Empathy has been getting a bad rap lately. The book Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion by Allie Beth Stuckey, which became a New York Times bestseller in late 2024, argues that “empathy has become a tool of manipulation.”

Josh McPherson, lead pastor of Grace City Church in Wenatchee, Washington, shared in a March 2025 podcast that “empathy almost needs to be struck from the Christian vocabulary.” Even PBS News published an article in August 2025 posing the question, “Is empathy a sin?”

Obviously, the word empathy has become contentious, particularly in some Christian circles.

Historian Susan Lanzoni, who explored empathy’s uses and definitions in her 2018 book Empathy: A History, shared with PBS that “she has never seen the aspirational term so derided as it is now.”

Granted, the word hasn’t been around all that long. Empathy appeared in an English publication for the first time in 1908, taken from a German word, meaning “in-feeling.” Today’s common definition, “the ability to understand and appreciate another person’s feelings,” comes from a 1946 professional psychology journal.

WHEN JESUS TOOK ON HUMAN FORM, HE EMBODIED EMPATHY.

However, despite being relatively new to the English language, the idea behind the word empathy is much older. In fact, it forms a core teaching across many religions, including Christianity.

Nijay Gupta, professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary in Illinois, suggests on his blog that “the Bible is, in fact, a story of empathy, God’s compassion for us who are sinners (which is all of us), and his desperate and relentless pursuit of redemption.”

Throughout the Old Testament, God is repeatedly described as being compassionate. The Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament, uses the term eusplanchnos, which literally means “good-guts”—significant for a culture that associated guts with feelings and human depth of emotion.

Jesus also repeatedly demonstrated this during his ministry on earth. When Jesus saw the crowds around him, we read that he often felt compassion for them (see Matthew 9:36; 14:14; 15:32). Jesus recognized and responded to the emotions and pain of others. As Gupta points out, “He did not talk about why they were poor or struggling or lost. He just wanted to help them.”

The Apostle Paul also seems to teach about the importance of empathy in his letter to the Romans when he urges the early Christians to “rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn” (Romans 12:15). He is encouraging people to understand, appreciate and even enter into another’s emotional experience, to embrace the feelings of those around them. This is the definition of empathy.

And then, of course, there is the Incarnation of Jesus. When Jesus took on human form, he embodied empathy, experiencing the full range of human emotions, limitations and suffering.

Empathy is not a New Age concept, nor is it dangerous. It is deeply biblical. Our ability to experience empathy is something that sets us apart as those made in the image of God, and when we show empathy, we are living as Jesus modelled.

So why are so many Christians apparently threatened by it?

The main concern seems to be the perception that, by embracing empathy, contemporary Western society is making decisions based on feelings rather than facts, moving us away from objectivity and blurring moral clarity. Some even fear that it makes us vulnerable to manipulation and affirms sinful actions.

I find this type of thinking very black and white, when there needs to be a both/and approach. While I agree that we shouldn’t make decisions based solely on feelings, we should allow our capacity to recognize and respond to suffering to shape our decisions and help us form and inform policy to create a healthy society.

God gave us the ability to think rationally and respond emotionally to the pain of others. The two are not mutually exclusive.

A quote attributed to philosopher Hannah Arendt, who wrote extensively in the 1950s on totalitarianism and the human condition, hits a bit too close to home: “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”

The heart of the gospel has always been a radical, countercultural call to love extravagantly and without limitations. What if, rather than fearing empathy, we stayed focused on what Jesus taught was important? Welcoming the stranger, showing hospitality to the foreigner, extending compassion to the marginalized, caring for the widow and the orphan.

May we imitate our empathetic God, not fearing our feelings, but embracing them as we seek to live out the command to love our neighbours as ourselves.

CAPTAIN LAURA VAN SCHAICK is the corps officer at Barrhaven Church in Ottawa, and the territorial gender equity officer.

Photo: AsiaVision/E+ via Getty Images

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