I grew up Catholic, and though you won’t catch me at church these days, that upbringing still sticks with me. My family and I keep a lot of the traditions alive—not because I’m tied to religion, but because it’s part of who I am. It gave me a blueprint for how to treat people, and there's no reason to toss that out.
I’m putting that out there so nobody reading this thinks I’m against religion. I see no point in tearing it down or attacking faith either. But that doesn’t mean I don’t scratch my head sometimes when good people—like the ones I grew up with—say crazy things.
Joe Rigney is a theologian and author, a fellow at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. His book The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits, just out in 2025, dives into why he thinks empathy can be dangerous. I watched him defend it in an interview, and like I figured, he’s leaning hard into big, splashy language to sell it. Still, there’s something worth chewing on in his wild idea.
Christians get taught to be kind, soft-hearted, to care for the down-and-out—that’s real. But Rigney’s got a point: bad people can sniff out a bleeding heart and use it. He told this one story that stuck with me—a lady crying about her tough life, tugging at his sleeve, only for him to find out later she was playing him. It’s a lesson I’ve learned myself after enough trips around the sun.
He also talks about staying anchored, not bending your beliefs just because someone’s begging you to. He uses this analogy of a drowning man: an empathic person jumps in to save him and risks drowning too, while a compassionate person holds the boat with one hand and reaches out with the other. It’s a neat picture, but it feels too clean for the real world.
Here’s where I start tripping over these theology talks. We can’t even agree on what words mean. My “compassion” might not match yours, and if we don’t sort that out, we’re just spinning our wheels. Rigney nods at this, but then says “the left” is out to twist definitions—like it’s their fault alone. Come on, language changes all the time, no political team owns that.
Still, I picked up something useful. This idea of fake victims—people using sob stories to manipulate—isn’t new to me. But I hadn’t thought about how Christian kindness, the stuff I grew up on, could be a Trojan horse for it. That’s a real concern some believers are wrestling with.
Here’s where I jump off the ride. Rigney’s argument starts sliding sideways when he leaves us hanging on what a “good Christian” should actually do. He warns about compromising principles, but what principles? What’s the boat we’re gripping while we save the drowning guy? He doesn’t say.
Then, as you’d guess, he pulls out “the woke,” the trans folks, the LGBT+ crowd—his hand’s fully on the table now. To him, good Christians ruin their salvation by empathizing with these groups, by accepting them. Accepting how? Letting them in church? Being friends? He’s fuzzy on that, and it bugs me.
I want to break this down fair and square, so here’s my pushback:
Empathy doesn’t wreck justice—it makes it better. It’s not about ignoring facts; it’s about seeing the whole picture. Take a kid stealing food. A judge who gets why he did it might go for reform, not just jail time. Without that, you get a cold system that punishes but doesn’t fix. That’s not weakness; that’s humanity.
Getting burned by trusting someone doesn’t mean empathy’s the problem. It means we need sharper judgment. Opening up to people takes guts—closing off to avoid hurt is the easy way out, and I’d argue that’s weaker every time.
Those folks posting videos of themselves helping out? That’s not empathy—that’s narcissism. Real empathy doesn’t need a camera. Mixing them up is sloppy thinking.
We’re not robots. Even picking lunch comes with feelings. Understanding how someone feels about their choices doesn’t make us saps—it shows we get how humans work. Rigney’s acting like empathy pulls us out of reality, but it’s part of it.
This is where it gets real for me. Rigney’s fuzzy talk isn’t just a theology puzzle—it’s a loaded gun. People are already using it to justify ugly stuff, stuff that should keep us up all night. Like what? you may ask.
If we lose sight of our shared humanity—Catholic, Buddhist, whatever—we’re not just wrong here, we’re completely lost.
I grew up hearing about the Good Samaritan, a guy who helped a stranger when nobody else would. Rigney’s boat-clinging Christian feels miles from that to me. Apathy, though? That’s the sin I’d conjure, more so if I had to come up with a spicy book to sell.
