In A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens tells the cautionary tale of a man who walked through the world with stubborn indifference toward the human suffering around him.

Nearly two centuries later, some decry the opposite posture as equally harmful. The warped figure in this alternate narrative is a society so accommodating of everyone and everything that it has fallen prey to so-called toxic empathy.

Psychologists acknowledge that even virtues like empathy can be harmful when untethered from healthy ways of thinking and acting. Yet the current debate about toxic empathy is not about social science as much as politics.

Two books on the subject popular among evangelicals are Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion and Joe Rigney’s Leadership and the Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits.

Stuckey and Rigney perceive empathy as a weapon of political progressives, and resistance to it as the appropriate Christian response.

Feeling With

Empathy, sympathy, and compassion are synonyms with subtle differences in meaning.

While sympathy signals concern for another person’s situation, empathy includes the ability to feel that individual’s pain on some level.

More than just an emotional response, empathy is a choice to enter the experiences of others and feel with them. It can also refer to a skill or capacity for emotional understanding.

Compassion, which functions alongside sympathy and empathy, stirs a desire to alleviate suffering.

These attitudes start with sensitivity toward someone else’s feelings or circumstances. They require a willingness to notice others and care about their well-being.

Critics, however, point to the word “empathy” as problematic. A relatively new term, it first appeared during the early 20th century.

In some academic literature, empathy captured the experience of projecting one’s emotional experiences onto inanimate objects or aspects of the natural world, such as a stream or bird in flight.

That niche usage faded rather quickly, but the term nevertheless stuck around in psychology to describe the emotion-sharing element of sympathy and compassion.

Appeals to empathy hit the cultural airwaves during the mid-20th century, helping brand the term as an invention of secular psychologists.

Compassion and sympathy are much older words. The former appears dozens of times in the King James Version of Scripture. This gives “compassion” a golden aura of an ancient and sacred pedigree, as well as a solid theological anchor.

“Sympathy” makes numerous appearances in other English translations, including the New International Version. For example, Psalm 69:20 says, “I looked for sympathy, but there was none, for comforters, but I found none.” The Psalmist goes on to contrast human cruelty with the Lord’s mercy, noting that God “hears the needy” (verse 33).

Evangelicals like Stuckey and Rigney frame empathy as the product of modern, secular thinking — a counterfeit and toxic redundancy, prone to error and falsely wielding an unassailable authority.

Open Hearts

Is this a fair assessment, or does empathy offer paths for Christ followers that are neither toxic nor redundant?

Compassion and sympathy are indeed central to the gospel message, our experience as children of God, and our calling as Christ’s representatives on earth.

Ephesians 4:32 says, “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”

Should we seek 
to understand, 
at a heart level, 
those whose 
perspectives and
experiences differ
from our own?

First Peter 3:8 names both compassion and sympathy as Christian virtues: “Be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble.”

But what of empathy? Does God call us to share someone else’s pain? Should we seek to understand, at a heart level, those whose perspectives and experiences differ from our own?

Scripture reveals God is not like humans (Numbers 23:19; Psalm 8:3–5; Ecclesiastes 5:2; Isaiah 55:8–9). People are finite, mortal, and sinful, but God is infinite, immortal, and perfect in all His ways. Even when He is moved to assist us in our suffering, God does not naturally share our feelings.

Yet God’s compassion is empathetic. That is, God intentionally crosses the divide of experience and perspective to come alongside us.

Theologians call this “condescension.” This means God measures His pace with ours, so to speak, to meet us where we are.

The ultimate expression of this divine impulse is of course the Incarnation. In Christ’s humanity, God walks among us and does share our feelings.

In fact, the one usage of “empathize” in the NIV appears within a description of Christ’s role as High Priest. Hebrews 4:15 says, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet he did not sin.”

Christ’s willingness to enter our world and feel our pain is precisely what makes Him the ideal High Priest. Jesus’ condescension and sacrifice on our behalf enable us to “approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (verse 16).

As Christ followers, we are called to walk in compassion and sympathy, but the social skill of empathy reminds us to do this even when it does not come naturally or easily.

We might even think of empathy as naming that phenomenon of humanity imitating divine compassion. We can embrace empathy’s invitation to emotional imagination and patience as a gift from God, one that assists us in the difficult work of living out the gospel mandate.

Surely the vision of God’s kingdom that Christ presents in Matthew 5–7 requires Spirit-assisted empathy. Perhaps more concretely, functions of Church ministry — such as evangelism, apologetics, counseling, and service — call for close attention to the gap-closing skills of empathy.

Insofar as empathy helps us follow Christ in His perfect compassion and mercy, it is anything but redundant.

Truth in Love

Critics claim empathy becomes toxic when there is a social expectation to affirm another person’s choices, leaving no room for disagreement. As the argument goes, cultural forces demand Christians ignore what is unbiblical lest they hurt someone’s feelings.

Before rejecting empathy as toxic, it is worth evaluating what’s truly at stake. Are we standing for righteousness, or just insisting on being right?

In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructed His followers to turn the other check, go the extra mile, give to the one who asks, and love their enemies (Matthew 5:38–45).

The apostle Paul told believers to speak the truth in love, a balance he saw as the mark of Christian maturity (Ephesians 4:15).

We don’t have to compromise biblical truth to meet others in their struggles and demonstrate Christ’s love. The empathetic skill of acknowledging people’s feelings and views can be an effective alternative to the expectation of affirming them.

In John 4, we see Christ acknowledging the painful realities of the Samaritan woman’s life, with palpable mercy, without compromising the moral truth about her situation.

Acknowledging people’s fears, hurts, hopes, and needs — and how those relate to their lived experiences — is something we can do, with the Holy Spirit’s help. And until we have listened and tried to understand, we are unlikely to change many minds.

There is no simple formula for being a faithful and empathetic gospel witness. In some cases, we can’t bend. In others, we can’t afford not to.

May the Lord help us wed discernment with charity as we grow in Christlike empathy toward a world in need.

This article appears in the Spring 2026 issue of Influence magazine.