In 2019, the year before protests in Minneapolis formed in response to the unlawful killing of George Floyd by white police officers, a local, white, Christian nationalist seminary professor named Joe Rigney began a campaign to popularize a concept he referred to as the “sin of empathy.”[1]
The strategy licenses white nationalism and male supremacy as biblical virtues, giving permission to overlook and even extol systemic oppression as virtuous. In the years after 2019, Rigney and a handful of other hard-right figures molded and refined the notion to apply it to many of the progressive or pluralistic ideas that they oppose.
Rigney’s public writing indicates that his views are mostly rooted in anti-feminist ideology. He is highly critical of the #MeToo movement for sexual assault accountability and frequently describes women’s empowerment as antithetical to biblical patriarchy. The “sin of empathy” has become a response to #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements by white Christian nationalist theologians and pundits who label empathy as “toxic.” This attempted alchemy of empathy into sin by hard-right groups is the latest expression of racist fear over the loss of white Christian power and privilege.
Rigney, along with Doug Wilson, who founded the seminary where Rigney works,[2] and Christian-right podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey use “sin of empathy” or “toxic empathy” rhetoric to characterize movements for equality and social justice as progressive plots to exploit Christians’ natural sympathies for the disenfranchised and toxically promote an “idolatrous” agenda. Stuckey has been particularly public and popular among Christian-right adherents, and she has worked with anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups, including the Family Research Council (FRC). Their rhetoric has demonized #BlackLivesMatter protesters, LGBTQ+ advocates, women’s reproductive healthcare advocates, immigration advocates and “woke” culture, which conservatives use as a derogatory byword for multiculturalism.
Anti-empathy crusaders like Rigney and Stuckey imply that they are the arbiters of true Christian emotional health. They allege that empathy is a form of hysterical overreaction to natural inequalities. Being empathetic, they argue, denies reality because it creates a social expectation that people should uncritically “validate” all the feelings of another. According to Rigney: “You lose the ability to actually make an independent judgment about anything. … In other words, you lose contact with truth.”[3] Rigney went on to publish a book on the topic called, Leadership and The Sin of Empathy: A Christian Guide to Discernment, Emotional Manipulation, Boundaries and False Compassion in 2025.
The “sin of empathy” and “toxic empathy” rhetoric are the most recent manifestations of hard-right rhetoric that dehumanizes political opponents and groups of people based on their supposed deviations from whiteness and Christianity. Such language paints bigotry as godly and hateful ideologies as virtuous.
At its heart, anti-empathy rhetoric denies the experiences of people who face systemic inequalities. This rhetoric reveals an anti-pluralist strategy and threatens democracy at its core, since it encourages white Christians to disregard personal feelings for others — even other Christians, their friends and family members who disagree with their politics. This rhetoric is espoused by white Christian theocrats, male supremacists, and anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigrant ideologues in a manner that distracts from real and harmful inequality in the U.S. today.
‘Toxic empathy’ in response to George Floyd’s murder
Stuckey has framed her work as standing up for white women after the murder of Floyd in 2020. In a 2025 interview with The New York Times, Stuckey said the “biggest surge” in listeners to her program came in 2020 after Floyd’s murder because she refused to “move to the left, especially on social justice and race issues.”[4]
In that interview, Stuckey also said she resisted reading Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility, which encourages dialogue about racism.
“Everyone was saying that George Floyd was killed because of racism. Everyone was saying that white people, and especially white evangelicals, had a role to play in George Floyd’s death,” Stuckey said. “But among white evangelical women, I have been one of the only ones to say, ‘No, that’s not biblical, and that’s not how I’m talking about it.’ I’m not going to shame white women. I’m not going to say that they need to sit down and shut up and be lambasted for something that someone who might have looked like them in the same geographical region did 200 years ago or 50 years ago.”[5]
The statement reflects an attempt to turn collective outrage at systemic racist abuse and momentum for egalitarian public policy reforms into nothing more than racial resentment, explicitly pitting white women against Black people to stifle political reform.
Similarly, in a 2024 interview with the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute — named for Focus on the Family founder James Dobson — Stuckey constructed a straw man argument to suggest toxic empathy allows abortion to occur but also requires poor white people to pay reparations to wealthy Black people. She also suggested that the legacy of chattel slavery, Jim Crow and racially discriminatory government policy does not make Black people “victims of something tangible,” in the same way she sees abortion as creating victims.
“So often on the left, their language is so distorted, like what they mean by ‘victims’ isn’t actually victims of something tangible,” Stuckey said. “They’re talking about something very abstract, like they see Barack Obama as a victim to whom the poor white person in a trailer park needs to pay reparations. It’s not actually talking about victims of real violence or actual oppression, which, of course, you know, like the unborn child that you and I know that we would need to take up their cause and advocate for them.”[6]
Stuckey and Rigney similarly frame women paternalistically as easily manipulated by compassion. In her interview with the Dobson Family Institute, Stuckey said she wrote her 2024 book Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion decrying toxic empathy “for Christian women” because women more frequently fall victim to “progressives” and are manipulated “into taking the left-wing position on something.”[7] According to Stuckey: “They’ll use emotional, compassionate, kind-sounding language in order to get a woman to think: ‘Well, in order to be a good person, in order to be kind, in order to even love my neighbor, then I have to be pro-open borders. I have to be pro-LGBTQ. I have to be pro-choice.’”[8]
Stuckey’s embrace of the phrase “toxic empathy” and her efforts to apply it to contemporary political goals of the hard right represent an attempt to expand the reach of Rigney’s ideas, which have flourished mostly among Christian supremacist theologians.
“I try to occupy that space where politics and theology intersects, Christian theology specifically,” Stuckey said in 2025.[9] She used the spiritual warfare rhetoric of the Christian right to describe political contests: “You’re not simply voting for the lesser of two evils. You are voting to lessen evil.”[10]
Hard-right claim: Compassion creates the wrong victim
At the heart of both “toxic empathy” and “sin of empathy” rhetoric is the idea that compassion isn’t universal and can be corrupted, resulting in sympathy for progressive, secular or “left-wing” political causes rather than right-wing causes. Comments from the progenitors of the rhetoric suggest that the “sin of empathy” is committed when Christians show compassion for the wrong groups, frequently defined as people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and women.
In a 2019 blog post that Rigney wrote from the perspective of a demon he named “Scratchpot,” Rigney advanced a view that people experiencing the effects of systemic inequality have been overly coddled by the church and society.[11] In the piece, Rigney’s demon says: “Compassion, like all of the Enemy’s qualities, is corruptible. In fact, the sheer intensity of its goodness means that, when corrupted, it becomes a most potent demon.”[12]
In a 2021 podcast recorded less than a year after Floyd’s murder, Rigney and Doug Wilson, a Moscow, Idaho-based Christian nationalist and slavery apologist,[13] agreed that empathy can blind people to “truth” and confuse them, making them vulnerable to progressive ideas. They claimed that pressure generated by the #MeToo movement contributes to false accusations of rape and that pressure from the Black Lives Matter movement makes it easier, for example, to punish a hypothetical police officer who, “legitimately fearing for his life,” shot and killed someone who “deserved to be shot.”[14]
Rigney, who according to Religious News Service believes women should not be allowed to speak in church services,[15] has compared homosexuality and feminism to cancer.[16] According to Rigney, egalitarian ideas also make victims of the wrong groups. In a 2024 article for the Christian supremacist blog American Reformer, Rigney seemingly blamed women’s equality for public policies that benefit Black, Brown and LGBTQ+ people, writing that feminism is the “key ingredient” making it possible for “various aggrieved groups … to steer communities into catering to greater and greater folly and injustice.”[17]
In response to Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde’s request to President Donald Trump in 2025 to show kindness to immigrants and transgender people, Rigney wrote: “Feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood that has plagued us in the era of wokeness. And for Christians, [Budde’s comments are] a reminder of how destructive the feminist cancer is in the Church.”[18]
According to some parishioners exposed to “sin of empathy” rhetoric, it helps create an emotionally abusive religious environment. In 2021, interviews with more than two dozen members of Bethlehem Baptist Church, the Minneapolis church that founded the seminary program Rigney led until 2023, found that Rigney’s teachings about empathy were “a factor that they believe shaped leaders’ responses when confronted with claims of bullying, institutional protection, and spiritual abuse,” according to Christianity Today.[19]
In 2023, Rigney resigned from Bethlehem Seminary, reportedly over his theocratic views being out of line with the school.[20] Rigney joined the faculty of New Saint Andrews College, a seminary founded by Wilson, whose Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, has been the center of child and sexual abuse allegations.[21] In a 2022 report about the connection between male supremacist ideology, religious leadership and violence against women, Religion Dispatches noted, “Not only are [Doug] Wilson’s ideas about rape extremely problematic, but he has it exactly backwards: an environment in which women have no power and no voice is an environment in which they’re more vulnerable to abuse.”[22]
Hate groups help spread the message
In 2022, Stuckey spoke to FRC’s Pray Vote Stand Summit and employed anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracy theories and rhetoric to accuse Christians of letting compassion blind them to the “evil” of progressive politics.
According to Stuckey, conservative Christians who do not believe like her “have convinced themselves that politics is beneath them, that it’s divisive, that it’s not loving, that it’s not compassionate, that it’s not empathetic, to talk about abortion, to talk about gender ideology [a dehumanizing phrase that suggests LGBTQ+ identity is not real, but a form of ideology], to talk about the left-wing indoctrination in schools, to talk about destructive left-wing policies.”[23] In a backstage video of the event posted by FRC, Stuckey described herself and other conservative Christians as “a threat to secular progressivism.”[24]
In a Feb. 9 article on FRC’s Washington Stand website, author S.A. McCarthy echoed Stuckey’s politicized rhetoric and wrote that empathy for LGBTQ+ people and immigrants was “disordered.”[25] The article also claimed that the “allocation of empathy” differentiates the political “left” from the “right,” highlighting how “toxic empathy” rhetoric is wielded to widen social cleavages.
McCarthy wrote, “The Right orders empathy according to emotional, moral, and sometimes even physical proximity,” arguing that those most deserving of empathy are those most similar and familiar to you. For white Christian nationalists, empathy is best reserved for those you can relate to or who share your racial, religious or political identity, while to live Jesus’ message in the Gospel of Matthew to welcome the stranger represents something “simply disordered.”
Image at top: Christian nationalist Joe Rigney (from left), Christian-right podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey and Idaho pastor Doug Wilson. (Photo illustration by the SPLC. Source images from YouTube and Reuters)
Citations
[1] Joe Rigney, “The Enticing Sin of Empathy,” Desiring God blog, May 31, 2019.
[2] Dale Chamberlin, “Joe Rigney To Join Faculty of Douglas Wilson’s New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho,” Church Leaders, April 11, 2023; Bob Smietana, “Joe Rigney, Bethlehem Seminary President, Resigns Due to Support of Christian Nationalism and Infant Baptism,” Religion News Service, April 3, 2023.
[3] Joe Rigney, “The Sin of Empathy,” interview by Doug Wilson, Man Rampant podcast, March 18, 2021; Alan Bean, “Here’s Who’s Behind the War on Empathy,” Baptist News Global, April 1, 2025.
[4] Allie Beth Stuckey, “Is ‘Toxic Empathy’ Pulling Christians to the Left?” interview by Ross Douthat, The New York Times, July 17, 2025.
[5] Ibid.
[6] “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion – Part 2 with Guest Allie Beth Stuckey,” Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, October 15, 2024.
[7] “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion – Part 1 with Guest Allie Beth Stuckey,” Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, October 14, 2024.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Allie Beth Stuckey, “Is ‘Toxic Empathy’ Pulling Christians to the Left?” interview by Ross Douthat, The New York Times, July 17, 2025. About 2:50.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Kate Shellnut, “Bethlehem Baptist Leaders Clash Over ‘Coddling’ and ‘Cancel Culture,’” Christianity Today. August 20, 2021.
[12] Joe Rigney, “Killing Them Softly: Compassion that Warms Satan’s Heart,” Desiring God blog, May 24, 2019.
[13] Doug Wilson, “He Believes America Should be a Theocracy. He Says His Influence Is Growing,” interview by Ross Douthat, The New York Times, October 9, 2025.
[14] Joe Rigney, “The Sin of Empathy,” interview by Doug Wilson, Man Rampant podcast, March 18, 2021.
[15] Bob Smietana, “Empathy For Immigrants Sounds Like Christianity 101. Here’s Why Some Say It’s a Sin,” Religion News Service, January 30, 2025.
[16] Joseph Rigney, “Triage in the Trenches: When Do Second-Tier Issues Divide?” Desiring God blog, July 10, 2022.
[17] Joseph Rigney, “Empathy, Feminism, and the Church,” American Reformer, January 26, 2024.
[18] Joe Rigney, “The Bishop’s Untethered Empathy,” WORLD, January 24, 2025.
[19] Kate Shellnut, “Bethlehem Baptist Leaders Clash Over ‘Coddling’ and ‘Cancel Culture,’” Christianity Today, August 20, 2021.
[20] Bob Smietana, “Joe Rigney, Bethlehem Seminary President, Resigns Due to Support of Christian Nationalism and Infant Baptism,” Religion News Service, April 3, 2023.
[21] Cait West, “Sexual Abuse Is Inevitable in Christian Patriarchy; Just Take a Look at Doug Wilson’s Christ Church, and its New ‘Documentary’ ‘Eve in Exile: The Restoration of Femininity,’” Religion Dispatches, Political Research Associates, May 31, 2022.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Allie Beth Stuckey, Pray Vote Stand Summit speech, Atlanta, Georgia, 2022.
[24] Allie Beth Stuckey, “Christian Theology Puts You at Odds With Culture,” interview with Marjorie Jackson, Pray Vote Stand Summit, Atlanta, Georgia, 2022.
[25] S.A. McCarthy. “Empathy Disorder: The Key Difference between Left and Right.” Washington Stand. February 9, 2026.
