Will Spencer [00:00:00]:

I think people can interpret certain responses as callous that are actually righteous. Meaning when the Bible says things like, lord, do I not hate those who hate you? Imprecatory psalms, things like that, that there's a place for looking at evil in the eye and just saying, this is evil, and I hate it. And I think people can go, that doesn't sound very Christian. It's like, no, no, it really is. Jesus called people sons of hell and was moved with anger at real injustice, real evil on the part of, say, the Pharisees. And you should be, too.

Will Spencer [00:00:38]:

Hello and welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast. This is a weekly interview show where we talk to authors, thought leaders and influencers who help us understand our changing world. New episodes release every Friday. My guest this week is Joe Rigney. Joe serves as the Fellow of Theology at New St. Andrews College. He is a husband, father of three, and the author of numerous books, including Live Like Narnian, A Christian Discipleship in Lewis's Chronicles, Things of Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts and the Sin of Empathy, Compassion and its counterfeits. Previously, Dr. Rigney served as professor at and president of Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, a pastor at city's church in St. Paul, and a teacher at Desiring God. Dr. Rigdy, welcome back to the Will Spencer Podcast.

Will Spencer [00:01:20]:

Hey, good to be here.

Will Spencer [00:01:22]:

I have very much been looking forward to this conversation. We talked about, I'm gonna guess sometime last year about leadership and emotional sabotage. And now we have your. I think you said you've called it a prequel, the Sin of Empathy. This is a pretty impressive cover duo, I do have to say, so I really enjoyed this book. I think you nailed a lot of things and I've been looking forward to getting into it with you.

Will Spencer [00:01:42]:

Excellent. Yeah, looking forward to it as well.

Will Spencer [00:01:44]:

So, I don't know, let's just get started. At the beginning of the book. I have a number of pages. I hope you'll forgive me if I flip through the book and just reference a couple different pieces of it. So let's start with the sub of what does empathy mean? Because you worked through it very carefully, which I thought was important. And again, just for a sense of context, I lived in the San Francisco bay area for 16 years and empathy was the currency of that world. So you've really identified something powerful.

Will Spencer [00:02:14]:

Yeah. So that's one of the challenges of a book like this, is what does that term actually mean? And the answer is it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And so at one level, some People use it simply as a kind of a synonym for sympathy or compassion. They just mean caring for people who are hurting. And I'm not fighting with them if that's all they mean. But I do think that frequently it's used as a kind of upgraded form of compassion, where sympathy is viewed as an inadequate response to human suffering, and instead we need to improve upon it through empathy. And when you listen to the folks who want to make that move, the elevation of empathy over sympathy, usually it involves some notion that sympathy is too distant. It doesn't totally dive into the suffering and pain of others, and that what empathy does that's better is it stays out of judgment, it affirms and validates feelings kind of across the board, and therefore it's a kind of greater immersion in other people's emotions, and that's why it's better. And this is precisely where I wanted to come in and say, that's not actually better. That's actually more dangerous, more destructive. In fact, to the degree that your care, compassion, empathy for others loses touch with what is true, what is good, what is for them and for you, it actually becomes sinful. In the same way that an emotion like anger or fear, when it becomes untethered from what is true and what is good, also becomes a destructive force. So that's kind of the idea behind the Scent of empathy is it's an excessive, untethered caring, compassion, or sharing of emotions with those who are hurting.

Will Spencer [00:04:08]:

Yeah, yeah. So you really touched on something in the public dialogue broadly by calling it a sin, the loss of self, diving into this, maybe just for a moment, sort of talk about what that's been like since going back to. I think it was 2019 when you did the Man Rampant. Like, there's the bit in the back where you do the screwtape letters. Kind of. Is that where that started? Is that where you started exploring these ideas? Just talk about that journey for a bit.

Will Spencer [00:04:31]:

Yeah. So that was when it. At least it came out in public. I'd been working on it for four or five years before that, largely kind of inspired by the work of Edwin Friedman, who was influential on the first book, Leadership and Emotional Sabotage as well. And Friedman has a chapter in his book Failure of Nerve, his book on leadership called the Fallacy of Empathy. And so a number of the insights, kind of what prompted me and got me into it was derived from Friedman, and then it kind of dovetailed with CS Lewis. And things I was seeing in the Bible, things I was seeing in the world around me, to kind of work together to produce that conversation with Doug Wilson as well as the Screwtape letters. And then in both of those cases, it was the language, it was the rhetoric that supposedly was what caused the controversy. People had strong reactions to the notion that empathy could be a sin. And that led me to write more on it to kind of clarify any confusion that that might have caused. And now at this point, I think that any remaining confusion is. Is willful misreadings and misrepresentations designed to sabotage. So, but that's where kind of that rhetoric came from. And I do think part of the reaction is empathy is a word. It's an interesting word because it's relatively recent. It's a 20th century English word, came over from German, Whereas sympathy and compassion are much older, have a long tradition of moral reflection, Christian reflection, on those virtues. And empathy is this new thing. And it really kind of made its home, I think, in the kind of therapeutic and the academic and therapeutic world, as opposed to the moral, ethical, philosophical world. And so part of, I think, why people have been brought up short by the title is I'm taking a traditional moral word, sin, and I'm putting it next to a psychological and therapeutic word. And people really don't have a category. So for that, that's jars with them. And I think there's other ways to describe it. Ali Beth Stuckey has been working on a book and came out last fall called Toxic Empathy. And you can hear how that phrase kind of just lives in that therapeutic world. The idea of toxic anything is the way that modern therapy tends to talk. But I think that bringing it into conversation with this moral framework that, no, it's a sin against God to allow your emotions to run you or to allow other people's emotions to run you. The sin's the word for that, not simply toxic.

Will Spencer [00:07:06]:

So maybe you can contrast empathy with pity, because the phrase that I hear is weaponized empathy. It's kind of like grabbing hold, getting your hooks in, and just kind of dragging you to an emotional position that you don't want to be in, where suddenly you have to do what the person says.

Will Spencer [00:07:21]:

Yeah, yeah. So pity would be another one of those older words. It's a Bible word, shows up a lot in especially older translations of the Bible. And the dynamics that I'm concerned about, the actual dynamics could fly under a number of different banners. So I criticize it under the term empathy, because that's the term today. You mentioned San Francisco. You could think of another. A lot of other current political Cultural examples where this notion of a kind of relativistic validating, affirming, celebrating of all feelings that what's what banner does that fly under empathy? But 100 years ago or 70 years ago, CS Lewis and GK Chesterton were criticizing the same phenomenon, using the language of pity. And usually for us, pity involves a more. A stronger asymmetry. There's somebody who's drowning, and we feel bad for them because they're drowning, and then we're moved by pity to help them, and that's all to the good. But the question is, what move do we make? And I think that the right move would be they're drowning, and so I want to reach in to help them, but I'm going to stay tethered to the shore to help pull them out. Whereas the upgraded version, empathy, says jump in with both feet, right? Dive in there with them, lose touch with the side, lose touch with reality, and simply join them in that pain. So that's part of that migration. But Lewis criticized that, using the language of the passion of pity. Chesterton used the language of pity that is untruthful. So untruthful pity is a pretty close equivalent, almost identical to untethered empathy, which is the way that I talk in the book.

Will Spencer [00:09:00]:

Have you been surprised at the impact at just how resonant this has been, or when you started talking about it, were you aware that this is going to set off something?

Will Spencer [00:09:10]:

Yeah. So when I first got into it, I knew that the sin of empathy phrase was mine. I suggested it to Canon when Doug and I did our conversation, and I knew it was a little bit provocative. It was a little bit, I thought, a little bit spicy. But I thought, we'll explain ourselves, we'll make the distinctions. It'll all be fine. And the persistence of the reaction has just made me think, I think I'm over the target. I think I'm actually putting my finger on something. And then really over the last, since then. So that was 2018, 2019, and I wasn't the first, obviously. Friedman had spoken about the danger of empathy in his book. A gentleman named Paul Bloom, a secular sociologist, basically wrote a book called Against Empathy, I think in 2016 that I remember coming across and finding really fascinating as a part of this. So others have been recognizing the dangers of this weaponized, toxic empathy for a while, but really it's been in the last four or five years that it's really gone mainstream. And it just happened that, you know, Elon Musk and others are talking about this phenomenon Usually from different angles, like not always from a Christian one for sure. But recognizing that there's a way that a really good thing, care for others, care for the weak, care for the hurting, can be used as a form of manipulation, can be hijacked, can become a form of emotional blackmail, all of that sort of thing. And that that's a society wide phenomenon. Which means now with the book out, people beyond our typical evangelical circles are listening in and concerned about this. They're associating it with the Trump administration and some of the reaction to left wing wokeness and they're curious, they're asking questions and engaged in it.

Will Spencer [00:10:59]:

So I have a couple practical questions then, because it seems that there's a point where it says because you have to feel what I feel, then you have to do what I say, right? And so like, okay, I can feel with you, I can empathize, sympathize, whatever the broad language is. But then it transitions very quickly into, well, now I get to be in control of the situation. And I think the one point that I wanted to bring up, that I observed before my time being a Christian and since is the phrase love your neighbor, loving your neighbor means doing X, maybe you can talk about that for a second.

Will Spencer [00:11:34]:

Yeah. So there's a way that all of these sort of good things, this is one of the main things I learned from Lewis. This was me taking the kind of Friedman insights and then trying to, you know, with Lewis's help, bring them into a more traditional Christian frame. Lewis points out that all natural loves, when they presume to be God, become demons. So really good things become really bad things when they elevate themselves too highly. And he uses mother love and romantic love as examples where these are really good, powerful desires loves. But if God's hand's not on the reins, they become really destructive. And I sort of then applied that when it comes to love for the weak and the hurting. But the banner under which those things are going to fly is going to be things like love your neighbor or you go farther and you kind of go the full progression. Aggressive love is love, which is sort of like a self explanatory creed that means you have no right to, there's no such thing as a bad love. Whoever I love is, you must affirm and validate and celebrate that. And that extends all the way out. Right. We went from that meant sodomy and same sex homosexuality. That's love is love. And then it moved beyond there. And now you got the trans stuff, which is my feelings must Be validated, and then it's going to extend. And people are arguing that it extends to pedophilia and other things like that, where love is love. And Christians typically can't go all the way there. Conservative Christians draw those lines, but what they instead they do is they say, but the way we talk about this, the language and the resistance that we put up to this needs to be carefully calculated to not give too much offense. And so we tend to adopt progressive definitions. I talk in the book about living underneath the progressive gaze. This idea that my rhetoric and my actions are going to be evaluated by a censorious progressive on my shoulder who's going to determine whether I'm being a compassionate and caring Christian, which is what the language of hey, love your neighbor. And then the action that's filled in the blank means affirm them in this or get the vaccine or take your pick. All of these things became weaponized against Christians to mute, to use biblical language to mute Christian resistance to progressive priorities.

Will Spencer [00:14:02]:

How did that progressive get on Christians shoulders? Do you have some sense of the historical story of where that came to be? Because I reckon there were periods of time where that wasn't necessarily the case.

Will Spencer [00:14:13]:

Yeah, so I think the notion that Christ wants us, we should do our deeds before men to be seen by them so that they give glory to God in heaven. Right. Let your light shine before men. Which means that got translated into Christianese as the world is watching. The world is watching Christian. They're trying to see whether or not you are. They want to see your good works. But that meant that the what world? What does world mean there? And for a lot of Christians, especially kind of in what Aaron Rand calls neutral world, roughly the mid-90s to up through like Obergefell, that sweet spot, period, the world was defined as progressive, elite, secular and coastal. So it was, you think about the Tim Keller with the big push to the cities and the centrality of the city. All of that then meant that the world that was watching us and the world that we were seeking to demonstrate look at our good deeds was a progressive, secular and liberal world. And then in doing that, we kind of absorbed, well, what's their definition of good? What works do they think are good? And so this is where we began to absorb progressive priorities to try to show that the gospel fulfilled progressive desires for justice. And so the different causes that we wanted to say, hey, Christ cares about this too, the Christian church should care about this too, were all catered to progressive sensibilities and priorities and progressive hostility. So oftentimes it was accompanied by, and we're the good Christians, unlike those bad Christians, the moral majority, culture warriors. We're not like them, we're different, we're kind, we're winsome, we're nuanced. We care about the things you care about. And it was that move that kind of set the groundwork for once things shifted once Obergefell fell, once the culture shifted, then those same mechanisms became really potent tools of manipulation where progressives could withhold certain privileges or certain reputational things from you if you didn't go along. And they began to actually, you know, Megan Basham, I think, has demonstrated this pretty well in her book Shepherds for Sale, the way that they funneled lots of money into reinforcing that progressive gay. So I think that's how it got in. And then as a result, Christians came. You know, they didn't necessarily always have progressives, secularists in mind directly, but it was that respectable Christians are pointed that way. And so I'm going to adopt these priorities. I'm going to speak about the racial issues in a certain way. I'm going to address manhood, womanhood in a certain way. I'm going to be nuanced when it comes to same sex stuff and sodomy. I'm not going to use the word sodomy. That would be a good example of that word just gets removed from the vocabulary entirely because it's offensive to progressive sensibilities. And so that move then meant that's a steering wheel on the back of Christians that was reinforced internally by other respectable Christians who wanted to be seen as winsome to the world.

Will Spencer [00:17:31]:

What's so interesting about this is part of the freedom that I've found in Christ was recognizing that I don't have to be empathetic in the way that I. Right. And so to come in and be like, oh my gosh, I'm free of all that. I have an objective standard. And then to have all so many Christians being like, no, you have to be empathetic. I'm like, no, you really don't.

Will Spencer [00:17:48]:

You can just draw lines. You can just say things.

Will Spencer [00:17:51]:

You can just say things. So I want to talk about also the sort of snapback that I think we're seeing because it seems that we have empathy on one side and then you have apathy perhaps on the other side. And then there was a third one. You talk about, talk about that spectrum because the reaction that we're seeing is no less sinful.

Will Spencer [00:18:09]:

Yeah. So the way I set it up is if you have a virtue, then it can go wrong in one of two directions. This is kind of a classic Aristotelian ethical point. Virtues go wrong through excess or defect. So too much sympathy, too much compassion, it's untethered. And that's the empathy thing. The flip side would be apathy or callousness. And this is what you see in the parable of the Good Samaritan with the priest and the Levite who walk by on the other side of the road, and they're just. We're not going to get anywhere near that. And so that's the person who's drowning, and you just turn around and walk away. You don't even care. And that is. That is a real danger. I think it's one that's commonly recognized as a. As a sin. So we all know that those are the bad guys in that story. Like that. Like, the response you may not have is just walk by on the other side. The challenge has been, well, what does it mean to love my neighbor? Who's right? Is it proximity? Does a person need to be in front of me? Or does this then extend to, now, I can't have a border. Our nations can't have borders because of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is, I think, clearly an overextension of the principle. That's not what that means. But you'll be. So people who refuse to be empathetic will be accused of being apathetic, heartless, cruel, callous. And the trick is, don't become the evil thing that your enemies think you are, okay? In reaction to their manipulations. Don't become the thing that they think you are. So actually be compassionate, be kind according to biblical standards, which if you do, you'll be accused of being callous, but you won't be callous. So I think that's one piece. I think the other thing that often, you know, this is an element of it is I think people can interpret certain responses as callous that are actually righteous. Meaning when the Bible says things like, lord, do I not hate those who hate you? Imprecatory psalms, things like that, that there's a place for looking at evil in the eye and just saying, this is evil. And I hate it. And I think people can go, that doesn't sound very Christian. It's like, no, no, it really is like. Like Jesus called people sons of hell and was moved with anger at real injustice, real evil on the part of, say, the Pharisees. And you should be, too. The question is whether or not you're targeting and you're calibrated by biblical standards that you love what God loves and you hate what God hates. You abhor what is evil. That's biblical exhortations. So do you abhor the right things? Do you despise the right things? Those are appropriate emotions, but they need to be anchored to the scriptures, to what God says and not simply tribal, personal vendetta type stuff, which is where it can easily go.

Will Spencer [00:21:10]:

And there's a component of meekness as well. I think I was reading maybe Psalm 46, something like that where he was talking about you reward righteousness and meekness. And so this anger, yeah, sure, feel it, hate this thing. But that doesn't mean you go drawing the sword to kill it it. And by the same time it doesn't mean you turn away from your fellow suffering man. You have to. The Christian life is not easy, the Christian moral posture is not easy. But you're called to maintain it and not something give in to your emotions, whether it be empathy pouring out or anger pouring out or apathy doesn't want to deal with it.

Will Spencer [00:21:41]:

Yeah. And the empathy anger thing is actually one of the more. This was when I got into this because I talked about sense of empathy back then. People react and responded. And so I'm like, wow, I got to dig into this a little bit more. And as I did, one of the interesting phenomenon is the way that empathy and anger actually go hand in hand because it's usually empathy becomes myopic and you become highly empathetic for your designated group. Right. So certain groups are worthy of empathy, which means that their enemies, anybody that you think is oppressing them now is an object of your anger and they go hand in hand. And so when social scientists study this, they found that like highly empathetic people are often the most tribal and polarized and can justify and rationalize great cruelty towards those they perceive as their enemies. And it's been interesting to read things where conservatives, those who identify or politically conservative or culturally conservative are often able, are often less angry and less empathetic. Right. So in other words, they're able. It's a rational. I can understand where my progressives are coming from. I disagree with them and I oppose them, but it doesn't have the same vitriol. Whereas highly empathetic progressives, when they do some of these studies come back as when they see cruelty done to their political opponents, they don't respond with empathy at all, but with a sense of self righteous. Yes. Which is an interesting element in all of this and just shows, again, like you said, that emotions are very powerful and need to be on a leash. They need to be tethered and anchored to something. They need to be governed by what is true and good, by reason, and not simply given free reign.

Will Spencer [00:23:25]:

There's a, There's a parallel, maybe progressive conservatism now that's highly empathetic for one's own tribe and completely apathetic towards everyone else. And it's so odd to see that spreading like, isn't there this standard that we're accountable to as Christians? No, no, we have to set that aside. We have to win as opposed to preserve our moral character.

Will Spencer [00:23:43]:

Yeah. And. And I think this is where I think the, you know, when J.D. vance mentioned ordered loves in that interview where he talked about, like, you know, it's about moral duties and obligations beginning with, you know, take care of your own family, your own household, working out to your community, working out, you know, your church. The Bible talks about, you know, do good to all men, especially those of the household of faith. So there's this special obligation you have to other Christians, and then you work out from there to further obligations. The key thing there is it starts in. And that's where the greatest obligation is. But it works out. It doesn't. You know, Jesus says, if you love those who love you, well, the world does that. Tax collectors, the pagans, the world, the gentiles know how to do that. They know how to love their own. But if it doesn't spill the banks, if the love of Christ doesn't spill the banks and extend outward from there, then something's gone wrong. It's not the love of Christ because God loved the world. And so figuring out the applications of that, obviously, is where a lot of debates and details will get in, you know, need to be worked out. But the principle, the idea that, like, I do have obligations from the inside all the way out. Right. Is a real thing. And I can't simply say, well, that's. Those people are my enemies and therefore I don't have any obligation to love them. No, Jesus said you do love your enemies.

Will Spencer [00:25:04]:

And that's one of the things that sets Christianity so far apart from other world tribalistic religions. I'm thinking of a heat map that's become very popular in the past year or so. You have the. Maybe talk about that for a moment.

Will Spencer [00:25:15]:

Yeah, well, I think that, I think the heat map is, you know, when some people hear what I'm talking about, they immediately throw the heat map at me. And I think the heat map does identify something. The point of the heat map is that that's actually an illustration is when the heat map is closer in red. That's your proximity, your familiarity, your people. But it does work out. And that progressivism is a kind of inversion of that, where your obligations to your own countrymen or your own family are really radically minimized in favor of love for abstract humanity or people on the universe. And this is a thing that the Christian tradition has long recognized. You know, there's, you know, Dostoevsky talks about this in Brothers Karamazov, where, you know, I love humanity. It's people that I can't stand, right? So this love for this abstract. In that story, there's a woman who says, when I think about loving humanity, when I think about loving the poor, I get all warm, fuzzy feelings and sentimental. But then you actually put that person in front of me, right? You put a poor man in front of me, and everything in me recoils. And it's like that kind of distortion, which has basically pushed love out to the imagination and away from the concrete will and action, is a real problem. And I think what the heat map is getting at, the problem does come. There is a corresponding problem where you can't just say, well, the only people I love is right here in the middle and out there. I feel nothing and no obligation and no compassion. And I think some people have tried to throw back in my face because I focus on the way that progressives have weaponized this. But in principle, it's a universal human problem, not just a progressive problem. And so they've said, you know, well, what about when the right says that, you know, we should have compassion on people who maybe whose family members were killed by illegal immigrants, right? Is that. Is that sin of empathy when, you know, conservatives use the story of Lake and Riley or some of these other incidents to say, hey, we need to do something because about immigration, because people have died. And my answer is there. I'm not saying at all that emotions, compassion is bad and shouldn't be a part of our moral deliberations. They absolutely must. The issue is always whether or not they're tethered to what is true, to what actually happened, and to our moral duties before God. That's the framework in which our emotions have to live and move and have their being. It's when you remove that framework that everything, you know, all of the virtues just run off in all directions and create chaos.

Will Spencer [00:28:01]:

I appreciate you saying that because I think we've seen an excess maybe for A couple generations of feminine expression of emotions as we're talking about an empathy. And now we're seeing a snapback to a more masculine framing of emotions, which is anger or outrage. And you can see this dynamic playing out every single day. And both of those are sinful.

Will Spencer [00:28:24]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:28:24]:

And maybe. Go ahead, please.

Will Spencer [00:28:26]:

Yeah, so no, I do think that in terms of general, I don't know if stereotypes is the right word. Women are the more empathetic sex. And there's reasons why in the scriptures God addresses certain commands to men versus women. And so when he speaks to men, like one Timothy, he says, I want men to lift up holy hands in prayer without quarreling. And so you go, okay, why did he say that? Well, it's because men are prone to fight. That's a typical male sin, is to butt heads in a kind of overt, aggressive, violent way. So I have to address that directly. Now women obviously have conflict with one another, but it tends to be more sublimated, it tends to be more under the table. It's the mean girls, it's the backstabbing, it's the ostracism and exclusion. It's not the knockdown drag out that you're going to find among men. And both of those, you're right, are the key thing across the board is sober mindedness. The idea is don't get drunk on your passions, either your angers or your empathy, either your fears or your loves, your desires. All of them need to be governed and they need to be downstream from a stability that you have in Christ which enables you to feel appropriately according to whatever is brought before you. Right? So you should weep with those who weep. You should rejoice with those who rejoice. You should hate what you should hate, you should love what you should love. But the shoulds there matter because that's where the moral obligation is grounding and tethering your emotions.

Will Spencer [00:30:07]:

Have you ever had counseling situations that you're willing to speak about just in vague terms or where you've been able to pull a woman out of a, out of an over empathetic situation and maybe a situation where you've been able to pull a man out of anger?

Will Spencer [00:30:22]:

Yeah, so I've been in counseling situations where. And actually on this case it's the same. I've been in men and women. Part of the reason why wokeness was so appealing to everybody is we all love to be the victim in our story or the hero. Okay? So everybody wants to be the hero and the victim. No one wants to be the villain in their story. And so we find all kinds of ways to avoid being the villain. And so victimhood narratives are very attractive and it's doubly potent if the victim is the hero. Right. So in other words, if the way to how do you become the great hero will be the greatest victim. And this is what the victimhood Olympics that we witnessed over the last 15 years was all about, where you piled up your oppression categories in order to be the greatest victim, because the greatest victim became invulnerable and became the agenda setter for the community. And I think that's very attractive, not just to women, but to all people. And so what that meant is that we began to re narrate our stories and cast ourselves. So I've been in plenty of pastoral situations where you can hear the kind of blame shifting where your complicity in the situation is minimized and, and the other person's responsibility is maximized. Right. Most Christians can't get all the way to I didn't do anything wrong, but they can get to a point where my contribution was this big and their contribution was that big because they're the oppressor, they're the evil one, they're the abuser. And so this is one of the great tragedies. I think of some of the way this worked itself out is that real substantial, say marital conflict, where you had two sinners sinning against each other, became recast in a clear cut. Here's an abuser, here's the victim. And once that hardened, it was really difficult to get anybody to admit, like, hey, you're both sinning against each other. And the language of abuse was inflated frequently. So where, you know, in the old days, abuse meant physical and sexual violence, like it had a very particular meaning. All of a sudden it became enlarged to where people talked a lot about emotional, psychological, spiritual abuse, which I think in principle could be categories. But the things that got roped on, you know, any disagreement in say a church setting became categorized as, you know, I didn't like what the pastor said, that was abuse, or I didn't like, the pastor corrected me, that's abuse, that's spiritual abuse. And that language was used as a tool because nobody wants to be thought to be an abuser or an abuse enabler. And so it was that that term had a real potency that I saw in numerous pastoral and church conflicts where that language and it took a lot, it takes a lot of work because once somebody throws that word out, now everybody's on edge and now you've really got to do some. It takes real sober mindedness to go, wait a minute, what actually happened? But this was one of the things where empathy could short circuit it because you're not allowed to ask that once somebody's claimed the mantle of victim, once they've said they've been abused, to say, well, tell me what happened. And you start probing, well, did they, but wait, did they do this or that? And you start trying to sift what actually happened. Any effort to do that was regarded as re traumatizing them or not believing them or not validating them. And as a pastor, if you're a judge in a court of law, if you're a police officer, whatever, in these situations where you're charged with justice, you have to be able to do that. And if you can't, if you're forbidden to because of empathy, then the result is lots and lots of injustice. Lewis says this mercy, when detached from justice, grows unmerciful. It's very cruel because it needs to be anchored in the rocks of justice.

Will Spencer [00:34:21]:

I'm sitting here, I feel like a Vietnam War veteran, because the situations you're talking about, I mean, I lived in that for a long time. The reason why your book is getting the response that it is is because you've really touched on something so central to how the world works outside of the Christian sphere, obviously inside as well. But in San Francisco, that's how this went. Like, what's this person going through? It's like, well, did you recognize that you kind of contributed to that situation? Right? Oh, what, how are you retraumatizing them? It's like it was so shocking, the frequency with which that happened.

Will Spencer [00:34:53]:

Yeah, well, and this is a Friedman insight, but when empathy is kind of elevated as the premier virtue, what happens is everybody begins to cater and accommodate the most reactive, immature members, the people most enslaved to their passions, the most passionate people become the center of attention. And everybody begins to walk on eggshells around them and police each other. So this was kind of his key leadership insight was if you decide and you imagine a family where you have a very reactive member, say it's Mom, Mom's real reactive and everybody's just constantly walking on eggshells. And then all of a sudden she says something sharp and somebody finally has enough of it and decides, you know what, I'm going to push back on that. Not angry, not anything, but I'm just going to say, mom, you can't talk to us that way. What inevitably happens in those kind of systems is that the other Members will police that person and try to bring them. Hey, hey. But yet this is. Don't you know how you set them off? If you hadn't said what you said, then they wouldn't have blown up. Yeah, yeah, they shouldn't have blown up. But if you hadn't set them off. What do you mean, set them off? All I did was disagree. All I said was, that's unacceptable. All I said was, that was wrong. What do you mean set them off? And it was that sort of dynamic that works its way into families, into churches, into nations where everybody then reorganizes themselves around the most immature and reactive people. And it makes it really difficult to lead. And if you're going to lead, if you're going to be a sober minded, courageous leader, you're going to take flak not only from the reactive, but from the enablers.

Will Spencer [00:36:34]:

I'm seeing this in men right now. Like everyone's like, well, don't want to provoke the men. They've been through so much already. It's like, well, isn't this the exact same that was going on? Right.

Will Spencer [00:36:45]:

No, that's absolutely right. I think that in reaction to the kind of feminized, weaponized, you know, all the stuff about toxic masculinity where normal masculinity was pathologized and normal manhood, normal expressions of manhood were treated as though they were the most destructive and evil things in the world. And so now you've got a bunch of guys who finally realize that and go, wait a minute. No, it's not. But there can be an easy temptation to play the victim there as opposed to. So there's a difference between being a victim of some injustice and playing the victim.

Will Spencer [00:37:19]:

Maybe unpack that a little bit.

Will Spencer [00:37:20]:

Yeah. So the idea would be, so Jesus was a victim, right, Of a great injustice. He was railroaded at a midnight trial by a, you know, a corrupt jury in order to get him. And it was corrupt through and through. It was the great, greatest act of injustice in human history. He was a victim, but he never played the victim, right? He. He never leaned into it. He never made it. His fundamental identity, his. His identity. I'm. I'm a beloved son of God. I'm doing exactly what my father wants. And therefore all of the assaults that were made upon him, there was pain, there was suffering, there was hardship. He's weeping in the Garden of Gethsemane, but he was able to endure it for the joy set before him. And he was able to entrust himself to the one who judges Justly so he didn't lean into his own victimhood and make that core to who he is. Neither did Paul, who followed right in Christ's footsteps. And everywhere he went was attacked and assaulted, falsely, illegitimately, lied about, slandered, beaten multiple times, thrown in jail, all of these things. And at no point do you get any sense that he's going, oh, poor me, everybody needs to feel sorry for me. And so I'll say this in terms of pastoral ministry, because I see this, I've felt this temptation. God's been kind, and I've largely been able to resist it. But. But if. So if you do something like I did, I've done here with sin of empathy. And you're going to take a lot of flack and people are going to misrepresent you and call you heartless and narcissistic and all kinds of names. It would be really easy to, like, lean into that and be like, oh, poor me, right? And it's like, no, if they're saying all kinds of false things about me, what did Jesus say I should do in this situation? And the answer is, he said I should rejoice, I should throw a party. And so sometimes I've had people ask, you know, hey, you know, how do I encourage my pastor, who's taken a lot of flack for being faithful, right? And I say, well, the one thing you must not do is pity him. Don't pity him. He's getting flack for being faithful. You should be like, way to go. Isn't this great? You should be happy. You should say, you should exhort him the way Jesus did, which is blessed are you rejoice, you are being faithful, right? Assuming he is being faithful and the flak is coming because of that faithfulness, encourage him and be happy. And don't in any way indulge that victimhood mindset that says, oh, poor me, isn't this terrible? Oh, no, no, don't do it like, that's the opposite of godliness. Instead, roll with it.

Will Spencer [00:39:55]:

So I want to play devil's advocate for a second. So say there's a young man who's saying, okay, so I'm supposed to bear up righteously under suffering. I think it was first Peter 2. I think he talks about that. And, and okay, but you know what? Like the, the woke Christians, they said, what would Jesus do, too? And now look where we are. And so the response would be, you know, if I'm supposed to be like Jesus, well, they. All these guys said the same thing. And now everything is a mess.

Will Spencer [00:40:22]:

Yeah. Right. So. So the fact that people can abuse truths doesn't undermine the truth. Right. Angels still look like angels, even though the devil pretends to be one. Like, they don't change. The angels don't go, well, the devil masquerades as an angel of light, so maybe we need to change our costume. Right. In other words, the abuse doesn't abolish the use, the corruption doesn't discount the real thing, the substantive thing. So in this case, it is actually. Well, what did be like Jesus actually do it? And I think that some people think that means you just roll over all the time. And. Which isn't like, Christ didn't roll over. Right. He was regularly in these confrontations, highlighting the sins of his enemies. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees. Hypocrites. Getting into tussles with them, not backing down, avoiding their traps when they did rhetorical traps, he just sidestepped it and shrewdly navigated it, highlighted the injustice. And then when Paul's in these kind of situations, he doesn't hold back. He's like, yeah, you killed the righteous one. You killed Jesus. One of my favorite ones is it's actually Peter, I think, in a book of Acts, chapter four or five. Peter's preached his sermon where he's condemned Jerusalem for killing Jesus, and he gets hauled before the Sanhedrin, and they're saying, you're trying to make us guilty of this man's blood. And Peter goes, yes, that's exactly what I'm doing. Yes, yes, you killed the righteous one. You murdered him. And then God raised him from the dead. And there's no other name by which you can be saved, so you should trust in him, you know, but, like, they heard him as you're trying to do this, and he didn't go, oh, I didn't mean to hurt you. He didn't back off. He just said, good communication is happening right now. This is great. And I think there's a similar sort of thing. And I think that's also true in this conversation about, say, men who have. Have been punching bags for a while should go, yeah, it's perfectly legitimate for you to point out lies and to resist the manipulations of the woke. You should absolutely do it, and you should do it cheerfully. You should do it gratefully. You should go, wow, this is the battle of my time. I want to fight like d' Artagnan, you know, whistling all through it. I want to do. I want to laugh loudly as I do this, not scowling Self pitying, angry. Like all of that sort of stuff is like, no, just put all that to death. God doesn't want that. It's not near as much fun either. It's way more fun. It's way more fun to cheerfully and gladly build and fight than to sink into oh, woe is me.

Will Spencer [00:43:08]:

And there's a difference in character, I think, between, you know, like a bitter, mocking laugh and the kind of laugh of, of having peace with God and knowing that the victory is ultimately in his hands. There's a big difference between those two.

Will Spencer [00:43:20]:

Yeah, no, that's right. So when, when the Lord, he who sits in heaven, laughs and the Lord holds them in derision, it's. It's not bitter and it's not bitter. Right. He may mock them at times, like Elijah mocks the prophets of baal, but Elijah mocks the prophets of BAAL out of confidence, not out of insecurity and not out of personal offense. And there's ways in which sometimes this is where things like, you know, I know that the Sermon on the Mount has been weaponized against Christians. Just turn the other cheek. Which means roll over and let the left do whatever they want to do, which includes castrating children. It's like, you can't roll over, stand up, resist it, fight it. But when it comes to your personal reputation, right, you don't hit back. Right. You do take it. You suffer the injustice, you take the slanders, you follow Christ. The Bible is built for you to do this and entrust your reputation to God. Entrust your vindication to God and let him do it, and he will. This is what he's promised to do for his people. If you're faithful in that suffering.

Will Spencer [00:44:26]:

You close the book on a similar note where you talk about the Father Zosima and you talk about, you know, being with the woman in her suffering. Maybe talk a little bit about that, because I think that that particular the Brothers Karamazov has so many incredible lessons woven throughout, and that's one of them. Maybe talk about that example just a little bit for how we can lean in and remind people in their suffering, you know?

Will Spencer [00:44:46]:

Right. So I, Yeah, so I write a whole book about the sin of empathy and the dangers of excessive compassion, distorted, corrupted, weaponized, black male compassion. But I didn't want to end it with a note of, okay, and therefore compassion's bad. The last chapter is in praise of compassion and say, we need to actually figure out that the abuse of this virtue doesn't mean we can abandon the virtue. And one of the things that. That story. It's a section from Brothers Karamasov in which Father Zosima, this monk, is comforting a woman whose child's children have died. And she's just an absolute distress. She's left her husband and she's come seeking counsel. And I kind of. I walk through how he tries to both identify with her in her pain, join her in her suffering, weep with her in her suffering, but also push back a little bit, correct, redirect, reorient her. And one of the ways that I kind of have summarized this in terms of my own counseling is these four statements that I keep in mind when I'm dealing with someone who's really hurting. You know, somebody's. Somebody died, Somebody's. They're a victim of something, that situation. And the first is, this is hard. It's an objective statement. So it's like whatever else is true. I'm just saying that whatever, you know, it isn't a statement of, I agree with everything you've said, because I don't know yet. Maybe this is the first time hearing of it and I need to think about it. But whether it's true or false, it's hard. So I can acknowledge that. I can say, hey, I just want you to know you're feeling heavy or you feel the heaviness. I'm just acknowledging. Yeah, you should. This is heavy. The second is, I know you feel that way. So acknowledging. I see your emotions. I know what you're feeling, even sometimes when they're out of bounds. Right. You're saying things that aren't true. You're raging against God. I know you feel that way. I'm acknowledging that felt reality. The third is, I'm with you in this. I'm not recoiling. I'm not running away. Your pain doesn't scare me. I can be stable. I'm not threatened or anxious about your sorrow. And then the last one is, I have hope. Right? So I'm. That's. And that's the tethering. Like, I'm anchored to Christ. And so you may not be able to see any hope here. All you see is the darkness. All you see is the despair. All you see is the dead baby. Right? But I can still see Christ. And so I'm going to be. I'll be here with you, but my eyes are on him first, not you. And that's precisely why I can bring something to this that can be a blessing and help to you and do good to you. So this is hard. I know you feel that Way, I'm with you in this and I have hope.

Will Spencer [00:47:22]:

Yeah. For whatever any of us are going through. Can we keep our eyes fixed on Christ or lean on someone who does? That's the particular blessing I think of the Christian life is knowing that there is something beyond ourselves who promises that he is there. And it's not a fiction.

Will Spencer [00:47:37]:

Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And it's what enables us from simply trying to invert, just out compete on the victimhood or the pain. So anybody who's ever put their family members on a guilt trip or throwing a pity party, exaggerating their suffering in order to manipulate those who care about them, it's like it's that sort of thing. God just put it to death, just kill it, and instead replace it with joy, with gratitude, with fear of the Lord. Those are the things that can actually give you stability, no matter what kind of hardship God sends you.

Will Spencer [00:48:15]:

What sort of practical advice would you give people for cultivating that sense in their everyday lives?

Will Spencer [00:48:22]:

I think this is why the Scriptures. So when Psalm 112 says about the blessed man, he fears the Lord, and he greatly delights in God's commands. And it says, he's not afraid of bad news because he trusts in the Lord. He's steady and steadfast because he knows that God is for him. So he doesn't fear what man fear. He's stable because he's brought before his mind with delight the Word of God. The Word of God is an anchor for him. He's meditating. What does God say? How does God say I should respond to this? So you're in a. You're in a conflict. You should always. This is a question, the what would Jesus do Question. Or what would God have me do? Or, you know, this is a riff on something Lewis says. What would I do if I was full of Jesus? So maybe, maybe you feel like I don't know what Jesus would do. He's so. He's. I don't. You know, it's hard to figure he's perfect and I'm not. Okay, imagine that you knew that God was for you. Okay, like, what if you really believed it, like down in your bones? And what if you were full of the kind of love that God has and the kind of kindness and grace and mercy and courage that God has? What if you were full of that? What if that was just flowing out of you? Okay, now take that version of you, that imaginary one. Put him in your situation right now. What does he do? And when you have. And Lewis Says when you have the answer, when you know, well, if that version of me was here, facing what I'm facing, I think that version of me would respond in this way. And then what I would say is, great. Once you have that answer, ask for God's help and do it. Don't wait. Just do it.

Will Spencer [00:50:00]:

That is some outstanding advice. One of those. I just want to sit with that for a minute.

Will Spencer [00:50:05]:

Yeah, that's. Yeah. So Louis calls this good pretending. So it's. And it's when there's a gap between the way you know you should respond and the way you're actually responding. And you're, you know, you're just a big, you know, you're a puddle of emotions. You're a big mess. There's sin in and out of it, and you don't know what to do. It's like, wait, just. This is why God gave you that. Imagination is, you know, reckon yourself dead to sin. Think about yourself in a particular way. What are you? What does God say you are? Okay, now, if you really believed that, if you really did, and these people were saying all these lies about you, but you really believe what God said about you, not what they said, and. And then you. And that you were full of his love for them and for him, what would you do? How would you respond to this? And you might go, I think if I was full of the Holy Spirit and overflowing with divine love and confident in God's care and love for me, I think I would be rejoicing right now. And it's like, that's exactly what you would be doing, so what you should do. And you go, but I'm not. And it's like, yeah, so ask for God's help and do what God wants, even in the absence of those emotions in the moment, and see what happens. See if God does it. Bless those little efforts to stumble your way into obedience. Right. See if he doesn't bless it. See if he doesn't fan it into a flame.

Will Spencer [00:51:20]:

Incredible. Incredible. I love that. Is this also covered? I discovered in putting together the bio that I read at the start, that you have a book, Live like a Christian Discipleship in Lewis's Chronicles. Is that in that book?

Will Spencer [00:51:33]:

That's not in that one. I have another book on Lewis, though, that it is in. So Lewis on the Christian Life has a whole chapter, I think, on Good Pretending, where I lay that whole thing out in detail from Lewis connecting it to the Scriptures. Lewis on the Christian Life. We'll get, you know, on how to. Yeah. Engage In Good. Good. Pretending. Holy pretending. Pretending your way into reality. It's. It's sort of a. It's a sanctified. Fake it till you make it. But it's sanctified. It's not the hypocritical kind. It's the. I'm committed to Christ and I'm going to take stumbling steps, even if I can't take full ones yet.

Will Spencer [00:52:14]:

Can we just talk about these two Lewis books very quickly? Because the question of Christian discipleship has very much been on my mind. I talked to Dr. Longshore about J.C. ryall's holiness. So let's talk about these two books specifically.

Will Spencer [00:52:25]:

Yeah. Yeah. So Live Like a Narnian is what I learned in Narnia. It's what I learned from all of my years reading the Chronicles of Narnia over and over again.

Will Spencer [00:52:33]:

And.

Will Spencer [00:52:33]:

And so there's different lessons in it for how Lewis designed those books. You're supposed to go into the wardrobe so that you can come back out of the wardrobe and live faithfully. You can be more noble. So there's a great. One of my favorite chapters in that one is called what It Means to be a King, I think. And it's where King Lune of Archenland says, this is what it means to be a king. To be first in every desperate attack and to be last in every desperate retreat. And when there's hunger in the land, as must be now and again in bad years, to wear finer clothes and laugh louder at a scantier meal than any man in your land. And I just. I summarize that as first in, last out, laughing loudest, which is my definition of manhood. Okay. That's sacrificial burden bearing. So your first in and last out. But it's happy, it's glad, it's rejoicing even in the face of hardship. And that's a great picture of kingship. Loon embodies that in that story. And so it's one of the things I want to just come in to hear, talking to you, who does a lot of stuff with men's issues, is to say that's a vision of masculinity that you ought to aspire to. Lewis on the Christian life was basically everything other than Narnia after I wrote Live Like a Narnia. And I was approached and asked, hey, would you write a book? Just kind of for a series on different theologians on the Christian life, and we want you to do Lewis. And so basically I took everything else I could find in Lewis, read through his stuff over and over and over again, listened to it, tried to find connections, and present, basically, Lewis says present. All of his writings boil down to there's a choice before you. You can either put God at the center or yourself at the center. And that choice appears to you every single day in a million different ways. It might look one way for this person, another way for that person, but at root, the choice is always the same. Is God center or am I center? Is God God, or am I God? Am I feelings God, or is God God? And the task of Christian discipleship is, with God's help, to constantly choose and go on choosing to put God at the center, to put Christ at the center. And when you do, you discover that yourself, the self that you didn't put at the center, becomes itself. You become fully human. You become who you really God intended you to be when you abandon yourself, when you lose yourself, when you die to yourself. And so I just kind of cash that out in a whole bunch of different ways from Lewis's writings. And it may be it's, you know, I've written about eight books. There's a way in which that one is one of. Is maybe my favorite sometimes just because of how much maybe. There's so many things I go back to personally. Lewis was just such a great doctor of the soul, and so. So many of the like frameworks in my mind have been shaped by Lewis. So that that book, in terms of practical Christianity may be one of the more practical ones that I've. That I've done. I go back to it a lot.

Will Spencer [00:55:35]:

Well, Dr. Rigney, it sounds like we have another book to talk about for our next conversation. All right, wonderful. Well, thank you so much for the generosity of your time and wisdom and for writing the Sins of Empathy, the Sin of Empathy and leadership and emotional sabo. Where would you like to send people to find out more about you and what you do?

Will Spencer [00:55:52]:

Yeah. So Joerigny on Twitter on X and, you know, the thing that I'm plugging a lot now because I just think there's so much good stuff is Canon plus, you know, it's the. It's a streaming service. It's like a combination of Audible and Netflix, sort of, but thoroughly Christian edifying, You know, cartoons for the kids, documentaries and lots of audiobooks and sermons and other things that can just edify. It's a really great immunity boost for your soul and your walk with Christ. And so canonplus.com, go there. I don't have a special code, but my friend Wade does. So if you use the code Wade. I think it's Wade from Wade Stotts. I think you get it for 99 cents for the first month, you can try it out. So I'll just plug his. I'll use his code and see what happens. But I just think it's a great resource for families, for kids, for parenting, for marriage, for the Christian life. There's so much good stuff there. And, you know, my stuff's there. Other people's stuff is there. But check out Canon plus dot com.

Will Spencer [00:57:01]:

Yeah. Such an incredible wealth of resources for the Christian life there. Yeah. Thank you so much, Dr. Ricky.

Will Spencer [00:57:07]:

Yeah, thanks. Will.