Ep. 316 - JLTY Plus: The Sin of Empathy with Dr. Joe Rigney

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[00:00:32] Hi everybody, welcome back to another episode of Just Listen to Yourself with Kira Davis. This is a 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 be a great exercise in critical thinking. I'm really excited for this next guest. Please welcome to the show Dr. Joe Rigney.

[00:00:59] He is the author of seven. I'm struggling to finish my second book. He is the author of seven books. He serves as a fellow of theology at the New St. Andrews College and he is a pastor at City's Church in St. 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

[00:01:26] and how empathy is a part of that. You can find him on x at Joe underscore Rigney, R-I-G-N-E-Y. Dr. Rigney, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. 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 leftward shift of white college education women

[00:01:52] and it's really connected to this idea of empathy. We talk a lot about empathy in modern Western culture, particularly in America. But so I was immediately attracted to that. Explain a little bit. How did you get your impetus for this book and why this topic interests you? 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.

[00:02:23] But the basic idea is that compassion, what we call compassion, a love for the hurting and the broken, those 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.

[00:02:45] And the problem in our modern context is that a lot of people can't imagine how something so 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.

[00:03:12] 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, 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, it becomes very, very harmful and great evils can be done in the name of compassion.

[00:03:41] 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 20th century. And it was presented as a kind of upgrade to sympathy, to compassion. It was, you know, sympathy is good, but we could do better. And the better was a more total immersion in the pain and suffering of other people, kind of untethering, let validation of all of their feelings and affirmation of all of their impulses.

[00:04:10] That was presented as a more loving response. And the term for it was empathy. And I saw that and said, no, that's, that's not an upgrade. It's important that our compassion and our sympathy and our sharing of emotions be anchored to something sturdy. Otherwise, we'll 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. I'm really curious about the idea that the word empathy is a new word.

[00:04:40] This is not something I knew I ever heard before. Can you expound on that a little bit? Yeah, actually, it came into English in the early 20th century, and it was a term in artwork. And it was basically the way that when you would see a turn, a painting, you would kind of project your feelings into it. And so interestingly, empathy was about actually originally was about projecting your feelings into, into kind of this, this artwork.

[00:05:03] It kind of migrated, the term kind of migrated and became to came to mean something like compassion, something like sharing the emotions of others. But really, in the last 20 or 30 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. In which she basically describes sympathy as a kind of response to human suffering that is aloof, apathetic, cold.

[00:05:31] 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 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. And I remember watching that and saying that there's something funny going on here. And part of what motivated me was the word sympathy is a Bible word.

[00:05:57] It shows up many times in the scriptures as a, 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 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 going to get swept off your feet. Now you have no anchoring.

[00:06:25] 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 going to go about doing that? Well, sympathy says I'm going to reach in there and I'm going to grab hold of them. So I'm going to join them in this quicksand, but I'm also going to remain tethered to the side. I'm going to grab a big branch or I'm going to tie a rope around my waist so that I'm anchored to the side. That's what's going to 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, and so that was the kind of argument.

[00:06:55] And I've had enough interaction over on this over the years to know that some people don't mean untethered empathy by that word. Or 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 become a tool of emotional manipulation and emotional blackmail.

[00:07:22] You don't love me if you refuse to use the pronoun. That's what we've been seeing thrust upon us since election day. Right. Which is like, I mean, like many people, my listeners know, 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.

[00:07:48] You had the opportunity to elect this X, Y, Z, you know, this person who will represent X, Y, Z 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 out before we move on, because I want to, I want to connect now these two ends of this conversation, the direction of your book and this conversation about empathy.

[00:08:12] However, you said something that really just blew my mind because it's the, 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 the show a lot about how the enemy can't create and only imitate. And that is why the imitations always feel a little bit off a little bit. It's not quite the same.

[00:08:42] Your Disney reboot isn't quite the same as the original Grimm's fairy tale. You said, I wrote this down. I 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 ancient word. It's like, okay, now I have a new framework. And what I wrote down is length. This is, this is a problem of language. And of the inversion of holiness.

[00:09:11] So the idea of like sympathy is a biblical scriptural, scriptural turn term. Empathy is the weak imitation of that. And it's an inversion of the holy order of sympathy. 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 it. And I think that the shift from sympathy to empathy, again, I don't want to fight about words.

[00:09:39] If somebody wants to use the word empathy for, to mean the good thing. Great. I would say use add an adjective, tethered empathy, anchored empathy. That's what I would commend 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 in, in, um, one of the thinkers who really influenced me on this subject is C.S. Lewis. And obviously the word didn't, it wasn't in use common use in his day. So what did he call it?

[00:10:09] He called it the passion of pity. And he said, 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 moves me to help them. Christ was moved with compassion. That's pity. But he says it can be used the wrong way around as a tool of emotional blackmail.

[00:10:37] And everybody's experienced this in their personal lives. Just imagine when a family member say has thrown a pity party or, you know, salt in order to get their way. Right. Has, has wielded their suffering. They put on the long face. Not me. I want to interrupt you. Me never. I would never. Yeah. Everybody. I always use a, a family member did this, right? You've never done that. Somebody else. Right.

[00:11:01] 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, by that emotional manipulation. Right. Well, what happened? So this is, this is an old phenomenon. I think Adam and Eve right after the garden, we're probably doing this to each other. Cain 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.

[00:11:28] So for the last 20 plus years, we were treated to various forms of emotional manipulation revolving around ostensible victims. And in the midst of those, there were real victims. There were real people who had real horrible, horrible things happen to them. But, 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.

[00:11:56] And, and what people for Christians in particular, 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 tender hearted. 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.

[00:12:14] And so they found it was really effective to say, if you don't agree with us, if you don't adopt our victim groups as victim groups that, that you have to defer to, or that you have to act in, 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, 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. Right. And so in order to save our reputation, we want to be.

[00:12:44] 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 good. As in looking, not the gaze as in your orientation. Yeah. Although that's true. Although there's a funny pun there that you could probably make. All right. 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?

[00:13:12] 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. 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. It's such fascinating stuff. And I feel like it's all just sort of bolstering that the theory that I have, you know, that that idea that this is all an inversion of something that is holy.

[00:13:42] This is why we need I talk about this a lot on the show. This is a 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 because we are we will we will necessarily default to overreaction or passionate responses. And this is something we talked about on the show quite a bit, Dr. Rickney, during the Black Lives Matter movement.

[00:14:10] And I really did encourage my listeners to be open minded, to listen to what 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 response is, well, let's 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?

[00:14:41] Is that empathy? Do you think that that was that I was asking my listeners to be empathetic or? No, I think that what you just described there. So this book, Sin of Empathy, has a companion book called Leadership and Emotional Sabotage. And in that book, the main virtue that I command is what is sober mindedness. This is, again, another biblical term. And if you think about what is 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.

[00:15:10] 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. 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 protest.

[00:15:40] 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, anybody who 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?

[00:16:09] And they would wield the emotional pain and distress of ostensible victims to mute the discussion that 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.

[00:16:31] But that, that assumes that you've taken the time and have had the mental space, the emotional space to sober mindedly evaluate what is true and false. And the last 20 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.

[00:16:56] Let's connect this to the political reality of this because 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 very conservative. So I, I, I always espouse those values and I think I'm right.

[00:17:23] So that that's a, that's the, that 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 because that's a crisis and need filler. So that means that's what we have to be too.

[00:17:44] But at the same time, the, the, 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 white liberal women then if we've seen 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.

[00:18:13] 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 college, like that college is the marker for 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 a group that came through for the left. They, it's a very venerated position. And now we are moving even Dr.

[00:18:40] Rigney, as you must know, to a statistic where 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.

[00:19:00] And so there seems to be a connection between that rise in, I don't want to say quality of education, but level of education and the way people vote. What's the connection you're making? What are you claiming here? Yeah. So there's, let me make three, connect three elements there. One is that higher education is where progressives catechize the next generation and their ideologies. So that's, that's what's going on there.

[00:19:27] It's, it's the, um, some people go to Sunday school to learn, you know, their deepest beliefs. Our universities have basically become a form of a, they're, they're like temples in the new civil religion that kind of imparts progressive ideology and catechizes people. So that's one element. That's, that's where the college piece comes into play. So what are they teaching and how does it relate to a particularly, so you mentioned white women. I'd say two things going on there. One is women naturally are the more empathetic sex. Okay. This, everybody intuitively knows this.

[00:19:56] Modern ideology says you're not allowed to say that, but men 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, it's connected to their mothering, their ability to intuit and read emotions. Well, you have an infant who can't speak. How do you know what they need?

[00:20:19] Well, mothers are highly attuned to the emotional distress of their infants and then of their children and then of their husbands. And they, 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.

[00:20:37] When it comes to drawing clear lines, when it comes to setting boundaries and perimeters, when it comes to guarding the doctrine and 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 what's, there's a feminine piece there. Now what's why, why particularly white women?

[00:21:05] I think this is where the victimhood Olympics that we witnessed over the last 10 years, where victimhood conferred invulnerability 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, once those became, once those were the rules of the game for white women in particular, I think two things happen 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.

[00:21:34] 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 to help whatever victim group presents itself as a way of compensating. It's a form of guilt. It's 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.

[00:21:59] The other way that this played out, though, is I think this is part of what's behind the explosion of the transgender movement in the last 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 you're the greatest oppressed group ever. And now everybody defers and accommodates you.

[00:22:30] Society now revolves around you. And this is what we've done over the last eight years is 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, because you mentioned white college educated women. Usually it's unmarried as well. That's another piece. I was about to go there, doc. I was about to ask you that.

[00:22:57] Is there a connection between marriage and child rates? Exactly right. Because what's happening is, is that maternal nature is still present in women. Yes. Like 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 going to gobble poison. And so what's happened is in the absence of marriage. That's right. Fur babies. And it's the maternal nature is still there.

[00:23:19] But instead of having its own, your own children to care for, to nurture and to raise 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 mama, this mama bear impulse. But instead of defending her own children, she's now forcefully advocating that Bruno be allowed to use the girl's bathroom.

[00:23:47] 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 means 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 a corruption of something that is really, really beautiful. Like it really is. It's the inversion of the holy order. Sure, this is the, this, this interview could be about everything.

[00:24:16] I'm thinking about my next book already, but like how everything is holistic, right? We can't, none of what ails 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 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?

[00:24:46] 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 and the first shall be last. So how do these people who are first on earth, you know, how do they avail themselves of that holy order? The last shall be 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.

[00:25:15] But I feel like really when we get down to this, because today when I get off this podcast with you, 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.

[00:25:36] 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 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. That's right. And so this is why feminism.

[00:26:05] So when I've, there's a chapter in the book called Feminism, Queen of the Woke, because under that, 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. And, 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.

[00:26:34] They make them warm and full of life. Men set the perimeter and then women make the life happen inside. That's, that's the, women are the life givers and the nurturers. Eve's name, her name means life. 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 in 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 in his vocation. And because he failed, then she fails as well, right?

[00:27:03] She believes the lie and then she offers the 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 they, but the, 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.

[00:27:27] 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 going to use the police to fix this. And it's like, that will never work. It will like that, that, that you're trying, it's like trying to hammer in a nail, but you're going to use a screwdriver. It's like, I don't care how much you, you whack it with that screwdriver. You're not going to drill that, hammer that nail into that board.

[00:27:56] We're using the wrong instruments because we've lost sight of the way that God made the world. That's so 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 a creation, but even the, on a more secular level, the creation of this nation and the ideas that allow for thriving.

[00:28:22] 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 black America.

[00:28:46] Now, if we're going to 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 utter chaos. I like what you say that the men are watchers on the wall. They set the perimeter and women make everything inside a home, a community, a space where a man can go and live.

[00:29:16] And so we've inverted that now. We've made women the ones standing on the wall. What does that mean for men? What are men supposed to be doing? Men check out. Men go watch TV. Men look at porn. Like it's, in other words, there's nothing to, 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 need, do need to man up.

[00:29:44] There's some, it's a time to build and there's a time to fight. And part of the, the, the, um, 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. Like it's not just that women. Yes. But it's interesting that one of the dynamics is, um, you know, there's the old joke. If you remember the movie, um, my big fat Greek wedding. Oh yeah. I love it. And, uh, in that movie, the wife says at one point, you know, the husband is the head, but the wife is the neck and she turns the head wherever she wants. That's right.

[00:30:14] 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 or their sister or their mother or their community. They'll, they just want it to go away.

[00:30:36] 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 take it back to CS Lewis again. One of his big hobby horses, he wrote about this in multiple books.

[00:30:59] He wrote an entire book on this 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 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.

[00:31:28] And if you remove God's hand from those reins, all of those good things, he says, become demons. He said, when love becomes a God, it becomes a demon and it destroys everything that 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. Is that, is that like that? Is it good like that? And the answer is it is if God's hand is on the reins. If it's not, well, then you can't have a border.

[00:31:58] Here's a funny illustration of this. I appreciate it 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, that's, that's what I'm saying. Because, and what's, 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.

[00:32:27] And it's like, that's the point. In doing so, we lose our boundaries. We lose our sense of ourself. And it's just one big blob of feelings that, 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. I feel like 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.

[00:32:57] I had a conversion experience as a teenager. And it's really, it has infiltrated the church. And I'm wondering how we, you know what, let me not, let me read what I, let me read this. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm organizing my thoughts on the fly. You're witnessing in real time, Karen Davis. That's great. Trying to think through issues.

[00:33:21] 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 groups and out groups. You said this peer-reviewed study concluded that empathetic concern does not reduce partisan animosity in the electorate and in some respects even exacerbates it. But this study found that high empathy people view the out group more unfavorably relative to their own group than low empathy people.

[00:33:49] And that they may even take more delight in the 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 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, but even in the church.

[00:34:17] The church has sort of glommed on to this idea of empathy. And in doing so, we have sort of created in groups and out groups within the structure of the church. 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.

[00:34:38] Which means empathy for the people that I care about is often accompanied by great hatred towards those who are opposed to them. Okay. So this is why Paul Bloom, who wrote a book in 2016, I think called Against Empathy. Great title. The Case for Rational 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.

[00:35:08] 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 empathy everywhere in the Middle East. Why? Well, because this group empathizes with their people and therefore disdains, hates, and can do 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.

[00:35:29] He once wrote, even a good emotion like pity, if it's not controlled by divine love or justice, leads through anger to cruelty. 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.

[00:35:48] 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. 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.

[00:36:12] All of the rejoicing and the glee at like serves you right because you were evil for not wearing the mask or getting a jab or what happened. Or that insurance company, the president of the insurance company that was murdered by, I won't say his name, that young man. 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.

[00:36:35] But 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 if you were to transplant that, 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.

[00:36:59] And it's like, that's, that's what's happened is we detached our mercy, our empathy, our compassion from biblical justice, from, from truth, from reality. 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, 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.

[00:37:29] 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 into the church in order to steer them, mute them, hijack them, and, and slow any resistance to that agenda.

[00:37:58] And I know we're, I hate that my podcast is only less than an hour because I have so many more questions. Maybe you could go back later. I'll interview you on one of your other seven books. Do you even work or do you just write books? I write books. I preach sermons. I teach classes. It's, it's great. The work of a man. Okay. Well, but I, you do. I love the idea. You connect it in the church too.

[00:38:24] 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 bellwether. It's always a bellwether without fail for the ultimate, the eventual collapse of the doctrine of a, 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.

[00:38:54] 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 causing a collapse. Yeah. Well, it's right. 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, in the scriptures that men are to be the pastors because the pastors are to guard the doctrine and worship of the church.

[00:39:22] And it's a, it's a well-documented phenomenon that churches that ordain female pastors very quickly abandon Christian, you know, Orthodox Christian doctrine, and especially historic Christian views of morality on like things like sexuality and things like that. Yeah. So when you think about the mainline churches, for example, in the United States, the United Methodist Church or the Episcopalian Church or the PCU, the Presbyterian Church USA, which was, is the

[00:39:52] liberal Presbyterians, all of them back in like the 50s, 60s, 70s began to ordain women under the influence of feminism. They said, we're not going to restrict the pastoral office to men. We're going to ordain women. Very quickly within the next 20 or 30 years, all of them had been, therefore were sanctioning sodomy, celebrating sodomy, ordaining gays to the ministry, and then sanctioned gay marriage subsequently as time went on. And there's a very good reason. And it, and it has to do with, well, once the women are in that pastoral role with all of

[00:40:20] 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, well, we want to let you come out. And so they abandoned 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, and it floods into all sorts of other areas, whether it's the doctrine of Christ,

[00:40:48] you get, you get these bizarre phenomenon where these churches are, instead of 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 meaningful sense at all. It's just a, it's just, they're pagan priestesses now, but 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?

[00:41:13] And it's like, this was a major component of what drove that kind of shift, drift, steering, whatever you want to call it. I think it's very interesting how the enemy has managed to infiltrate all of our institutions and even our buildings. You, back in the beginning of this interview, you mentioned how education, higher education catechizes these beliefs. And I was, my daughter's 17, she's graduating this year. And so we went, we went to Northwestern College to visit beautiful campus.

[00:41:43] All universities, major universities 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, buildings, churches on the campus. And what do I see when I walk into what used to be a church on campus and is now a cafeteria? I see a sign that says people who can get pregnant need health care.

[00:42:12] You know, you know, it's just, it's incredible how the 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 talking about, it's a rather conservative congregation. They're talking about leaving the Methodist union. But that means they've got to leave their historic church building that is very rare now to have in Los Angeles.

[00:42:40] 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 we seem to be okay with that. We seem to be going along with that just fine. Yeah, it is. It is a great tragedy. 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,

[00:43:06] 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 help people and not be 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.

[00:43:36] God is God. 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'll see God blessing it, God will pour out His Spirit. God will do great things in the faithful places. And then, you know, those churches that are dying, maybe those buildings will still be

[00:44:03] there and the rest of us will get to move back in sometime in the future. I actually know a number of congregations. The congregation I was a part of a few years ago, we planted a church and ended up inheriting this old Episcopalian cathedral, basically, is a 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 up. And now we worship in this beautiful space. But it was a faithful congregation 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.

[00:44:33] There's no spiritual life there. And there's no physical life there. Those congregations, because once you've abandoned Christ, once you've abandoned His Word, why bother getting up in the morning on Sunday morning? Why not just sleep in? Why not? What's the point? There's no reason to renew covenant with the living God and His people on a Sunday morning if you're just going to 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.

[00:45:03] I thought about it that way or heard it put that way. So thank you so much for that. I think that's a great note to end things on talking to Dr. Joe Rigney. He is the author of The Sin of Empathy. You can find that on Amazon or wherever books are sold. Okay, before I let you go, Dr. Rigney, this has been a fascinating conversation. I have two questions that I typically ask my guests before I let them go.

[00:45:30] 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 of the book. But what's a book that has impacted you? Yeah, so I would say, 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

[00:45:56] conversations between those damned spirits from hell and saints in heaven. And they have these conversations. And it's really a way of shedding light on the choice that confronts all human beings. Like, are you going to put yourself at the center? Or are you going to 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.

[00:46:25] It's all the same. Self at the center, Christ at the center. That's the basic choice. But for each of us, 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 St. Andrews, my freshmen. And 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 you facing? 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.

[00:46:56] That's a great place to start. I mean, C.S. Lewis is just great, period. 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'd like to ask is, let's just, this is a lighthearted question, but you can answer however you want. Let's pretend that you get to be emperor of America. Somebody just snaps their fingers. And for a day you get to be emperor of America.

[00:47:23] 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? Yeah. 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

[00:47:47] and potentially removed if it does not accord with God's law. That would be it. It would just be like, that's, that's the 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. There can be all kinds of different.

[00:48:16] But if there's 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. There you go. 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 Dr. Regney's solution would have more lasting impact.

[00:48:43] And this is why men are the ones who protect the wall. Dr. Regney, thank you so much for stopping by the show. What a great conversation. Before I let you go, tell everybody where they can find you more of your stuff. Where are you? Yeah. So on X, it's Joe underscore Regney. If you want to get the book, you can get it at sin of empathy.com. And there's some other things there. You can also go to emotional sabotage.com. That's the companion book that kind of shows more of the solution and sober mindedness.

[00:49:09] And then a lot of my stuff is actually on a subscription service called Canon plus that has books, audio books, TV shows, some movies. It's a great resource for, it's 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. Canon plus. That's interesting. Okay. Well, thank you so much. Yeah. Everybody.

[00:49:37] I hope that you've gotten a lot as much out of today's conversation as I have. This is definitely going to prompt some, some future discussions on this show. Before I let you go, everybody, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. If you're not already subscribed, it's a great and free way to help this show and keep my voice independent. Go subscribe to my sub stack, just care, davis.substack.com by my book, drawing lines, why conservatives must begin to battle fiercely in the arena of ideas.

[00:50:05] And as always, until we meet again, don't forget every once in a while, just stop and listen to yourself.

[00:50:36] This has been a presentation of the FCB podcast network, where real talk lives. Visit us online at fcbpodcasts.com.