Some conservative Christian leaders and influencers are warning their audiences about what they call “toxic empathy,” while others argue that empathy is a Christian virtue—or at least not a harmful one. The debate centers on how empathy is being framed, who is driving the critique, and how other Christians are responding.

In 2024, Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative Christian author and content creator who runs a podcast called Relatable, published a book titled Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.

Despite what the title (and certain critics) suggests, Stuckey does not believe that empathy is inherently toxic. In her book, she defines empathy as the “ability to place yourself in another person’s shoes.”

 She goes on to write that “empathy is a powerful motivation to love those around you. It precludes unfair criticism and presumptuousness and motivates us to help people who need it. This kind of empathy can help us become better neighbors, friends, and parents, as we consider how to treat people the way we’d like to be treated.”

Stuckey notes that this sounds a lot like Jesus’s command to love one’s neighbor as oneself (Mark 12:31).

However, Stuckey and other conservative Christians claim that empathy is being exploited to further political progressivism. 

Stuckey lays out several examples of what she calls “toxic empathy” pushed by politics:

If you really care about women, you’ll support their right to choose.

If you really respect people, you’ll use preferred pronouns.

If you’re really a kind person, you’ll celebrate all love.

If you’re really compassionate, you’ll welcome the immigrant.

If you’re really a Christian, you’ll fight for social justice.

Essentially, Stuckey argues that  toxic empathy is when a political position is cast as the morally right way to think, and disagreement is cast as immoral and inhumane.

Stuckey is not alone. In 2025, theologian Joe Rigney published The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits. And just a few months before Stuckey published Toxic Empathy, Megan Basham wrote Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. 

Rigney resonates with Stuckey’s wariness about empathy being used as a political tool. And Basham shares Stuckey’s disdain at certain other evangelicals who they believe have fallen for toxic empathy.

The rhetoric surrounding toxic empathy has extended far beyond the pages of these books. In April 2025, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde pleaded for mercy from President Donald Trump on behalf of immigrants and queer youth.

 In response, one Utah pastor posted on X:

Do not commit the sin of empathy.

This snake is God’s enemy and yours too. She hates God and His people. You need to properly hate in response.

She is not merely deceived but is a deceiver. Your eye shall not pity. pic.twitter.com/JBKT3Y0BUw

— Ben Garrett (@tompawnbadil) January 22, 2025

Joel Berry, managing editor of the Babylon Bee, a Christian satire site, affirmed the idea of toxic empathy. He shared a quote from Flannery O’Connor, the master of southern grotesque literature:

If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

One of America’s greatest modern writers Flannery O’Connor defines “toxic empathy:”

“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a… pic.twitter.com/KT7Jdk3zoT

— Joel Berry (@JoelWBerry) October 18, 2024

Some of the Christian defenses of empathy have come from progressive and mainline Christians. Two months after Bishop Budde’s plea for mercy, Rev. Canon Dana Colley Corsello at the Washington National Cathedral devoted an entire sermon to defending empathy as a virtue, not a sin.

Corsello tied empathy to the doctrine of the Incarnation, saying:

I would argue that if Jesus is anything, he is empathic. If compassion is being willing to suffer alongside another, empathy is understanding how they feel. Jesus, as God, embodied empathy by coming to earth as a man and enduring the human experience. This is what we mean when we refer to the doctrine of the incarnation.

However, not all defenses of empathy have come from mainline Christians.

 Shane Claiborne, an evangelical Christian and author of The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, countered the Utah pastor who echoed Rigney’s “sin of empathy” rhetoric.

As Claiborne writes, “There is no such thing as ‘the sin of empathy.’ God is love. And the world will know that we are Christians by our love.”