Meet Empathy, the greatest rhetorical tool of manipulation in the 21st century.

Because love is a real virtue, empathy’s power is in posing as selfless care for victims.

A sad polar bear paces as David Attenborough informs you that the family suburban is melting the ice caps.

“Jesus was an asylum seeker!” the sign reads at an Open Borders Rally.

A forlorn Bruno wishes he too could change in the women’s locker room, a place he’s always known he belonged.

“My mom said if we don’t go she’ll be just devastated.”

When you reject the sin of empathy, you reject the manipulation of the media, the manipulation of family and friends, and most importantly, the manipulation of your own heart.

The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits

(1 review)
$22.00

Joe Rigney

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Book details

Joe Rigney serves as Fellow of Theology at New Saint Andrews College and as Associate Pastor at Christ Church. He is a husband, a father of three, and the author of a number of books, including Things of Earth and Leadership and Emotional Sabotage.

AUTHOR: Joe Rigney

BINDING: Hardback

PAGE COUNT: 164

SIZE: 5.5x8.5"

ISBN 10: 1-59128-323-X

ISBN-13: 978-1-59128-323-2

RELEASE DATE: February 18, 2025

Table of Contents
  1. Foreword by Rosaria Butterfield
  2. Introduction
  3. The Challenge of Definitions: Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion
  4. Weaponizing Pity: When Love for the Hurting Becomes a False God
  5. The Trouble With Empathy: Emotional Blackmail, Selectivity, and Cruelty
  6. Under the Progressive Gaze: The Corruption of Compassion, Justice, and Credibility
  7. Empathy, Feminism, and the Church: The Trojan Horse Behind All Things Woke
  8. Of Empathy and Monsters: Medusa, Frankenstein, and Retelling Myths
  9. In Praise of Compassion: Commending the Virtue in the Face of the Counterfeits
  10. Appendix A. On Provocative Rhetoric and “The Sin of Empathy”
  11. Appendix B. Corrupt Compassion: Recognizing a Devilish Strategy
Media: Hardback

Customer Reviews

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Tim S.

This was exactly the book I was looking for to answer the question I had years ago when I watched the Man Rampant interview, back when I had no idea who Joe Rigney was. It was confusing and yet intriguing to see a discussion about how something like empathy could be sinful, given how our culture treats it as the pinnacle of Christian love.

In the book, Joe breaks it down into six short chapters, starting with careful definitions. I appreciate that he takes the time to define the concept, rather than merely haranguing people about a word preference. He doesn't care if you call it sympathy, pity, love, empathy, compassion; it doesn't matter. The key is when a virtue goes wrong. He even takes the time in the appendix to answer the critics asking 'why the inflammatory rhetoric?'. I really enjoyed how he used examples from various CS Lewis books, which I expected. And while he starts with the Brene Brown video, I think the best chapter of the book is how feminism has infiltrated and eroded society and the church, using the cancellation of Calvin Robinson as a case study. The book is not long, but it packs a punch, and like the crisp Narnian air one would expect from Dr. Rigney. The last chapter, "In Praise of Compassion," was an excellent answer to the question of what to do now that we see the problem, and how to avoid the error of apathy.

One other tangential insight was his point about complementarians either being natural (patriarchal) or ideological, meaning that gender roles are arbitrary assignments from God, rather than something that cuts with the grain of our natures as male and female. The language of natural vs. ideological is much clearer than trying to use the broad/hard/thick to distinguish from narrow/soft/thin complementarians, which are really just egalitarians anyway.

Also, the cover is awesome.

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