Empathy is a virtue?
There has been conversation lately in certain evangelical circles that empathy is woke. There’s a book by a prominent evangelical that is about how empathy is toxic. The title alone is scandalous and misleading; creating a false dichotomy where Christian compassion is opposed to the secular understanding empathy. It’s now become a hot topic for discussion among secular groups and they are conflating what the author says in her book with all of traditional Christianity. But, I’m also noticing that certain groups within the Catholic church also seem to take an unfavorable view of empathy and compassion and reduce mercy down to the sacrament of reconciliation. Maybe it was just the circle I was in, but they would laugh at praise and worship songs because they were “too sentimental” or “too emotional”. This seems to say that emotions are bad, which concerns me, since God made us with our emotions in order to help us love God and others better.
But, from my own understanding, compassion, mercy and empathy are not contradictory to Catholicism. Only fundamentalist believe in penal substitutionary atonement (which I’m assuming is strongly influencing the theology of the author of that book and evangelism in general). Catholics (and presumably Orthodox and other non-fundamentalists) reject the transactional and legalistic approach of this doctrine. In Catholic theology, justice is about putting things back into right relationship. Because of this, empathy is not a threat to justice; it is a necessity to understand that what is broken so it can be healed. Truth is not opposed to mercy. They are equally reliant on each other for love (charity)
And, looking at the gospels, I’ve noticed that Jesus didn’t gate keep his love or mercy. There are many healings where Jesus did not have any commentary on the state of someone’s soul. He simply healed them because his love is not transactional, it’s restorative.
While the secular view may completely discount objective truth, evangelicalism goes the opposite extreme and discounts mercy. How can we ever say empathy is toxic when every person is made in the image of God? C.S. Lewis wrote “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses”.
So, am I missing something, or is this idea that “empathy is bad” simply a product of evangelical theology?