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Welcome to Episode 327 of The Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. If you are new to this podcast, you can connect with me by emailing me at jack@christian-leader.com. Life and Leaders with your comments, suggestions, questions, and ideas for future episodes. You can find more resources at thenonanxiousleader.com, where you can also subscribe to my Two for Tuesday email newsletter. I'll also I'll put a link to that subscription page in the show notes. And finally, if you want to support my work and become part of an exclusive online community, you can become a patron for as little as $5 a month. I do at least one live event like a Q&A or case study each month. And for $9 a month, you can become a VIP patron where you get discounts on everything that I offer, including positive intelligence. And you can share those discounts with your friends, family, and colleagues.

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Now, without further ado, here is episode 327, My Take on Joe Rigny's War on Empathy. Two different listeners have emailed me recently to ask me for my thoughts on Joe Rigny's so-called War on Empathy. I wasn't familiar with his work, but as I dug into it, I found that he was inspired by Edwin Friedman's take on empathy in A Failure of Nerve. Rigney is a Fellow of theology at New St Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. He is the author of numerous books, including The Sin of Empathy and Leadership and Emotional Sabotage. Rigney argues that an overemphasis on empathy has made evangelical Christians more susceptible to the arguments of progressives, which has caused them to stray from the truth. For example, with LGBTQ plus inclusion or immigration. Of course, this is his understanding of Christian truth, not mine. To make his point, Rigny distinguishes between what he calls sentimental empathy and compassion. He defines sentimental empathy as emotional identification that suspends moral judgment and can lead to moral confusion by prioritizing feelings over truth. In contrast, Rigny calls for compassion that includes sympathy for others without compromising one's morals or values. In theory, I don't think Rigny is far off.

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However, in practice, I believe he's missing the mark. Before I unpack why, I want to unpack the whole idea of empathy as well as Friedman's understanding and where I agree and disagree with him. In a failure of nerve, Edwin Friedmann maintains that empathy is a problem. He contends that empathy is the source of functioning and enabling behavior, that because of empathy, we are not able to remain self-differentiated in the face of sabotage. I agree to a certain extent, but I think it's a bit more complicated. To better understand this, I decided to look into empathy. The current understanding of empathy breaks it down into two types, effective and cognitive. Some say there is a third type, somatic empathy, where mirror neurons actually cause us to physically mimic the emotions of another. But the research on this is not conclusive. Anyway, for our purposes here, distinguishing between effective and cognitive empathy is what matters. Affective empathy is the ability to respond appropriately to the emotions of others. It is further subdivided into two types of responses, empathic concern and personal distress. Empathic concern is the ability to respond with compassion and care. Personal distress is a feeling of discomfort and anxiety in response to another's suffering.

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I would contend that it is the personal distress response that causes a problem in any system. When people are less differentiated, they are unable to distinguish between the problems of others and their own feelings. In fact, they unwittingly make the problems of others their own problems. This is a problem. Instead of letting the other respond to their own challenges, a personal distress response will result in a need to relieve one's own anxiety. This could be through enabling over functioning behavior. It could also be through blame or pain displacement, either aimed at the other or by triangling a third. Or one could withdraw completely, which is definitely not helpful. I believe it is the personal distress response that Friedmann had a problem with. Conversely, I believe empathic concern is a response of a self-differentiated person. This is appropriate emotional connection. Showing care and concern for another who is in pain is appropriate. It's healthy as long as you don't try to relieve their pain for them. Remember that effective empathy is the ability to respond appropriately. The other type of empathy is cognitive empathy, sometimes called perspective-taking. This is the ability to understand the thinking behind another person's mental state.

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It is the ability to see things from another's point of view. You don't have to agree with them. You're just able to see things the way they do. I believe that cognitive empathy is a critical skill in recognizing emotional process. It's not emotional at all. In fact, some would call it cold or calloused. It's getting into someone's head in a good way so as to understand where they're coming from. It helps us to recognize whether someone is self-differentiating or not. When it comes to sabotage, empathy can be a good thing or a bad thing. It's a good thing when you are able to use cognitive empathy to recognize emotional process. This helps keep you from getting sucked in emotionally to the anxiety of others. It enables you to have some perspective on the situation. It provides emotional space to help you to avoid reacting. Cognitive empathy can help you recognize sabotage without taking on the problems of others. Likewise, empathic concern is a good thing. It's how you stay connected emotionally to another without taking on their problems. A healthy combination of cognitive empathy and empathic concern is how you can remain a non-anxious presence in the face of sabotage.

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I believe this is what Rigny refers to when he talks about compassion. Conversely, personal distress is a form of empathy that will make things worse. It will feed the anxiety of others and make the sabotage harder to handle. Personal distress will cause you to over function and/or enable inappropriate behavior. It can result in reactivity, that is, unleashing your own anxiety in the face of sabotage, or adaptivity, which is giving in without taking a non-anxious stand. I'll note here that Rigny's term sentimental empathy is not a psychological term. It's a vernacular term that I believe equates to personal distress. I'm in agreement with Rigny that this type of empathy is not helpful and can cause to stray from their goals and values to give in to surrounding togetherness pressure created by others. I would say that this is consistent with Friedman's take on empathy. But I also believe that Friedmann was using hyperbole to push back on the increasing emphasis on empathy in the mid to late 20th century. I contend that healthy empathy, that is empathic concern and perspective taking, is essential to self-differentiation. It fosters healthy emotional connection without defining others. In a sense, I agree with Rigny, but I disagree with him in two big ways.

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One way I think Rigny gets the idea of empathy wrong is that he is applying the concept of empathy to public discourse and sentiment and not to how we function as individuals in relationship systems. He's using empathy as an abstraction that is used as a cultural and political tool. To me, this isn't empathy, it's influence. Now, I will grant that a nation is a relationship system, but he focuses mainly on how sentimental empathy causes Christians as a whole to stray from the truth. In a conversation with Albert Moller, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Rigny explains this. I'll put a link to the conversation in the show notes. Rigny says, I think there's a quote by a guy, Paul Bloom, is a secular psychologist, wrote a book a number of years ago called Against Empathy. The quote that got me turned on to him was where he said, When most people hear the word empathy, they think kindness. I think war because It's empathy for my in-group, empathy for the oppressed classes, empathy for these people, as coupled with intense rage, hatred, demonization of anybody that I think is threatening them. Rigny is using empathy as a polemic against progressive values and claiming that progressives are influencing conservative Christians by getting them to feel sorry for those who are victimized.

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To me, what Rigny really has a problem with is how politics and cultural influence work these days, but it's process, not content. Making people feel sorry for the illegally deported immigrant is no different than saying you're a victim of DEI. In fact, I would say that the right might be better at this the left. For example, opponents of critical race theory incorrectly claim that it teaches that Whites are inherently racist or oppressive and should feel guilty. In this case, they claim that Whites are victimized by people who are trying to make them feel guilty for what their ancestors did without acknowledging that systemic inequality still exist. This is the same sentimental empathy that Rigny identifies just used in the other direction. It's process, not content. In his article, The Anatomy of a Steer, Rigny shows how Wheeton College recently gave in to social media pressure to take down their post, congratulating a Wheaton graduate for their appointment to the Trump administration. There is pushback showing concern, sadness, and outrage over what Rigny calls the, quote, victims, real or alleged, unquote, of the Trump administration. Wheaton ended up taking down the post and saying they didn't mean to imbroil the college in a political dispute.

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Now, I agree with Rigny that the college gave in to surrounding togetherness pressure. My difference with him is that this isn't empathy. It's giving in to political and cultural influence. Yes, that's still surrounding togetherness, and yes, it's poor leadership, but it's not empathy. In Rigny's defense, he does acknowledge that empathy can be appropriate, but he also proves my point that his big concern is social and political. It's about who is winning the culture wars. He says, And this is why part of the reason I've gone on the war path on this, and that I do hope that one of the results is that there are perfectly acceptable uses of the term empathy. I'm not a word wrangler. I'm not trying to fight about terms because you could do the same thing under the banner of pity or compassion or any other term. But I do want people to be more mindful of the ways that institutions and families and communities can be hijacked by powerful emotions in the hands of advocates who are trying to steer them. That's what I'm concerned about, and I don't want the emotion. I wonder if Rigny would agree with me that the big problem is that people need to stop blaming others for their condition and need to start taking responsibility for self.

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This is true for progressives, conservatives, Christians, and non-Christians. Until we do that, Rigny's problem with empathy will continue. My other big difference with Rigny is a huge divergence in our understanding understanding of Christian values. His interpretation of scripture is completely opposite from mine. This not only plays into his support for the current Trump administration, but also in his understanding of feminism. He says, Women are more empathetic by God's design. There's a reason that they are barred from the pastoral office. So it's no surprise that in a culture which has become dominated by feminism, it's deep in the American system at this point. That in the same time frame, you would have an outbreak of empathy that would become the steering wheel by which every institution is hijacked. End quote. Look, there are so many ways that Rigny and I disagree on this, and I'm not going to try to unpack this. I think you understand his point of view, and you probably understand my point of view. Self-differentiation means I don't need him to agree with me, and I hope he doesn't need me to agree with him. What I would say is that his war on empathy is more about politics and the culture war and how they integrate with his own understanding of Christian faith.

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Finally, as I mentioned, I believe that appropriate empathy is important. It's about how we function in real relationships, not in the media or social media. Certainly, effective leadership depends on the ability to self-define, to know your goals and values, and to be able to hold onto them in non-anxious ways in the midst of surrounding togetherness pressure. But it also It also depends on healthy emotional connection, and you can't do that without healthy empathy. That's it for episode 327. Don't forget, you can connect with me at jack@christian-leaders.com and get more resources at thenonanxiousleader.com. If you have found this episode helpful, please share it with someone who might benefit, and please leave a review on your podcast platform of choice. Until next time, go be yourself.