Equal Rights Institute BlogIs Empathy Toxic? https://blog.equalrightsinstitute.com/is-empathy-toxic/ Clear Pro-Life Thinking Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:57:57 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://blog.equalrightsinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/cropped-ERI-436A89-Just-ERI-square-512-32x32.jpg Is Empathy Toxic? https://blog.equalrightsinstitute.com/is-empathy-toxic/ 32 32 Is Empathy Toxic? https://blog.equalrightsinstitute.com/is-empathy-toxic/ https://blog.equalrightsinstitute.com/is-empathy-toxic/#respond Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:57:14 +0000 Greg Austen https://blog.equalrightsinstitute.com/?p=11676 It was 2020 (that dumpster fire of a year!) and I was extolling the importance of empathy in a conversation with a friend. I was shocked when he pushed back, calling the term “woke” and “politically correct.” It was the first time I learned that some people view empathy as a dirty word. When I […]

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]]> It was 2020 (that dumpster fire of a year!) and I was extolling the importance of empathy in a conversation with a friend. I was shocked when he pushed back, calling the term “woke” and “politically correct.” It was the first time I learned that some people view empathy as a dirty word. When I asked what word he’d prefer, he said, “sympathy,” and then he tried to make the case that this was a more “biblical” word.

Confused, I also couldn’t suppress an internal eyeroll, but I decided to get curious. It helped that my friend and I had a lot of respect for each other. 

And so, although it took some effort, we both decided to pause, check our reactions, and listen. Good questions followed that helped us unpack how we were defining our terms, as well as the experiences that were fueling our perspectives. In the end, because we both chose to be curious rather than dismissive, we learned a few things. For one thing, we discovered that we were using two completely different definitions of the word “empathy.”

7–10 minutes

Two Different Definitions

For me, defining “empathy” was simple and essential. Empathy is feeling another person’s pain, walking a mile in their shoes. I spent a good bit of my career with National Fatherhood Initiative writing curricula that held up self-awareness and empathy as two of the most foundational qualities for being a healthy human. Without them, it was impossible to grow. For example, here’s some of the content and questions we used to communicate the concept of empathy to incarcerated fathers:

Empathy is being able to feel and understand another’s situation and feelings. A key mark of maturity is being able to take responsibility for ways you have hurt your family. You must understand how your behavior affected, affects, or will affect each family member. The following exercise is difficult but will help you do this. Don’t be tempted to rush through it. Feeling your family’s pain [empathy] will help you change from the inside out. Do your best to put yourself in the shoes of each family member and write out answers to the following questions.

Be as honest as you can:

  • How did my behavior prior to incarceration affect my spouse, children, and/or extended family?
  • What would they remember about how I behaved?
  • How could my past behavior still be affecting them today?
  • How did my arrest and trial affect my family?
  • How do they explain my absence?
  • What has changed in my family since I went to prison?
  • What is it like for them to visit me (e.g. waiting in line, getting searched, etc.)?
  • What do they sacrifice in order to visit me?1

My friend resonated with this definition and the examples, and we discovered he was coming from a totally different reference point. He saw empathy in the current cultural climate being used to say something like, “If you haven’t experienced exactly what someone else has, you have nothing valuable to offer.” For example, someone might say, “Unless you’ve shared in the black experience, you have no part in the conversation.” I acknowledged his point, and we both realized our definitions of empathy were radically different. I fully agreed that you don’t have to have gone through the same experience as another person to help them. Or, said differently, you don’t have to have shared the same life experience as someone to offer wisdom or valuable expertise. For example, must an oncologist have gone through cancer herself to treat cancer patients effectively? Of course not. She just needs to be a good doctor.

Six years after that conversation with my friend, many of us are still talking past each other—me included. For example, when I heard that Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy was a national bestseller, my first instinct was the familiar eye roll.

My definitions and experiences kicked in and I quickly judged her book by its cover. Disgusted, I began to rehearse my mantra: Viewing a basic virtue like empathy as toxic produces a distorted humanity. It contributes to a system that cranks out arrogant culture warriors who don’t listen or give thought to other people’s stories. It shoves aside love and compassion to make room for dehumanization and “owning the libs.” Except…

This is not what Stuckey is saying. I don’t agree with her on everything, but as I found out when I tried to be an honest broker and actually listen to her audiobook on a recent trip, she clearly states that “this book isn’t about killing empathy; it’s about submitting our empathy to God’s definitions of love, goodness, and justice.”

In acknowledging that I misjudged Stuckey, I remain undeterred in showing all who will listen that empathy is not a dirty word. But, again, my journey has taught me that empathy needs nuance, because it can be distorted and misunderstood. 

Empathy Needs Honesty

And this brings me to one more important insight. Although empathy is an essential starting place, it is not a final destination. In other words, empathy by itself is not the be-all and end-all; it is just one vital step on the way to courageous, just, and loving action.

This is something Arthur Brooks articulated well in a recent leadership podcast with Andy Stanley. He asked, “What does it mean to be compassionate?” and gave four steps:

  • Understanding the problem at hand.
  • Feeling the pain of the affected people enough to know why you have to act. [Brooks defines this step as empathy—notice how it’s just step two out of a four-step process.
  • Having the capacity and intellect to know what needs to be done.
  • Having the courage to get it done.

He then offered this brilliant insight:

Empathy [by itself] will hamstring you… if all you have is the pain of somebody who’s going to be affected, you won’t be able to fire anybody if you need to. You won’t be able to give somebody a hard truth. You won’t be able to say to your spouse, “I don’t like how this is working here. We need to change this.” Honesty is a form of love, and the problem is that if all you have is empathy, then honesty very often falls to the wayside.

Two Opposite Errors

When it comes to talking about abortion, I think we’re all swimming in cultural waters that pull us toward one extreme or another: viewing empathy as toxic or viewing empathy as the end game.

Wrongly seeing empathy as toxic can look like not caring about or trying to understand the perspectives of people we disagree with. It can also look like misrepresenting and dehumanizing them with memes on social media. And the opposite error—viewing empathy as the endgame—can hamstring us from expressing our true thoughts and feelings or make us so concerned with listening well that we don’t speak up on behalf of the voiceless and most vulnerable.

You can probably guess from what I’ve said already, but of those two errors I’m more prone to the second one—I can listen and empathize so much that I don’t make a pro-life argument often enough. I hate cancel culture, and it’s not hard for me to humanize people I disagree with, even about really important things. But I’m still growing in, as Albert Brooks says, “having the courage to get it done.” I don’t want my silence to unwittingly contribute to continued massive human rights violations against those in the abortion conversation with the least agency—unborn babies. And so I’m continuing to learn to speak out in classy ways on behalf of those whose lives hang in the balance and who also deserve our empathy. 

We need to avoid both honesty that’s missing empathy and empathy that’s missing honesty. We need to watch out for both errors, but most people lean more toward one than the other, and it can be helpful to know which one you personally are more prone to. I tend toward the second one—how about you?

  1. Inside Out Dad Christian Fathering Handbook (National Fatherhood Initiative, 2008). ↩︎

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