Casting down imaginations . . . (2 Cor. 10:5)
The high places of old that kings in Judah were reluctant to tear down, even the good kings, were places that presented themselves well. The groves were stately, the trees well-spaced, the shrines impressive, the walkways manicured. There was a sense of the numinous and holy, and a sense of hushed awe suffused the whole, and surrounded all those who came to worship. But everything about it was detestable to Jehovah, who promised to scatter the bones of the idolaters all around their altars, and to cover the green lawns with their bodies.
Liars are most successful when they masquerade as Satan does, as an angel of light. Rancid lies are more easily swallowed when they are coated in something that has the taste of real virtue. This is because, as Dylan put it, Satan comes as a man of peace.
To accept such lies not only enables one to quiet the murmuring of his own conscience, it also allows him to feel morally superior to anyone who dares to disbelieve the lie.
That this kind of thing is going on can be seen when there is a radical juxtaposition between what is being claimed for the lie and what actually happens if the lie is confronted. The COEXIST people start burning stuff again.
One such lie, and one of the central lies of our generation, is the lie of empathy. It is distinguished from actual sympathy, and from real compassion, by the descriptive adjectives that we need to attach to it. We are talking here about toxic empathy. It is untethered empathy. The thing that makes it such a destructive force is the fact that it is untethered. But this leads to a very natural question—untethered from what?
The short answer is that empathy is untethered from love. It is estranged from love, and from the paths of love, and from the source of all love.
And so it happens that respondents to any criticisms of untethered empathy try to act as though the critic is opposed to any forms of tenderness, sympathy, compassion, gentleness, or love, and indeed, that the critic must be advocating a harsh sternness as the appropriate response to anyone who is hurting. These would be the more volatile responses. The respectable responses try to treat the whole thing as an unclear and murky puzzler, in which the critics of empathy have failed to make their distinctions and definitions clear, and thus are in large measure responsible for the angry and volatile reactions. It is the difference between “I can’t believe you said . . .” and “surely you didn’t mean to imply . . .”
Now for the man in the street, for whom the word empathy is simply a rough and ready synonym for sympathy . . . we have nothing but sympathy. But even he needs to beware. He is living in a time when a radical and corrosive relativism is eating out many of the institutions he actually depends upon, and the acid that is doing this corrosive work is empathy—as defined and fostered by the apostles of empathy.
By the apostles of empathy, I mean the people in those white lab coats, residing in Wuhan, who first released it into counseling clinics all over the world.
When words and labels like woke or DEI become radically unpopular, the progressive left is willing to stop using them. But they will fight hard for empathy because so much of their project depends on it.
Take away empathy, and feminism is done. Stick a fork in it, it’s over. When we finally sour on the word empathy, then we will know that the longhouse is burning down. So the stakes are high for them. Rigney and Stuckey have criticized toxic empathy and untethered empathy. Where did all the fire trucks come from?
Nursing mothers should be able to vote absentee in Congress . . . empathy demands it. The Southern border must remain out of control . . . empathy demands it. Jail time in the UK for people who cause online anxiety in others . . . empathy demands it. The disruptive work of DOGE must be stopped . . . empathy demands it. The gender dysphoria that is being fomented in the government schools must be surgically catered to . . . empathy demands it.
But for all its claims to be universal and omnidirectional, this kind of empathy actually has tunnel vision. A mentally-disturbed mother with a transgender three-year-old is catered to, with no objective checks at all, with the end result that the child is mutilated for life. There is no sympathy at all for the child, none whatever. But that child is trans in the same that the same family’s house cat decided to become vegan. And no one cares about the cat. Or the kid. For the kid, there is no sympathy, no compassion, no nothing.
Universal empathy is a reservoir that is almost bone dry, and whatever water it might have is stolen from other sources.
So in the mouths of its own apostles, empathy is supposed to be detached from all judgment, assessment, evaluation, discernment, appraisal, critique, or estimation. The one you are empathizing with is to be received on his own terms, together with his own reality. Because this cannot be sustained with any sort of coherence over time, this will at some point lead to him being received together with his own realities, only now in the plural.
Brené Brown, a well known representative of all this, says that an essential element of this approach is “staying out of judgment.” This is how this false view of compassion detaches from the real world. This means that baked into this approach is the insistence that we make reality optional. This is radical relativism brought down to the individual, in order to destroy lives, marriages, and relationships, one at a time.
Empathy in this sense is the logic of free fall into the Void.
If someone comes to you wounded and bleeding, sympathy requires that you receive him as wounded, and to tend the wound, but untethered empathy requires that you receive without question his account of how he came to receive the wound, even if that account is absurd, incoherent and makes no sense at all.
In the world of therapeutic empathy, there can be no such thing as a self-inflicted wound.
And so it is that untethered empathy requires you build out all your relationships with a firm commitment to a culture of lying. Instead of deriving our definition of love from the standards of God’s law, we find ourselves deriving a bogus definition of love from a loose weave of makeshift lies.
The counselor and the client have clasped hands together, agreeing solemnly to traffic in falsehoods. The counselor invites the client to “tell me your truth, and I will respond in the same currency.” Truth, lies, whatever. This is where that absurd phrase “your truth” comes in.
This is why it is necessary to say that untethered empathy is a sentiment that refuses to be tethered to love. Untethered from what? Untethered from love.
The two great commandments—to love God and to love your neighbor—are commands that are rooted and grounded in the objective and fixed nature of God’s holy character, and as a secondary result, they are rooted and grounded in the nature of the world He created, which includes us, God’s holy law, the reality of our fall into sin, our consciences, and the correspondence view of truth.
Untethered empathy is untethered from a genuine love for God. God says that if we love Him, we will keep His commandments. Untethered empathy says that is just your interpretation.
Untethered empathy is untethered from a genuine love for neighbor. Your neighbor has dismissed a blemish on his neck as a skin rash, or leftover sunburn from his vacation. You know at a glance that it is a serious form of skin cancer. According to this new and exciting empathy way, your duty is plain. Lie your head off. When you have to choose between loving your neighbor and loving his delusions, go with the delusions.
Untethered empathy is untethered from a genuine love for truth. The apostle told the Thessalonians that their salvation was connected to their love of the truth. But it is not possible to love the truth without exulting in the correspondence view of truth. If Christ was not actually raised from the dead, then our propositions that claim He did are just meaningless jabber, and we are all still in our sins. The truth that we love must therefore be tethered to the way things actually are out in the world.
Untethered empathy is untethered from a genuine love for the law. What is love? A biblical definition of love is to treat someone lawfully from the heart. What is sin? Sin is lawlessness. We are to owe others nothing but the debt of love because love is the fulfillment of the law. Love does no harm to its neighbor, and harm is defined by the law. Theft harms, adultery harms, and lies harm, not to mention whatever other harm that might be proscribed by any other commandment.
Untethered empathy is untethered from a genuine love for reality. God has placed us in a fascinating and delightful world, a world that contains worship on the Lord’s Day, buttered corn on the cob, overdone sunsets, mountain ranges to hike, dinners with family, the smell of gunpowder on the range, and to bring butter into it again, buttered toast. The price of admission is to accept it all as a gift, which means accepting it the way it was given. When we open the gift, we must be prepared to receive whatever God wrapped, and not to project into the box what we in a fever dream came to believe we might want to receive instead. God is good, and so reality is never optional.
Untethered empathy is untethered from a genuine love for actual healing. Although the world really is a delightful gift, it is a world that is nevertheless groaning under the weight of our folly and sin. We are a busted and broken race, but God has sent a Savior, and He is in the process of putting everything back together again. But He defines the problem, and so He defines what healing is.
And the way back is the way of love. As His people, we are under obligation to walk in that path, the way of love. He has instructed us how to conduct ourselves as we go, and we must embrace those instructions.
Indeed, it is not too strong to say that we must tether ourselves to them.