this played out, though, is I
think this is part of what's behind the explosion of
(22:05):
the transgender movement, say in the last eight eight or
so years, because what that enabled was a white woman
who was at one level at the top of the
oppression hierarchy. You're not the highest white men. White straight
white men are at the top, but you're pretty close. Well,
all of a sudden, if you're transgender, you just inverted
the hierarchy. You're now the greatest victim. You're the greatest
(22:25):
oppressed group ever, and now everybody defers and accommodates you.
Society now revolves around you. And this is what we've
done over the last eight years. As we've said that
the most immature, reactive, and deranged people, all of society
must be reorganized around them. And you get this really
strange phenomenon where women in particular that maternal nature they have.
(22:48):
Because you mentioned white college educated women, usually it's unmarried
as well. That's another piece.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
It was about to go there, Doc, I was about
to ask you that is there a connection between marriage
and child?
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Exactly right, because what's happening is is that maternal nature
is still present in women. Yes, God, God, it's just there. C. S.
Lewis once made this point that if you don't eat food,
the appetite still needs to be filled, and so you're
gonna gobble poison. And so what's happened is in the
absence that's right, fur babies, and it's the maternal nature
is still there. But instead of having its own, your
own children to care for, to nurture and to raise,
(23:23):
that feminine impulse under the influence of that progressive ideology
learned in college, seeks out surrogates. And so that could
be the fur babies, or it could be the most
deranged people on the planet, So say, men who think
they're women. And so you have these this mama bear impulse,
but instead of defending her own children, she's now forcefully
(23:44):
advocating that Bruno be allowed to use the girl's bathroom.
And it's and it's Mama Bear. It's like it comes
out there's this intensity, this emotional like we have to
protect these people and help these people, and that means
we must castrate them, and that must we have to
give them the hormones. We have to do all of
these things in the name of that's what compassion demands.
And it's a perversion again, like you said earlier, it's
(24:06):
a corruption of something that is really, really beautiful, Like
it really is a version of.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
The Holy Order. This interview could be about everything. I'm
thinking about my next book already, but like how everything
is holistic, right, we can't None of what Ale's American
society is going to be healed if we don't deal
with it all at the same time. But this is
really a big deal marriage and family. What did I
(24:32):
write down while you were talking The glue that holds
the communities together, that's womanhood. And so what do you do?
I was right from the Garden of Eden. What do
you do when you want to disrupt the community, when
you want to disrupt the order, you disrupt the very
vessel of new life, which is womanhood, right, you disrupt that.
Everything's inverted, even the idea of the last shall be first,
(24:55):
and the first shall be last. So how do these
people who are first on earth?
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Know?
Speaker 3 (25:00):
How do they avail themselves of that holy order? The
last shelby first? They got to be last and first?
How do they do that? You got it? It's a
race to the bottom to get to the top. It's
all inverted and it's just so insidious from top to bottom.
But I feel like, really, when we get down to this,
because today, when I get off this podcast with you,
(25:22):
I'm going to break down this tragic murder that happened
I think in Tennessee, where a young black boy stabbed
a young white football player to death over something silly.
And we have I talk about these uncomfortable things all
the time on this show, but one of the things
I talk about is, yes, there's race angles here, but
this is a socioeconomic and spiritual deficit that starts with
(25:47):
the family. Everything starts with the family. And you're saying,
even the way women vote starts with the family, whether
you have one or not, whether you commit to one
or not.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
That's right. And so this is why feminism. So when
I've there's a chapter in the book called feminism Queen
of the Woke, because under that undercurrent was there in
all of these various controversies, whether it was over to
the LGBT stuff or the race stuff or these things,
this was a common element because of the natural female
empathy that they have. But what you said is right,
(26:23):
And this is the way that men and women are
designed to work together. So men are designed by God
to set structures right. So men build houses. Women make
them into homes. Okay, they make them warm and full
of life. Men set the perimeter, and then women make
the life happen inside. That's that's Women are the life
givers and the nurture is Eve's name. Her name means life.
(26:44):
Why did Adam name her that? Because she's the mother
of all living. So his job was to guard the garden, right,
and he failed. And when he allowed the serpent to
come into the garden and question God's word and attack
his wife. He should have been a man and he
should have dealt with the intruder, and he failed and vocation,
and because he failed, then she fails as well. Right,
she blate believes the lie, and then she offers the
(27:07):
fruit to her husband. And now you have sin entering
the world through the fall of Adam and Eve. So
these dynamics, like it really is, when it works well
by God's design, it's a beautiful thing. But then when
think but the disruption of that family, the destruction of it,
the dismantling of it, the inversion of it, all of
these things cause massive social problems down down the road.
(27:27):
And what we're what we're faced with now is that
there are problems that God intended to be addressed through
different means, Like the church has a role, the family
has a role. And what we've said is we can
dismantle the family, we can sideline the church, and then
we're just gonna use the police to fix this. And
it's like that will never work. It will like that
that you're trying. It's like trying to hammer in a nail,
(27:49):
but you're gonna use a screwdriver. It's like, I don't
care how much you you whack it with that screwdriver.
You're not gonna drill that hammer that nail into that board.
And we're using the wrong instruments because we've lost sight
of the way that God made the world.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
That's how good we're using the wrong instruments. I absolutely
and again I think this all goes back to this
idea of being totally disconnected from the basis of egg creation,
but be even the on more secular level, the creation
of this nation and the ideas that allow for thriving.
(28:22):
One of the one of the most interesting things that
happened during the Black Lives Matter movement was that the
national organization Black Lives Matter scrubbed their site, scrubbed their
I'm sure you remember this, they scrubbed their about page
because they very clearly talked about the destruction of the
nuclear family and the patriarchy, particularly when it comes to
(28:45):
Black America. Now, if we're gonna look at the results
of that, you know that push in Black America specifically,
and I just gave you that example about that terrible murder,
which is not an isolated incident, unfortunately, then we can
see a direct line between the destruction of the patriarchy
and complete and under chaos. I like what you say
that men are the watchers on the wall. They set
(29:08):
the perimeter, and women make everything inside a home, a community,
a space where a man can go and live. And
so we've inverted that. Now we've made women the one
standing on the wall. What does that mean for men?
What are men supposed to be doing.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Men check out, men, men go watch tv a men
look at porn like it's in other words, there's nothing
to that because they're not being asked to do the
hard thing of building and sustaining a civilization. Then it's like, well,
I might as well go do a fake one on
my video games. That that's what that's what men do,
and it's an abdication and it's a failure, and men
do need to man up. There's it's a time to
build and there's a time to fight. And part of
(29:48):
the the in my book, I'm there's a way in
which I'm directing a lot of my exhortations to men
to say hey, because because men can be easily steered too.
It's not just that women. Yes, but if it's interesting
that one of the dynamics is you know, there's the
old joke if you remember the movie My Big Fat
Greek Wedding, Oh yeah, I love it, And in that
movie the wife says at one point, you know, the
(30:09):
husband is the head, but the wife is the neck,
and she turns the head wherever she wants. That's right. Well,
good men especially have a real hard time dealing with
female agitation, angst, and heavy emotion, and they'll do anything
to make it go away, right. They'll choose a short
term quick fix rather than maintaining their vision of what's
the long term good for their wife or their daughter,
(30:32):
or their sister, or their mother or their community. They
just want it to go away. And part of what
I'm commending is men need to have the stamina and
the sober mindedness and the courage to be able to
be steady as all of these conflagrations are happening all
around us. And in order to do that, you do
have to have all of your natural loves anchored. I'll
(30:52):
take it back to see us. Lewis again one of
his big hobby horses. He wrote about this in multiple books.
He wrote an entire book on premise is that our
natural loves, if they become ungoverned, become highly destructive. So
he regularly talks about maternal love. Is an example, family love,
which is a glorious thing, but when it becomes untethered
(31:14):
from the love of God, becomes a maternal vampire that
possesses and dominates and is very destructive. Same thing happens
with paternal love or the love of friends. Or romantic love.
All of these are great and good, but they need
to have God's hand on the reins. And if you
remove God's hand from those rains, all of those good things,
he says, become demons. He said, when love becomes a god,
(31:37):
it becomes a demon, and it destroys everything he and
so he illustrated it with those loves. My project has
been to say, well, is love for the hurting, love
for the weak, love for the broken?
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Is?
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Is that like that? Is it good?
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Like that?
Speaker 1 (31:51):
And the answerest it is if God's hand is on
the reins. If it's not, well, then you can't have
a border. Here's a funny illustration of this, appreciated sometimes
when people unintentionally market your book. But I had a
friend send me a picture from the Mexico side of
the southern border, and written on the border wall in
big block letters was the word empathy. And I just thought, well,
(32:14):
that's what I think, because because what's the argument there
that someone says, hey, this border wall, it's a graffiti artist. Empathy?
The idea is empathy means you're not allowed to have
a border. You're not allowed to have boundaries. You can't
put up walls, and it's like, that's the point in
doing so. We lose our boundaries, we lose our sense
of our self, and it's just one big blob of
(32:34):
feelings that just run us left and right and up
and down and blow up and shut down, and there's
no structure, there's no order because we can't actually draw
those clear lines.
Speaker 3 (32:45):
Bill, you write a lot in your book. You actually
connect this to the church and how empathy has invaded
the church, particularly the evangelical church. And I'm an evangelical
or I guess I would be considered an evangelical non denominational.
I had a conversion experience as a teenager. Uh, And
it's really it has infiltrated the church. And I'm wondering
(33:07):
how we you know what, let me not let me
read what I let me read this, Okay, I'm trying.
I'm sorry. I'm organizing my thoughts on the fly. You're
witnessing in real time, guarantee, trying to think through issues.
It's literally what this show is about. But I'll just
read what I wrote to you because I want to
talk about that idea of the border empathy and in
(33:31):
groups and out groups. You said this par reviewed study
concluded that empathetic concern does not reduce partisan animosity in
the electorate, and in some respects even exacerbates it. This
study found that high empathy people view the out group
more unfavorably relative to their own group than low empathy people,
and that they may even take more delight in the
(33:52):
suffering of some of the out group members. And then
to bolster your your point, you use some examples of
COVID shaming. How all, you know, we don't have to
re litigate all of that. We know murderers and killers
for wanting to go outside and stuff like that. But
I was really interested in that concept of in groups
and out groups and how that manifests itself, not just politically,
(34:15):
even in the church. The church has sort of glommed
onto this idea of empathy, and in doing so we
have sort of created in groups and outgroups within the
structure of the church.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Yeah, so the basic idea there is that again, because
compassion and emotion sharing needs to be tethered. When it's not,
it becomes very selective and myopic, which means empathy for
the people that I care about is often accompanied by
great hatred towards those who are opposed to them. Okay,
(34:53):
So this is why Paul Bloom, who wrote a book
in twenty sixteen I think called Against Empathy, great title,
The Case for Ration Compassion. One of his famous statements
that always stuck it got me onto this. It stuck
with me was when most people think of empathy, they
think of kindness. I think of war, and you think, what,
why would you think that? He said, well, yeah, he
looks at the Middle East and he says, there's just
(35:14):
empathy everywhere in the Middle East. Why Well, because this
group empathizes with their people and therefore disdains hates and
contobe great cruelty to their enemies in the name of
their compassion. So C. S. Lewis again, I'll come back
to him. He's a great influence on me. He once wrote,
even a good emotion like pity, if it's not controlled
by divine love or justice, leads through anger to cruelty.
(35:39):
So just think about that. Pity leads through anger to
cruelty because most atrocities are sort of motivated or prompted
by the other guy's atrocities. And so when we feel pity,
say for the oppressed classes, and we don't connect it
to God's law or God's standards. It leads, by a
very natural process, to a reign of terror, to brutalities.
(36:01):
We can do great evil in that we can be
very cruel to people in the name of empathy, which
is what you saw with the COVID shaming, where because
this person wouldn't get the vaccine and then they die,
all of the rejoicing and the glee at like serves
you right, because you were evil for not wearing the
mask or getting the jab.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Or what by that insurance company, the president of the
insurance company that was murdered by I won't say his name,
that young man.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
That young man. That's exactly right. Because again the principle
again this is a Lewis quote. Mercy detached from justice
grows unmerciful. It's so good, mercy detached from justice grows
unmerciful because he Lewis compares it to like a plant.
And there's certain plants that only grow like in mountain
rocky mountain climates, and they thrive in their environment. But
(36:48):
if you were to transplant that plant mercy from the
crags of justice, and you put it in the swamp
of humanitarianism, it becomes a man eating weed and devours everything,
and it's like, that's what's happened, is we detached our mercy,
our empathy, our compassion, from biblical justice, from truth, from reality,
(37:09):
and therefore this man eating weed has been devouring everything
inside and that does happen. And the Church was complicit
because we very clearly have commands from Christ and from
our God, who says, be kind, be compassionate. And so
the world discovered a very potent steering wheel, right. All
they had to do was say, that's what we're after.
(37:29):
And there's books that have been written on this phenomenon
where progressive billionaires discovered that the way to sideline the
church was through this combination of empathy and then the
redefinition of justice as social justice, and all of these
sort of things were ways that and that were baptized
with Bible verses. I just put a Bible verse on
top of it. And all of these progressive ideologies flooded
(37:50):
into the church in order to steer them, mute them,
hijack them, and slow any resistance to that agenda.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
And what I know, we're I hate that my podcast
is only less than an hour because I have so
many more questions. Maybe you can go back later. I'll
interview on one of you, one of your other seven books.
Do you even work or do you just write books?
Speaker 1 (38:13):
I write books, I preach sermons, I teach classes.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
It's it's great the work of a man. Okay, well,
but you do. I love the idea you connect it
in the church to and my my bff Wendy and
I talk about this all the time. We talk about
the problem of women pastors and how it is a
bell weather. It's always a bell weather without fail for
(38:40):
the ultimate, the eventual collapse of the doctrine of a
church or an organization. You talk a little bit about that.
It's all connected to this whole topic of the leftward
shift of white liberal women. Talk to us about that
and how empathy has now caused the church to remove
some of our most sacred doctrines and in turn that's
(39:03):
causing a collapse. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Well, it's related to that idea that God designed men
to set the perimeter, and so when you apply that
principle to the church, it means that God insists in
the scriptures that men are to be the pastors, because
the pastors are to guard the doctrine worship of the church.
And it's a well documented phenomenon that churches that ordain
(39:29):
female pastors very quickly abandon orthodox Christian doctrine and especially
historic Christian views of morality on things like sexuality and
things like that. So when you think about the mainline churches,
for example in the United States, the United Methodist Church,
or the Episcopalian Church, or the PC, the Presbyterian Church USA,
(39:51):
which was is the Liberal Presbyterians, all of them back
in like the fifty sixties seventies began to ordain women
under the influence of feminism, and they said, we're not
going to restrict the pastoral office to men. We're going
to ordain memen women. Very quickly, within the next twenty
or thirty years, all of them have been Therefore, we're
sanctioning sodomy, celebrating sodomy, ordaining gaze to the ministry, and
(40:11):
then sanctioned gay marriage subsequently as time went on. And
there's a very good reason, and it has to do
with well, once the women are in that pastoral role
with all of their care and compassion, and then the
LGBT community comes to them and says, we're oppressed, we're victims.
We're hurting, we're suffering because we're in the closet, and
because we can't be our true selves. Women very naturally go,
(40:32):
we want to let you come out, and so they
abandon the biblical doctrine. They've already abandoned the biblical doctrine
by ordaining the women, and now there's nothing anchoring their compassion,
and so now they indulge. And that's where you get
where we are today, and it floods into all sorts
of other areas, whether it's the doctrine of Christ. You
get these bizarre phenomenon where these churches are instead of
(40:53):
praying to God our Father, say well, we're going to
pray to God our Mother. And at that point it's
just a different religion. It's no longer Christian in any
means sense at all. It's just a it's just they're
pagan priestesses now. They but they still inhabit old church
buildings and they have Presbyterian on the front right next
to the rainbow flag. And it's that phenomenon that you go,
how did that happen? And it's like this was a
(41:15):
major component of what drove that kind of shift drift,
steering whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 3 (41:21):
I think it's very interesting how the enemy has managed
to infiltrate all of our institutions and even our buildings.
Back in the beginning of this interview, you mentioned how education,
higher education catechizes these beliefs. And I was my daughter's
seventeen she's graduating this year, and so we went to
Northwestern College to visit beautiful campus. All universities, major universities
(41:46):
in America are Christian institutions. They were established by the Church.
This is no different a beautiful legacy of learning about
Christ christ worship. These beautiful old, beautiful sanctuaries, built churches
on the campus. And what do I see when I
walk into what used to be a church on campus
(42:06):
and is now a cafeteria. I see a sign that
says people who can keet pregnant need healthcare. You know,
you know, it's just it's incredible how an enemy has
infiltrated and now we're giving up these gorgeous buildings. I
was talking to a friend who is a member of
the Methodist Church in Los Angeles last night, and they're
(42:27):
talking about it's a rather conservative congregation. They're talking about
leaving the Methodist Union, But that means they've thought to
leave their historic church building that is very rare now
to have in Los Angeles, and they've got to hand
that over to the enemy. It seems like the enemy
is doing a lot of good work to push us
out of even the physical spaces of our institutions, and
(42:49):
we seem to be okay with that. We seem to
be going along with that just fine.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Yeah, it is a great tragedy that the bright spot
in it is it does seem to me that there
are more Christians who recognize the manipulation and the play
that's been run on them and are trying to kind
of regroup to re anchor themselves in the scriptures, to
be both courageous and sober minded and therefore able to
be compassionate in the way that Christ was to actually
(43:15):
help people, and not being so focused on the immediate
feelings that we say all kinds of lies, like men
can become women, or men can have periods, and men
can get pregnant and all of these sort of insane
things that are demanded of society. More and more Christians,
I think are recognizing we've been played, we've been had,
and we need to go back to basics. We need
to God is God. Feelings aren't God. God is God,
(43:37):
feelings are not God, and our feelings need to obey,
they need to snap to and they need to become
obedient to Christ. It's not just that we need to
take every thought captive. We need to take every feeling
captive and bring it in obedience to Jesus. And the
more Christians do that, I think, the more that we
will see God blessing it. God will pour out of spirit.
God will do great things in the faithful places. And
(43:58):
then you know, those church that are dying, maybe those
buildings will still be there and the rest of us
will get to move back in sometime in the future.
Speaker 3 (44:06):
I know.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Actually no a number of congregations. The congregation I was
a part of a few years ago, we planted a
church and ended up inheriting on this old Episcopalian cathedral.
Basically is it Baptist church, But basically it went for
sale and they were going to turn it into a
wedding venue and we were able to get in there
and snatch it out and now we worship in this
beautiful space. But it's a It was a faithful congregation
(44:27):
that was able to inherit that. And I think you're
going to see more of that as those congregations die,
because there's no life there. There's no spiritual life there,
and there's no physical life there those congregations. Because if
once you've abandoned Christ, once you've abandoned his word, why
why bother getting up in the morning on Sunday morning?
Why not just cleep in? Why not? What's the point?
(44:48):
There's no reason to renew covenant with the Living God
and his people on a Sunday morning. If you're just
gonna echo the very same things that the pagans and
the secularists are saying all week long, you might as
well sleep in and go to brunch.
Speaker 3 (45:04):
Thought about it that way, or her to put that way,
So thank you so much for that. I think that's
a great note to end things on talking to doctor
Joe Rickney. He is the author of The Empathy of
the Sin of Empathy. You can find that on Amazon
or wherever books are sold. Okay, before I let you go,
doctor Rickney, this has been a fascinating conversation. I have
(45:25):
two questions that I typically ask my guests before I
let them go. So the first question is what book
besides the Bible has had an impact on your life?
I feel like I already know the author give based
on this interview, I feel like I already know the
author of the book. But what's a book that has
impacted you?
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Yeah, so I would say one, since I have quoted
Lewis enough, I'll go ahead and give a book recommendation.
So The Great Divorce is this kind of it's a
dream allegory type book where Lewis imagines conversations between those
damned spirits and from hell and in heaven and they
have these conversations, and it's really a way of shedding
(46:04):
light on the choice that confronts all human beings, like, ohre,
you gonna put yourself at the center or you're gonna
put Christ at the center. Like that's the basic choice
that every human being is confronted with. And he's trying
to show the different ways that that choice might manifest.
If you're a woman versus a man, if you've had
this happen to you or that happened to you, and
it's just it's all at root, it's all the same
(46:27):
Self at the center, Christ at the center. That's the
basic choice. But for each of us, that that journey
is going to look a little different, that story is
going to look a little different. So that's a book
that I go back to. I teach it to my
students here at New stan my freshmen and our I
teach freshman theology here, and so my students we make
sure we read that, we walk through it, and I
want them to be able to see what choice are
(46:48):
you facing? Where? Where is that choice for you in
your life right now? Between putting self at the center
of God. So that'd be a book that would be
a good place to start.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
That's a great place to start. I mean C. S.
Lewis is just great period. If I could name a
million moments aha moments from reading his stuff, and I
can't wait to pick his brain when we get on
the other side. Well, okay, the other question I like
to ask is, let's this is this is a lighthearted question,
but you can answer however you want. Let's pretend that
(47:17):
you get to be emperor of America. If somebody just
snaps their fingers and for a day you get to
be Emperor of America. You have full and total control
over everything in society, but you can only do one
thing and then you got to go back to your
regular life. What are you doing as Emperor of America?
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Yeah, so I think probably I would. I would go
the most the most basic and fundamental thing, which would
be to if I could decree it would be every
law in the land needs to be evaluated and potentially
removed if it does not accord with God's law. That
would be. It would just be like, that's that's the
(47:56):
law is. We got to go do an audit of
every law and if it can be derived from and
rooted back in what God has said, He's Lord, so
it'd be acknowledged the lordship that God is Lord. God
is God, and then every law that we have needs
to match that, and then it can be an application
that can be all kinds of different. But if there's
(48:17):
any law that doesn't, it's gone. That would be. That
would be the cleanest and clearest way to try to
bring some biblical justice and biblical roots to the nation.
Speaker 3 (48:29):
Well, that's very good. That's the difference between men and
women everybody. Because I was going to say I would
just put my shop. I would make it so everyone
had to put their shopping cart back. I feel like
doctor Rigney's solution would have more lasting impact, and this
is why men are the ones who protect the walls.
Doctor Rigney, thank you so much for stopping by the show.
(48:51):
What a great conversation. Before I let you go, tell
everybody where they can find you more of your stuff?
Where are you?
Speaker 2 (48:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (48:56):
So on Exit's Joe Underscore Rigney. If you want to
get book, you can get it at Sinochempathy dot com
and there's some other things there. You can also go
to Emotional Sabotage dot com. That's the companion book that
kind of shows more of the solution and sober mindedness.
And then a lot of my stuff is actually on
a subscription service called Canon Plus that has books, audiobooks,
TV shows, some movies. It's a great resource forre it's
(49:19):
a Christian ministry here in our town. That's a kind
of a Netflix slash Audible for Christian edification for the kids.
And a lot of my stuff's there. So if you're
if your listeners like what they heard and they want
to go explore more, go check out Canon plus Plus.
Speaker 3 (49:34):
That's interesting. Well, thank you so much, everybody. I hope
that you've boughten a lot as much out of today's
conversation as I have this is definitely going to prompt
some future discussions on this show. Before I let you know, everybody,
don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. If you're not
already subscribed. It's a great and free way to help
(49:54):
this show and keep my voice independent. Go subscribe to
my subsect, Justicia Davis subseac dot com by my book
Drawing Lines Why Conservatives must begin a battle fiercely in
the arena of ideas and as always until we meet again,
don't forget. Every once in a while, just stop and
listen to yourself.
Speaker 2 (50:14):
A braids masoda that we won't with maath, then we
won't to say, oh we got it? Does no one
get dig that?
Speaker 3 (50:22):
Owen this gonna be okay?
Speaker 2 (50:26):
A braids masoda that we won't was made, then we
won't to say, oh we got it? Does no one
get dig that? Owen it gonna be okay?
Speaker 1 (50:37):
This has been a presentation of the FCB podcast Network,
where Real Talk lives Visitors online at Fcbpodcasts dot com.
This is the FCB Podcast network.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
A braais Mansoda day that we won't to say, and
then we won't to say, oh we got it does.
No one can take that oway. This gonna be okay,
A preassa that we won't to say, and then we
won't to say, oh we got it does.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
No one can take that away. Don't say this don't
be okay. Hi, everybody, welcome back to another episode of
Just Listen to Yourself with Kira Davis. This is the
podcast where we take hot topics, hot button issues, and
we discuss the talking points on those issues, and we
draw those talking points all the way out to their
logical conclusion. And I think today's show is going to
(00:50):
be a great exercise in critical thinking. I'm really excited
for this. Next guest, please welcome to the show. Doctor
Joe Rigney is the author of seven I'm struggling to
finish my second book. He is the author of seven books.
He starts a fellow of Theology at the New Saint
Andrew's College, and he is a pastor at City's Church
(01:12):
in Saint Paul and a teacher at Desiring God. And
his new book is the Sin of Empathy and it
breaks down the issue of college educated, white college educated
women swinging hard to the left and how empathy is
a part of that. You can find him on x
at Joe Underscore Rickney r ig n e Y Doctor Rickney,
(01:34):
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Okay, I was so fascinated by your book when I
first saw it, the sin of Empathy and the way
it was pitched to me. The way that I saw
it was, well, we're seeing a left word shift of
white college education women, and it's really connected to this
idea of empathy. We talk a lot about empathy in
(01:58):
modern Western culture, pretectularly in America, so I was immediately
attracted to that. Explain a little bit your impetus for
this book and why this topic interests you.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah. So, well, First, when you write a book with
a title like that, you better expect questions, and I've
gotten plenty of them over the years. It's something I've
been working on for actually quite a number of years,
and this is kind of the fruit of that reflection.
But the basic idea is that compassion, what we called compassion,
a love for the hurting and the broken of those
(02:31):
who are weak, is obviously a great and glorious thing.
It's commanded in the scriptures modeled for us by the
Lord Jesus himself. It's a great and glorious thing, and
like most great things, when it goes bad, it goes really,
really bad. And the problem in our modern context is
that a lot of people can't imagine how something so
(02:52):
good could become destructive, harmful, and even a sin. But
when we think about other virtues, we don't have that
same problem. So when we take a virtue like courage,
everybody recognizes you could have too little of it and
you could be a coward. But you can also have
too much of it and be reckless, and so virtues
can kind of go wrong in two directions. Well, when
it comes to compassion, you have a similar kind of challenge.
(03:12):
So everybody recognizes you could have too little of it
and you could be apathetic and indifferent and callous to
human suffering. But can it go wrong the other way?
Can you have too much of it? Can it be excessive?
And what would it mean to have too much compassion? Well,
my argument is that when compassion becomes untethered from reality,
when it becomes untethered from what is true, from what
is good from what is fruitful, it becomes very very destructive.
(03:36):
It becomes very very harmful, and great evils can be
done in the name of compassion. And the argument is
is that in the modern world the term for that
excessive compassion is empathy. Empathy was presented to it's a
modern term, it's not an ancient term. It appeared in
the twentieth century, and it was presented as a kind
of upgrade to sympathy to compassion. It was, you know,
(03:57):
sympathy is good, but we can do better. And the
better was a more total immersion in the pain and
suffering of other people, kind of untethering, let a validation
of all of their feelings and of affirmation of all
of their impulses. That was presented as a more loving response,
and the term for it was empathy. And I saw
that and said, no, that's not an upgrade. It's important
(04:18):
that our compassion and our sympathy and our sharing of
emotions be anchored to something sturdy, otherwise will be swept
off our feet by the power of our passion, the
power of our feelings. So that's the basic idea underneath it.
And then we could talk about all the kinds of
applications that we see in the world around us.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
I'm really curious about the idea that the word empathy
is a new word. This is not something I knew
I ever heard before. Can you just found on that
a little bit.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Yeah, Actually, it came into English in the early twentieth century,
and it was a term in artwork, and it was
basically the way that when you would see a painting,
you would kind of project your feelings into it. And
so interestingly, empathy was about actually, originally it was about
projecting your feelings into kind of this artwork. It kind
of migrated, The term kind of migrated and became came
(05:07):
to mean something like compassion, something like sharing the emotions
of others. But really in the last twenty or thirty
years it was presented as an upgrade. So there's a
famous video by author Brene Brown, and it went viral
about five or six years ago, I think maybe actually
maybe eight or nine years ago now, and what she
basically describes sympathy as a kind of response to human
(05:28):
suffering that is aloof apathetic cold. So she talks about
sympathy and says this breeds disconnection. It's a bad response
to human suffering. But empathy, well, that's a sacred space.
Empathy is stays out of judgment. Empathy does not do
any of those things. And it was presented as ironically
it was the sin of sympathy versus the virtue of empathy.
(05:50):
And I remember watching that and saying that there's something
funny going on here. And part of what motive motivated
me was the word sympathy is a Bible word. It
shows up many times in the script as what God
commands us to have in response to human suffering. Christ
is a sympathetic high priest. He suffers with us. That's
the word. Sympathy literally means to suffer with. He joins
(06:12):
us in our suffering. Empathy means to suffer in And
you can hear in that how it implies that more
total immersion in the pain and sorrows and suffering. Well,
what's the danger there? You're gonna get swept off your
feet now you have no anchoring. So when I've illustrated
this over the years, if you imagine that someone is
sinking in quicksand and you want to help them, how
are you gonna go about doing that? Well, sympathy says,
(06:34):
I'm gonna reach in there, and I'm gonna grab hold
of them, so I'm gonna join them in this quicksand,
but I'm also gonna remain tethered to the side. I'm
gonna grab a big branch or I'm gonna tie a
rope around my waist so that I'm anchored to the side.
That's what's gonna allow me to help pull them out.
Empathy says, just jump in there with them, and then
now you have two people stuck in the quicksand. And
so that was the kind of argument. And I've had
(06:55):
enough interaction on this over the years to know that
some people don't mean unten the empathy by that word.
They just mean sharing someone's emotions. And I don't want
to fight with people about words. What I'm really interested
in is these underlying relational and emotional dynamics that really
become forms of emotional blackmail. That's another way to talk
about what I'm after is when when emotional responses can
(07:17):
become a tool of emotional manipulation and emotional blackmail. You
don't love me if you refuse to use the process.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
What we've been seeing thrust upon us since election day, right,
which is like I mean, like many people my listeners
knowing for like many people, to relax at night, I
just watch old election like election night coverage, and so
I'm going through I'm going through some of the more
crazy responses right now the following day. And that's a
common refrain. You had the opportunity to elect this XYZ
(07:52):
you know, this person who will represent XYZ group, and
you didn't. This is why you hate us. It is
it's blackmail. It's such a good way to put it
before we move on, because I want to connect now
these two ends of this conversation, the direction of your
book and this conversation about empathy. However, you said something
(08:15):
that really just blow blew my mind because it's what
I'm exploring in my personal thought life right now and
on my podcast, which is this idea and I can
talk to you about this because you're a Christian. So
this is this idea of the enemy inverting the created order,
and how I always talk on this show a lot
about how the enemy can't create, can only imitate, and
(08:36):
that is why the imitations always feel a little bit off,
a little bit it's not quite the same. Your Disney
reboot isn't quite the same as the original Grim's fairy Tale.
You said, I wrote this down. It said, it's really
interesting that empathy is a new word. I did not
know this. I feel like how I felt when I
found out dinosaur is a new word and not an
(08:57):
engine word. It's like, okay, now I have a new framework.
And what I wrote down is length. This is a
problem of language and of the inversion of holiness. So
the idea of like sympathy is a biblical, scriptural, scriptural term.
(09:18):
Empathy is the weak imitation of that, and it's an
inversion of the holy order of sympathy.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
That's right. And so if you think about this is
the way that the devil likes to work. He wants
to an open assault. Sometimes it can be resisted, but
if you can subvert the language, if you can modify,
and I think that the shift from sympathy to empathy. Again,
I don't want to fight about words. If somebody wants
to use the word empathy to mean the good thing, great,
I would say, use ad an adjective tethered empathy, anchored empathy.
(09:47):
That's what I would command as a way to kind
of clarify that you're not doing what so many are doing.
So I don't want to fight about words, but there
is a subtle shift, and underneath it is this this
dynamic that we're talking about. And in one of the
thinkers who really influenced me on the subject is C. S. Lewis.
And obviously the word didn't it wasn't in use common
(10:07):
use in his day. So what did he call it?
He called it the passion of pity, and he said
pity can be used. He said that the pity can
be used the wrong way around. What's pity for? Why
did God give us pity? Well, pity is meant to
be a spur that moves joy to help misery. So
I have joy, I'm in a good space. I'm on
the shore and there's someone sinking, and pity is what
(10:29):
moves me to help them. Price was moved with compassion.
That's pity. But he says it can be used the
wrong way around as a tool of emotional blackmail. And
everybody's experienced this in their personal lives. Just imagine when
a family member, say, has thrown a pity party, or
you know, sulked in order to get their way right,
has wielded their suffering. They put on the long face.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
I want to interrupt you me. Never, I would.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Never never, yeah, no, but yeah, everybody always use a
family member. Did this, right, You've never done that somebody else, Right,
So there's a way we all know that that's possible,
and that soft hearted people are easily steered by that
sort of pity party, by that emotional manipulation. Right, Well,
what happened. So this is an old phenomenon. I think
Adam and Eve right after the Garden, we're probably doing
(11:16):
this to each other. Cana and Abel, we're doing this
to each other. It's an old it's a human problem.
What's different in the modern context is that it was
institutionalized at a societal scale. Right, So, for the last
twenty plus years, we were treated to various forms of
emotional manipulation revolving around ostensible victims, and in the midst
(11:37):
of those there were real victims. There were real people
who had real horrible things happened to them, but their
suffering was weaponized in order to hijack all the major
institutions of society, from the family to the church, to
the government. All of these institutions were sort of it
was a hostage situation, and what people for Christians in particular,
(11:59):
we know we want to be like Christ. We want
to be compassionate, we want to have tender mercies, and
we want to be kind and tenderhearted. And so this
was a really potent weapon against the church to mute them,
to take them off the board unless they resist where
progressives were wanting to take the country. And so they
found it was really effective to say if you don't
don't agree with us, if you don't adopt our victim
(12:19):
groups as victim groups, that you have to defer to,
or that you have to act in behalf of whether
it's immigrants, whether it's LGBT, the racial conversation, all of
these things had a common element which was basically, go
along with us, or you're a hater, you're a bigot,
you're heartless, you're cruel. And Christians don't want to be
those things. They don't like that name. And so in
(12:41):
order to save our reputation, we want to be And
so what we did is one of the ways I
put it in the book is we came to live
under the progressive gaze. It was like there was a
little progressive sitting on every Christian shoulder, evaluating what they
were doing and to see whether it was a.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Gay as in looking not the gays as in your orientation.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Correct, yeah, although that's true. Although there's a funny pun
there that you could probably make. All right, no gaze.
The idea is there's a little progressive on your shoulder
who's evaluating your behavior and saying, are you being compassionate
enough to the right groups? And if you aren't. If
you aren't, then you're condemned and we're going to reject you,
and you're and you don't have a seat at the table.
(13:21):
And Christians began to jump through hoops to try to
prove that we were compassionate enough according to a progressive
definition of compassion, and in doing so, we were hijacked.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
It's such fascinating stuff and I feel like it's all
just sort of bolstering that the period that I have.
You know that that idea, that this is all an
inversion of something that is holy. This is why we
need I talk about this a lot on the show.
This is the political podcast, but I always take it
to church. My listeners know that. But this is why
we need a moderating God. We need a moderating spirit
(13:55):
because we are we will we will necessarily default to
overreaction or passionate responses. And this is something we talk
about on the show quite a bit Doctor Rigney during
the Black Lives Matter movement, and I really did encourage
my listeners to be open minded, to listen to what
(14:16):
people were saying, to try to not respond with justified anger.
I was angry too at the violence and everything that
was going on. But as a Christian, my responses will
let let's take a step back, let's breathe, let's not
respond in kind, but let's see are there any truth?
Is there any truth underneath this anger? Is that empathy?
(14:43):
Do you think that that was that I was asking
my listeners to be empathetic or.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
No, I think that what you just described there. So,
this book Center Empathy has a companion book called Leadership
and Emotional Sabotage, And in that book, the main virtue
that I command is what I is sober mindedness. This
is again another biblical term. And if you think about
what does the word sober minded mean, Well, normally you
think of sober in terms of a drunkenness and alcohol. Right,
if you get drunk on alcohol, you're not sober, and
(15:09):
so you need to sober up. The basic biblical claim, then,
is you can be drunk on more than just alcohol.
You could be drunk on emotions. And we actually talk
this way pretty regularly about people who are blinded by anger,
or overwhelmed by grief, or paralyzed by fear. This language
of my emotions are so potent that they overwhelm my
rational faculties. And I don't see straight, I can't think clearly.
(15:30):
I'm not stable. Well, to say then we need to
be sober minded is precisely what you just said. We
need to actually step back and assess. Here's a big reaction,
there's protests, there's violence. What's going on. We need to
get to the bottom of it. We can't do that.
It's really difficult to do that. If the rules of
the game, if the pressure is whatever in anybody who
(15:51):
claims to be a victim must be affirmed, believed, never questioned,
never challenged. You can't even ask those questions, like to
do what you describe. Hey, let's step back and assess
is it true? Is it false? If you tried to
do that, people would say, you're so heartless, you're so callous.
Do you not care? Do you not see that the
people are suffering, and they would wield the emotional pain
and distress of ostensible victims to mute the discussion that
(16:16):
you think is important. Like, I'm all in favor of
let's if there's real suffering, right, then we want our
emotions to go along with reality. We want it to
We want to feel deeply, we want to feel deep
compassion and be moved by that compassion to actually help people.
But that assumes that you've taken the time and have
had the mental space, the emotional space to sober mindedly
(16:38):
evaluate what is true and false. And the last twenty
years have really been this exercise, and we short circuit that,
and it's all reactions, it's all passions, it's all emotions,
and it's amazing how much destruction can happen with that
banner of compassion being waved over it.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Let's connect this to the political reality of this, because
I think I feel like we're already there, but yeah,
there is this idea, and I think this is really
what prompted me to even get into the podcast space,
and because I was just seeing so many people talking
past each other and no one digging in. And I'm
(17:17):
very conservative, so I I I always espouse those values,
and I think I'm right, so that that's the that's
the the angle that I argue from. But I also,
you know, as a Christian, understand this need to tolerate
where people are coming from and figure out their needs
(17:40):
because that's a crisis, a need filler. So that means
that's what we have to be too. But at the
same time, the city, the all of the language around
this these topics is so heated and and I've come
to understand now that that's on purpose. And you've laid
this out very well in your book, But what is
going on with why liberal women? Then? If we've seen
(18:02):
this huge swing to the left, this is now. I
mean again, I just told you I go through my
election night, you know, my cocaine, my election night cocaine.
I take those hits a lot. And one of the
common refrains I hear about that is college educated white women.
And the way they say it is that the rest
of us are just uneducated. If you didn't go to
(18:23):
college like that college is the marker. Or if you're educated,
college educated white women and they always talk about that group,
those are the group that came that's the group that
came through. That's the group that came through for the left.
It's a very venerated position. And now we are moving
even doctor Rigney's you must know to a statistic where
(18:44):
in some communities it's already more where there are more
women in graduate programs postgraduate programs than there are men,
that there are more white women with freed white women
than men. And so there seems to be a connection
between that rise in I don't want to say quality
(19:06):
of education, but level of education and the way people vote.
What's the connection you're making? Yeah, what are you claiming here?
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Yeah? So there's let me make connect three elements there.
One is that higher education is where progressives catechize the
next generation in their ideologies. So that's what's going on there.
It's the some people go to Sunday School to learn,
you know, their deepest beliefs. Our universities have basically become
a form of They're like temples in the new civil
(19:37):
religion that kind of imparts progressive ideology and catechises people.
So that's one elements. That's where the college piece comes
into play. So what are they teaching and how does
it relate to particularly you mentioned white women. I'd say
two things going on there. One is women naturally are
the more empathetic sex. Okay, everybody intuitively knows this. Modern
ideology says, you're not allowed to say that, But men
(19:58):
and women are different, and by God's design, this is
actually a strength of women. God gave them this compassionate,
tenderheartedness in order to serve communities, and it's one of
the great blessings. It's why women are great nurturers. It's
why it's connected to their mothering, their ability to into
it and read emotions. Well, you have an infant who
can't speak, how do you know what they need? Well,
(20:19):
mothers are highly attuned to the emotional distress of their infants,
and then of their children, and then of their husbands.
And therefore they act as a kind of glue that
holds communities together, and they're ready to move towards suffering
with comfort and care. This is a great blessing. But
what's a blessing in one place becomes destructive in another
when it comes to drawing clear lines, when it comes
(20:40):
to setting boundaries and perimeters, when it comes to guarding
the doctrine worship of the church, or maintaining a border
in a nation, that same impulse of care, nurture, compassion, sympathy, empathy,
whatever word you want to use, becomes a liability because
it's more likely to justify, rationalize great evil in order.
And if someone presents as a victim and so that's
(21:01):
what's good. There's a feminine piece there. Now why, particularly
white women, I think this is where the victimhood Olympics
that we witnessed over the last ten years, where victimhood
conferred in vulnerability, and everybody was carved up into either
oppressor or oppressed, and it was just a question of
how much oppression you could pile up so that dynamic
(21:21):
once those became once those were the rules of the game.
For white women in particular, I think two things happened
for white women. On the one hand, they're a part
of the oppressor group according to society's definition, because they're white.
They've been a part of the oppressor class, and therefore
they don't want to be that. They don't want to
be the evil. They don't want to be the villain
in the story, and they don't want to be the
uncompassionate one. And so therefore they identify with and seek
(21:43):
to help whatever victim group presents itself as a way
of compensating. It's a form of guilt. It's a manipulation
by guilt and by their feelings in order to get them. Now,
you can be the good guy in the story if
you just go along with all of the progressive agenda.
The other way that this played out, though, is I
think this is part of what's behind the explosion of
(22:05):
the transgender movement, say in the last eight eight or
so years, because what that enabled was a white woman
who was at one level at the top of the
oppression hierarchy. You're not the highest white men. White straight
white men are at the top, but you're pretty close. Well,
all of a sudden, if you're transgender, you just inverted
the hierarchy. You're now the greatest victim. You're the greatest
(22:25):
oppressed group ever, and now everybody defers and accommodates you.
Society now revolves around you. And this is what we've
done over the last eight years. As we've said that
the most immature, reactive, and deranged people, all of society
must be reorganized around them. And you get this really
strange phenomenon where women in particular that maternal nature they have.
(22:48):
Because you mentioned white college educated women, usually it's unmarried
as well. That's another piece.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
It was about to go there, Doc, I was about
to ask you that is there a connection between marriage
and child?
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Exactly right, because what's happening is is that maternal nature
is still present in women. Yes, God, God, it's just there. C. S.
Lewis once made this point that if you don't eat food,
the appetite still needs to be filled, and so you're
gonna gobble poison. And so what's happened is in the
absence that's right, fur babies, and it's the maternal nature
is still there. But instead of having its own, your
own children to care for, to nurture and to raise,
(23:23):
that feminine impulse under the influence of that progressive ideology
learned in college, seeks out surrogates. And so that could
be the fur babies, or it could be the most
deranged people on the planet, So say, men who think
they're women. And so you have these this mama bear impulse,
but instead of defending her own children, she's now forcefully
(23:44):
advocating that Bruno be allowed to use the girl's bathroom.
And it's and it's Mama Bear. It's like it comes
out there's this intensity, this emotional like we have to
protect these people and help these people, and that means
we must castrate them, and that must we have to
give them the hormones. We have to do all of
these things in the name of that's what compassion demands.
And it's a perversion again, like you said earlier, it's
(24:06):
a corruption of something that is really, really beautiful, Like
it really is a version of.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
The Holy Order. This interview could be about everything. I'm
thinking about my next book already, but like how everything
is holistic, right, we can't None of what Ale's American
society is going to be healed if we don't deal
with it all at the same time. But this is
really a big deal marriage and family. What did I
(24:32):
write down while you were talking The glue that holds
the communities together, that's womanhood. And so what do you do?
I was right from the Garden of Eden. What do
you do when you want to disrupt the community, when
you want to disrupt the order, you disrupt the very
vessel of new life, which is womanhood, right, you disrupt that.
Everything's inverted, even the idea of the last shall be first,
(24:55):
and the first shall be last. So how do these
people who are first on earth?
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Know?
Speaker 3 (25:00):
How do they avail themselves of that holy order? The
last shelby first? They got to be last and first?
How do they do that? You got it? It's a
race to the bottom to get to the top. It's
all inverted and it's just so insidious from top to bottom.
But I feel like, really, when we get down to this,
because today, when I get off this podcast with you,
(25:22):
I'm going to break down this tragic murder that happened
I think in Tennessee, where a young black boy stabbed
a young white football player to death over something silly.
And we have I talk about these uncomfortable things all
the time on this show, but one of the things
I talk about is, yes, there's race angles here, but
this is a socioeconomic and spiritual deficit that starts with
(25:47):
the family. Everything starts with the family. And you're saying,
even the way women vote starts with the family, whether
you have one or not, whether you commit to one
or not.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
That's right. And so this is why feminism. So when
I've there's a chapter in the book called feminism Queen
of the Woke, because under that undercurrent was there in
all of these various controversies, whether it was over to
the LGBT stuff or the race stuff or these things,
this was a common element because of the natural female
empathy that they have. But what you said is right,
(26:23):
And this is the way that men and women are
designed to work together. So men are designed by God
to set structures right. So men build houses. Women make
them into homes. Okay, they make them warm and full
of life. Men set the perimeter, and then women make
the life happen inside. That's that's Women are the life
givers and the nurture is Eve's name. Her name means life.
(26:44):
Why did Adam name her that? Because she's the mother
of all living. So his job was to guard the garden, right,
and he failed. And when he allowed the serpent to
come into the garden and question God's word and attack
his wife. He should have been a man and he
should have dealt with the intruder, and he failed and vocation,
and because he failed, then she fails as well. Right,
she blate believes the lie, and then she offers the
(27:07):
fruit to her husband. And now you have sin entering
the world through the fall of Adam and Eve. So
these dynamics, like it really is, when it works well
by God's design, it's a beautiful thing. But then when
think but the disruption of that family, the destruction of it,
the dismantling of it, the inversion of it, all of
these things cause massive social problems down down the road.
(27:27):
And what we're what we're faced with now is that
there are problems that God intended to be addressed through
different means, Like the church has a role, the family
has a role. And what we've said is we can
dismantle the family, we can sideline the church, and then
we're just gonna use the police to fix this. And
it's like that will never work. It will like that
that you're trying. It's like trying to hammer in a nail,
(27:49):
but you're gonna use a screwdriver. It's like, I don't
care how much you you whack it with that screwdriver.
You're not gonna drill that hammer that nail into that board.
And we're using the wrong instruments because we've lost sight
of the way that God made the world.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
That's how good we're using the wrong instruments. I absolutely
and again I think this all goes back to this
idea of being totally disconnected from the basis of egg creation,
but be even the on more secular level, the creation
of this nation and the ideas that allow for thriving.
(28:22):
One of the one of the most interesting things that
happened during the Black Lives Matter movement was that the
national organization Black Lives Matter scrubbed their site, scrubbed their
I'm sure you remember this, they scrubbed their about page
because they very clearly talked about the destruction of the
nuclear family and the patriarchy, particularly when it comes to
(28:45):
Black America. Now, if we're gonna look at the results
of that, you know that push in Black America specifically,
and I just gave you that example about that terrible murder,
which is not an isolated incident, unfortunately, then we can
see a direct line between the destruction of the patriarchy
and complete and under chaos. I like what you say
that men are the watchers on the wall. They set
(29:08):
the perimeter, and women make everything inside a home, a community,
a space where a man can go and live. And
so we've inverted that. Now we've made women the one
standing on the wall. What does that mean for men?
What are men supposed to be doing.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Men check out, men, men go watch tv a men
look at porn like it's in other words, there's nothing
to that because they're not being asked to do the
hard thing of building and sustaining a civilization. Then it's like, well,
I might as well go do a fake one on
my video games. That that's what that's what men do,
and it's an abdication and it's a failure, and men
do need to man up. There's it's a time to
build and there's a time to fight. And part of
(29:48):
the the in my book, I'm there's a way in
which I'm directing a lot of my exhortations to men
to say hey, because because men can be easily steered too.
It's not just that women. Yes, but if it's interesting
that one of the dynamics is you know, there's the
old joke if you remember the movie My Big Fat
Greek Wedding, Oh yeah, I love it, And in that
movie the wife says at one point, you know, the
(30:09):
husband is the head, but the wife is the neck,
and she turns the head wherever she wants. That's right. Well,
good men especially have a real hard time dealing with
female agitation, angst, and heavy emotion, and they'll do anything
to make it go away, right. They'll choose a short
term quick fix rather than maintaining their vision of what's
the long term good for their wife or their daughter,
(30:32):
or their sister, or their mother or their community. They
just want it to go away. And part of what
I'm commending is men need to have the stamina and
the sober mindedness and the courage to be able to
be steady as all of these conflagrations are happening all
around us. And in order to do that, you do
have to have all of your natural loves anchored. I'll
(30:52):
take it back to see us. Lewis again one of
his big hobby horses. He wrote about this in multiple books.
He wrote an entire book on premise is that our
natural loves, if they become ungoverned, become highly destructive. So
he regularly talks about maternal love. Is an example, family love,
which is a glorious thing, but when it becomes untethered
(31:14):
from the love of God, becomes a maternal vampire that
possesses and dominates and is very destructive. Same thing happens
with paternal love or the love of friends. Or romantic love.
All of these are great and good, but they need
to have God's hand on the reins. And if you
remove God's hand from those rains, all of those good things,
he says, become demons. He said, when love becomes a god,
(31:37):
it becomes a demon, and it destroys everything he and
so he illustrated it with those loves. My project has
been to say, well, is love for the hurting, love
for the weak, love for the broken?
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Is?
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Is that like that? Is it good?
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Like that?
Speaker 1 (31:51):
And the answerest it is if God's hand is on
the reins. If it's not, well, then you can't have
a border. Here's a funny illustration of this, appreciated sometimes
when people unintentionally market your book. But I had a
friend send me a picture from the Mexico side of
the southern border, and written on the border wall in
big block letters was the word empathy. And I just thought, well,
(32:14):
that's what I think, because because what's the argument there
that someone says, hey, this border wall, it's a graffiti artist. Empathy?
The idea is empathy means you're not allowed to have
a border. You're not allowed to have boundaries. You can't
put up walls, and it's like, that's the point in
doing so. We lose our boundaries, we lose our sense
of our self, and it's just one big blob of
(32:34):
feelings that just run us left and right and up
and down and blow up and shut down, and there's
no structure, there's no order because we can't actually draw
those clear lines.
Speaker 3 (32:45):
Bill, you write a lot in your book. You actually
connect this to the church and how empathy has invaded
the church, particularly the evangelical church. And I'm an evangelical
or I guess I would be considered an evangelical non denominational.
I had a conversion experience as a teenager. Uh, And
it's really it has infiltrated the church. And I'm wondering
(33:07):
how we you know what, let me not let me
read what I let me read this, Okay, I'm trying.
I'm sorry. I'm organizing my thoughts on the fly. You're
witnessing in real time, guarantee, trying to think through issues.
It's literally what this show is about. But I'll just
read what I wrote to you because I want to
talk about that idea of the border empathy and in
(33:31):
groups and out groups. You said this par reviewed study
concluded that empathetic concern does not reduce partisan animosity in
the electorate, and in some respects even exacerbates it. This
study found that high empathy people view the out group
more unfavorably relative to their own group than low empathy people,
and that they may even take more delight in the
(33:52):
suffering of some of the out group members. And then
to bolster your your point, you use some examples of
COVID shaming. How all, you know, we don't have to
re litigate all of that. We know murderers and killers
for wanting to go outside and stuff like that. But
I was really interested in that concept of in groups
and out groups and how that manifests itself, not just politically,
(34:15):
even in the church. The church has sort of glommed
onto this idea of empathy, and in doing so we
have sort of created in groups and outgroups within the
structure of the church.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Yeah, so the basic idea there is that again, because
compassion and emotion sharing needs to be tethered. When it's not,
it becomes very selective and myopic, which means empathy for
the people that I care about is often accompanied by
great hatred towards those who are opposed to them. Okay,
(34:53):
So this is why Paul Bloom, who wrote a book
in twenty sixteen I think called Against Empathy, great title,
The Case for Ration Compassion. One of his famous statements
that always stuck it got me onto this. It stuck
with me was when most people think of empathy, they
think of kindness. I think of war, and you think, what,
why would you think that? He said, well, yeah, he
looks at the Middle East and he says, there's just
(35:14):
empathy everywhere in the Middle East. Why Well, because this
group empathizes with their people and therefore disdains hates and
contobe great cruelty to their enemies in the name of
their compassion. So C. S. Lewis again, I'll come back
to him. He's a great influence on me. He once wrote,
even a good emotion like pity, if it's not controlled
by divine love or justice, leads through anger to cruelty.
(35:39):
So just think about that. Pity leads through anger to
cruelty because most atrocities are sort of motivated or prompted
by the other guy's atrocities. And so when we feel pity,
say for the oppressed classes, and we don't connect it
to God's law or God's standards. It leads, by a
very natural process, to a reign of terror, to brutalities.
(36:01):
We can do great evil in that we can be
very cruel to people in the name of empathy, which
is what you saw with the COVID shaming, where because
this person wouldn't get the vaccine and then they die,
all of the rejoicing and the glee at like serves
you right, because you were evil for not wearing the
mask or getting the jab.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Or what by that insurance company, the president of the
insurance company that was murdered by I won't say his name,
that young man.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
That young man. That's exactly right. Because again the principle
again this is a Lewis quote. Mercy detached from justice
grows unmerciful. It's so good, mercy detached from justice grows
unmerciful because he Lewis compares it to like a plant.
And there's certain plants that only grow like in mountain
rocky mountain climates, and they thrive in their environment. But
(36:48):
if you were to transplant that plant mercy from the
crags of justice, and you put it in the swamp
of humanitarianism, it becomes a man eating weed and devours everything,
and it's like, that's what's happened, is we detached our mercy,
our empathy, our compassion, from biblical justice, from truth, from reality,
(37:09):
and therefore this man eating weed has been devouring everything
inside and that does happen. And the Church was complicit
because we very clearly have commands from Christ and from
our God, who says, be kind, be compassionate. And so
the world discovered a very potent steering wheel, right. All
they had to do was say, that's what we're after.
(37:29):
And there's books that have been written on this phenomenon
where progressive billionaires discovered that the way to sideline the
church was through this combination of empathy and then the
redefinition of justice as social justice, and all of these
sort of things were ways that and that were baptized
with Bible verses. I just put a Bible verse on
top of it. And all of these progressive ideologies flooded
(37:50):
into the church in order to steer them, mute them,
hijack them, and slow any resistance to that agenda.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
And what I know, we're I hate that my podcast
is only less than an hour because I have so
many more questions. Maybe you can go back later. I'll
interview on one of you, one of your other seven books.
Do you even work or do you just write books?
Speaker 1 (38:13):
I write books, I preach sermons, I teach classes.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
It's it's great the work of a man. Okay, well,
but you do. I love the idea you connect it
in the church to and my my bff Wendy and
I talk about this all the time. We talk about
the problem of women pastors and how it is a
bell weather. It's always a bell weather without fail for
(38:40):
the ultimate, the eventual collapse of the doctrine of a
church or an organization. You talk a little bit about that.
It's all connected to this whole topic of the leftward
shift of white liberal women. Talk to us about that
and how empathy has now caused the church to remove
some of our most sacred doctrines and in turn that's
(39:03):
causing a collapse. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Well, it's related to that idea that God designed men
to set the perimeter, and so when you apply that
principle to the church, it means that God insists in
the scriptures that men are to be the pastors, because
the pastors are to guard the doctrine worship of the church.
And it's a well documented phenomenon that churches that ordain
(39:29):
female pastors very quickly abandon orthodox Christian doctrine and especially
historic Christian views of morality on things like sexuality and
things like that. So when you think about the mainline churches,
for example in the United States, the United Methodist Church,
or the Episcopalian Church, or the PC, the Presbyterian Church USA,
(39:51):
which was is the Liberal Presbyterians, all of them back
in like the fifty sixties seventies began to ordain women
under the influence of feminism, and they said, we're not
going to restrict the pastoral office to men. We're going
to ordain memen women. Very quickly, within the next twenty
or thirty years, all of them have been Therefore, we're
sanctioning sodomy, celebrating sodomy, ordaining gaze to the ministry, and
(40:11):
then sanctioned gay marriage subsequently as time went on. And
there's a very good reason, and it has to do
with well, once the women are in that pastoral role
with all of their care and compassion, and then the
LGBT community comes to them and says, we're oppressed, we're victims.
We're hurting, we're suffering because we're in the closet, and
because we can't be our true selves. Women very naturally go,
(40:32):
we want to let you come out, and so they
abandon the biblical doctrine. They've already abandoned the biblical doctrine
by ordaining the women, and now there's nothing anchoring their compassion,
and so now they indulge. And that's where you get
where we are today, and it floods into all sorts
of other areas, whether it's the doctrine of Christ. You
get these bizarre phenomenon where these churches are instead of
(40:53):
praying to God our Father, say well, we're going to
pray to God our Mother. And at that point it's
just a different religion. It's no longer Christian in any
means sense at all. It's just a it's just they're
pagan priestesses now. They but they still inhabit old church
buildings and they have Presbyterian on the front right next
to the rainbow flag. And it's that phenomenon that you go,
how did that happen? And it's like this was a
(41:15):
major component of what drove that kind of shift drift,
steering whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 3 (41:21):
I think it's very interesting how the enemy has managed
to infiltrate all of our institutions and even our buildings.
Back in the beginning of this interview, you mentioned how education,
higher education catechizes these beliefs. And I was my daughter's
seventeen she's graduating this year, and so we went to
Northwestern College to visit beautiful campus. All universities, major universities
(41:46):
in America are Christian institutions. They were established by the Church.
This is no different a beautiful legacy of learning about
Christ christ worship. These beautiful old, beautiful sanctuaries, built churches
on the campus. And what do I see when I
walk into what used to be a church on campus
(42:06):
and is now a cafeteria. I see a sign that
says people who can keet pregnant need healthcare. You know,
you know, it's just it's incredible how an enemy has
infiltrated and now we're giving up these gorgeous buildings. I
was talking to a friend who is a member of
the Methodist Church in Los Angeles last night, and they're
(42:27):
talking about it's a rather conservative congregation. They're talking about
leaving the Methodist Union, But that means they've thought to
leave their historic church building that is very rare now
to have in Los Angeles, and they've got to hand
that over to the enemy. It seems like the enemy
is doing a lot of good work to push us
out of even the physical spaces of our institutions, and
(42:49):
we seem to be okay with that. We seem to
be going along with that just fine.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Yeah, it is a great tragedy that the bright spot
in it is it does seem to me that there
are more Christians who recognize the manipulation and the play
that's been run on them and are trying to kind
of regroup to re anchor themselves in the scriptures, to
be both courageous and sober minded and therefore able to
be compassionate in the way that Christ was to actually
(43:15):
help people, and not being so focused on the immediate
feelings that we say all kinds of lies, like men
can become women, or men can have periods, and men
can get pregnant and all of these sort of insane
things that are demanded of society. More and more Christians,
I think are recognizing we've been played, we've been had,
and we need to go back to basics. We need
to God is God. Feelings aren't God. God is God,
(43:37):
feelings are not God, and our feelings need to obey,
they need to snap to and they need to become
obedient to Christ. It's not just that we need to
take every thought captive. We need to take every feeling
captive and bring it in obedience to Jesus. And the
more Christians do that, I think, the more that we
will see God blessing it. God will pour out of spirit.
God will do great things in the faithful places. And
(43:58):
then you know, those church that are dying, maybe those
buildings will still be there and the rest of us
will get to move back in sometime in the future.
Speaker 3 (44:06):
I know.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Actually no a number of congregations. The congregation I was
a part of a few years ago, we planted a
church and ended up inheriting on this old Episcopalian cathedral.
Basically is it Baptist church, But basically it went for
sale and they were going to turn it into a
wedding venue and we were able to get in there
and snatch it out and now we worship in this
beautiful space. But it's a It was a faithful congregation
(44:27):
that was able to inherit that. And I think you're
going to see more of that as those congregations die,
because there's no life there. There's no spiritual life there,
and there's no physical life there those congregations. Because if
once you've abandoned Christ, once you've abandoned his word, why
why bother getting up in the morning on Sunday morning?
Why not just cleep in? Why not? What's the point?
(44:48):
There's no reason to renew covenant with the Living God
and his people on a Sunday morning. If you're just
gonna echo the very same things that the pagans and
the secularists are saying all week long, you might as
well sleep in and go to brunch.
Speaker 3 (45:04):
Thought about it that way, or her to put that way,
So thank you so much for that. I think that's
a great note to end things on talking to doctor
Joe Rickney. He is the author of The Empathy of
the Sin of Empathy. You can find that on Amazon
or wherever books are sold. Okay, before I let you go,
doctor Rickney, this has been a fascinating conversation. I have
(45:25):
two questions that I typically ask my guests before I
let them go. So the first question is what book
besides the Bible has had an impact on your life?
I feel like I already know the author give based
on this interview, I feel like I already know the
author of the book. But what's a book that has
impacted you?
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Yeah, so I would say one, since I have quoted
Lewis enough, I'll go ahead and give a book recommendation.
So The Great Divorce is this kind of it's a
dream allegory type book where Lewis imagines conversations between those
damned spirits and from hell and in heaven and they
have these conversations, and it's really a way of shedding
(46:04):
light on the choice that confronts all human beings, like, ohre,
you gonna put yourself at the center or you're gonna
put Christ at the center. Like that's the basic choice
that every human being is confronted with. And he's trying
to show the different ways that that choice might manifest.
If you're a woman versus a man, if you've had
this happen to you or that happened to you, and
it's just it's all at root, it's all the same
(46:27):
Self at the center, Christ at the center. That's the
basic choice. But for each of us, that that journey
is going to look a little different, that story is
going to look a little different. So that's a book
that I go back to. I teach it to my
students here at New stan my freshmen and our I
teach freshman theology here, and so my students we make
sure we read that, we walk through it, and I
want them to be able to see what choice are
(46:48):
you facing? Where? Where is that choice for you in
your life right now? Between putting self at the center
of God. So that'd be a book that would be
a good place to start.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
That's a great place to start. I mean C. S.
Lewis is just great period. If I could name a
million moments aha moments from reading his stuff, and I
can't wait to pick his brain when we get on
the other side. Well, okay, the other question I like
to ask is, let's this is this is a lighthearted question,
but you can answer however you want. Let's pretend that
(47:17):
you get to be emperor of America. If somebody just
snaps their fingers and for a day you get to
be Emperor of America. You have full and total control
over everything in society, but you can only do one
thing and then you got to go back to your
regular life. What are you doing as Emperor of America?
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Yeah, so I think probably I would. I would go
the most the most basic and fundamental thing, which would
be to if I could decree it would be every
law in the land needs to be evaluated and potentially
removed if it does not accord with God's law. That
would be. It would just be like, that's that's the
(47:56):
law is. We got to go do an audit of
every law and if it can be derived from and
rooted back in what God has said, He's Lord, so
it'd be acknowledged the lordship that God is Lord. God
is God, and then every law that we have needs
to match that, and then it can be an application
that can be all kinds of different. But if there's
(48:17):
any law that doesn't, it's gone. That would be. That
would be the cleanest and clearest way to try to
bring some biblical justice and biblical roots to the nation.
Speaker 3 (48:29):
Well, that's very good. That's the difference between men and
women everybody. Because I was going to say I would
just put my shop. I would make it so everyone
had to put their shopping cart back. I feel like
doctor Rigney's solution would have more lasting impact, and this
is why men are the ones who protect the walls.
Doctor Rigney, thank you so much for stopping by the show.
(48:51):
What a great conversation. Before I let you go, tell
everybody where they can find you more of your stuff?
Where are you?
Speaker 2 (48:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (48:56):
So on Exit's Joe Underscore Rigney. If you want to
get book, you can get it at Sinochempathy dot com
and there's some other things there. You can also go
to Emotional Sabotage dot com. That's the companion book that
kind of shows more of the solution and sober mindedness.
And then a lot of my stuff is actually on
a subscription service called Canon Plus that has books, audiobooks,
TV shows, some movies. It's a great resource forre it's
(49:19):
a Christian ministry here in our town. That's a kind
of a Netflix slash Audible for Christian edification for the kids.
And a lot of my stuff's there. So if you're
if your listeners like what they heard and they want
to go explore more, go check out Canon plus Plus.
Speaker 3 (49:34):
That's interesting. Well, thank you so much, everybody. I hope
that you've boughten a lot as much out of today's
conversation as I have this is definitely going to prompt
some future discussions on this show. Before I let you know, everybody,
don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. If you're not
already subscribed. It's a great and free way to help
(49:54):
this show and keep my voice independent. Go subscribe to
my subsect, Justicia Davis subseac dot com by my book
Drawing Lines Why Conservatives must begin a battle fiercely in
the arena of ideas and as always until we meet again,
don't forget. Every once in a while, just stop and
listen to yourself.
Speaker 2 (50:14):
A braids masoda that we won't with maath, then we
won't to say, oh we got it? Does no one
get dig that?
Speaker 3 (50:22):
Owen this gonna be okay?
Speaker 2 (50:26):
A braids masoda that we won't was made, then we
won't to say, oh we got it? Does no one
get dig that? Owen it gonna be okay?
Speaker 1 (50:37):
This has been a presentation of the FCB podcast Network,
where Real Talk lives Visitors online at Fcbpodcasts dot com.
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