The idea that empathy is a sin seems incompatible with Christian teachings and Christ’s exhortation to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” but it is a fashionable concept in Christian nationalist circles these days.
The phrase comes from the titled of a new book by Joe Rigney, “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits,” published by Canon Press – Douglas Wilson’s publishing company.
Wilson is an infamous Christian nationalist and in addition to founding his own publishing house, he is the pastor and founder of Christ Church as well as the Logos School in Moscow, Id.
He is well known for his position that martial rape is impossible and his defense of American chattel slavery. He’s also something of a mentor to Grace City Church’s Executive Pastor Josh McPherson and GCC’s new school, Garden City Academy, assigns many textbooks printed and some even written by Wilson to its students.
I did a deep dive into one of those textbooks last year, and you can read that here:
Rigney resigned as the president of the Bethlehem Seminary in Minneapolis, MN, in 2023 in part due to his support for Christian nationalism. He was also once a faculty member at Wilson’s Logos K-12 school and has defended Wilson’s mishandling of abuse situation there in which a 53-year-old teacher groomed and then sexually assaulted a student. You can learn more about that story here.
Although Rigney’s new book was just released on Feb. 18, Grace City Church pastors have been discussing and teaching the idea extensively from the pulpit and on podcasts for months.
In a sermon back in July of last year, Vector Academy Director and GCC Pastor Kyle McMullen dedicated an hour to the topic.
“There’s a Christian author by the name of Joe Rigney who really teases out this principle and he coined the phrase that is a provocative phrase but it sticks in your mind and you’ll never forget it, Joe Rigney has coined the phrase ‘the sin of empathy,” McMullen said. “Maybe some of you have heard of it before. He wrote a whole book recently that unpacks this in greater detail. I have not read it yet but I’ve heard him various talks where he deals with this and I want to unpack it a little bit for you.”
As Rigney defines it, the sin of empathy is when you allow the distressed emotions of another person “to control and change and to manipulate your view of reality,” McMullen said.
On Jan. 27, Grace City Church’s Executive Pastor Josh McPherson, GCC’s pastor of “City Groups” and Pastor Ryan Visconti of Generations Church in Arizona recorded a podcast titled “3 Pastors REACT to President’s Trump’s First Week in Office.” In it the three men praise Trump’s performance and integrity and speak about how empathy is one of the worst traits out there, and not worth cultivating.
“Empathy almost needs to be struck from the Christian vocabulary,” McPherson said. “Empathy is dangerous. Empathy is toxic. Empathy will align you with hell.”
And it’s women who are especially susceptible to feeling empathy. That’s why men need to control who they are in contact with.
“It’s not ungodly for a man to speak into who his wife is friends with. Who she can hang out with. Who she listens to,” McPherson said.
Women can be “vulnerable” to friends and those she has a history with, and it’s a husband’s job to control those relationships lest she participate in, spread or listen to “gossip” and “slander” against the church.
Like McPherson, McMullen connects gossip to empathy and frames them as largely female sins.
“Think about the sin of gossip. It often starts with the sin of empathy, doesn’t it?” he said. “Someone has a grievance. Someone else takes it up herself to hear said grievance from the disgruntled person – and yes I know that I said ‘herself.’”
Once you allow these “patterns” and habits to take root you are facing years of an unhappy marriage. A man letting his wife wear the pants in the family is un-Biblical, according to McPherson. She becomes a “Jezebel” and he in turn becomes an “Ahab.”
These are common references in evangelical Christian circles. In the Old Testament book of Kings, a beautiful young princess named Jezebel uses deceit and manipulation to convince King Ahab to worship Baal and other gods. This brings great shame upon their royal house and nation of Israel. In McPherson’s circles, the terms are pejorative, with Jezebel referring to an assertive women and Ahab to a weak man.
And it’s women not knowing their place that brings a lot of trouble and strife to married life.
“One of the patterns we’ve seen in 25 years of church ministry is the most divisive households are those households where there is a loud, aggressive Jezebel spirit wife paired with a weak passive Ahab beta male,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Bro, you gotta get ahold of that woman.’”
You can watch that clip here:
