How Some U.S. Evangelicals Came To Call Empathy a Sin

In 2019, a pastor in Idaho preached a sermon titled “Empathy Is a Sin.” Clips ricocheted around social media. He argued that entering into another person’s feelings could pull Christians away from God’s truth. Other conservative pastors and writers echoed him. Empathy, they said, was sentimental, manipulative, even satanic.

For many Christians, this sounded insane. The New Testament tells believers to “weep with those who weep,” to bear one another’s burdens, to imitate Christ’s compassion. So how did a movement rooted in the Bible and in historic Calvinism get to the point where some of its leaders publicly reject empathy as morally dangerous?

What follows is not the story of all American Calvinists or all evangelicals. It is the story of a particular slice of conservative Reformed and neo-Calvinist circles, mostly in the United States, that has redefined empathy as a threat. To understand that shift, you have to track a long arc: from classic Calvinist theology, through the culture wars, into the age of Trump and social media.

What does “empathy is a sin” actually mean in this context?

In this debate, “empathy” is not just ordinary kindness. The pastors and writers who attack it usually define empathy as “feeling exactly what another person feels” or “letting someone else’s feelings govern your moral judgment.” They contrast that with “sympathy,” which they say means caring about someone while still standing outside their emotions.

So when they say “empathy is a sin,” they usually mean this: allowing another person’s pain, anger, or identity to set the terms of what you believe or how you judge right and wrong. In their framing, empathy is a kind of emotional submission. They argue that this emotional surrender can tempt Christians to excuse sin, accept unbiblical ideas, or soften hard doctrines like hell, sexual ethics, or male headship.

Empathy in this sense is treated as a rival authority. Instead of God’s word, it is the feelings of the sufferer that supposedly rule. That is why some conservative Calvinists have started to treat empathy not as a virtue but as a Trojan horse for secular ideologies.

This redefinition matters because it lets certain leaders claim they are not against compassion in general, only against a specific modern form. In practice, though, the rhetoric often trains people to distrust the emotional claims of victims, minorities, or anyone who challenges existing power. So this semantic move becomes a tool for policing which kinds of suffering count.

What set this off? From classic Calvinism to culture war anxiety

Historic Calvinism did not teach that empathy was sinful. John Calvin himself urged Christians to be “soft and tender” toward the afflicted. The Reformed tradition stressed human depravity and God’s sovereignty, but it also produced hospitals, poor relief, and missionary movements driven by compassion. The idea that feeling with another person is spiritually dangerous is not a Reformation doctrine.

The roots of the modern backlash lie less in 16th century Geneva and more in late 20th century America. Three big shifts matter here.

First, the rise of the Religious Right in the 1970s and 1980s turned many white evangelicals into a self-conscious political bloc. Abortion, feminism, gay rights, and later transgender rights were framed as existential threats. This fostered a siege mentality. Moral clarity and firmness became watchwords. Anything that looked like “softening” on social issues was suspect.

Second, from the 1990s onward, psychology and therapy language flooded popular culture. Words like “trauma,” “validation,” and “emotional safety” moved into everyday speech. Many conservative pastors watched this with suspicion. They saw a therapeutic culture that, in their view, excused sin by appealing to feelings and victimhood. Empathy, in that context, started to look like the gateway drug to moral relativism.

Third, after 2010, social movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and later conversations about LGBTQ rights and gender identity pressed hard on churches. Stories of abuse, racism, and exclusion poured out. Victims asked to be believed and centered. For some conservative leaders, this felt like an attempt to replace biblical categories of sin and repentance with secular categories of oppression and harm.

Put together, you get a specific fear: that “empathy” is the emotional engine behind progressive politics and identity-based claims. When those fears mix with a Calvinist suspicion of human reason and emotion, empathy becomes an easy target. So what began as a theological concern about the limits of human feeling morphed into a cultural panic about losing the culture war.

The turning point: from quiet suspicion to open denunciation

For most of the 20th century, conservative Calvinists did not run public campaigns against empathy. They might warn against sentimentality or “cheap grace,” but they did not label empathy itself as sinful. That changed in the 2010s.

Several overlapping developments pushed the idea into the open.

One was the “social justice” fight inside Reformed and evangelical circles. Around 2018, the Southern Baptist Convention and other conservative bodies erupted over issues like racial reconciliation, abuse reporting, and the use of concepts like systemic racism. A faction argued that “social justice” was just Marxism in Christian clothing. Empathy, in their telling, was how these ideas smuggled themselves into churches, because listening to stories of harm made people more open to structural critiques.

Another was the Trump era. Donald Trump’s rise split evangelicals. Some leaders backed him enthusiastically, others reluctantly, others not at all. Critics pointed to Trump’s cruelty and lack of compassion. Defenders responded by downplaying those traits and stressing his policies. In that environment, empathy itself started to look like a political litmus test. To some, calls for empathy toward immigrants, Muslims, or sexual minorities sounded like coded attacks on conservative politics.

At the same time, social media rewarded outrage and hot takes. Pastors who might once have written a quiet essay about “the limits of empathy” now posted viral threads and sermons with titles like “Empathy Is a Sin.” The more provocative the claim, the more attention it got. Some of these figures were part of what is often called the “Moscow, Idaho” or Christian nationalist orbit, which already framed Christianity as a culture war project.

By the late 2010s, influential blogs, podcasts, and conferences in certain Reformed circles were repeating the line: empathy, as our culture defines it, is not a Christian virtue. That shift from private caution to public denunciation marked a turning point. It turned a niche theological concern into a badge of identity for a subset of the movement.

Once empathy became a marker of which side you were on, it stopped being a neutral psychological term and became a weapon in an internal war over the future of conservative Christianity.

Who drove this? The mix of theologians, culture warriors, and internet pastors

No single person invented the phrase “empathy is a sin,” but several types of figures helped normalize the idea.

First, there were theologians and writers in the Reformed tradition who had long warned about the limits of human emotion. They drew on older Calvinist themes: the noetic effects of sin (the idea that sin corrupts our minds and feelings), the authority of Scripture over experience, and the danger of sentimental religion. Some of them wrote careful distinctions between empathy and sympathy. They argued that Christians should love and care for others, but that they must not let another’s feelings override biblical teaching.

Second, there were culture warriors who took those distinctions and weaponized them. They linked empathy to “wokeness,” critical race theory, feminism, and LGBTQ rights. In their telling, empathy was the emotional strategy by which secular ideologies captured Christians. If you felt too deeply with a gay Christian, a rape survivor, or a Black congregant describing racism, you might be tempted to question traditional doctrines or conservative politics. So they warned their followers to be on guard against empathy as such.

Third, there were internet pastors and influencers who thrived on shock value. Figures associated with hard-line complementarianism (strict male headship), Christian nationalism, or the Moscow, Idaho scene often spoke in absolutes. For them, saying “empathy can be misused” was not enough. “Empathy is a sin” was a clearer brand. Sermons and blog posts with that title circulated widely, especially on YouTube and Twitter, and were quoted by both supporters and critics.

Finally, there were institutional battles that gave this rhetoric teeth. In some seminaries, mission boards, and denominations, accusations of being “too empathetic” were used against pastors who supported abuse survivors, backed racial reconciliation initiatives, or questioned harsh disciplinary practices. Empathy talk became a way to police the boundaries of acceptable ministry.

These different actors did not always agree on everything, but they converged on one message: empathy, as promoted by modern culture, is spiritually dangerous. That convergence gave the phrase staying power and turned a fringe idea into a recognizable talking point in conservative Calvinist subcultures.

What did this change inside American Calvinism and evangelicalism?

Redefining empathy as suspect has had several concrete effects in parts of American evangelical life.

First, it reshaped how some churches handle abuse, trauma, and mental health. If leaders are trained to distrust strong emotional claims, they are more likely to question victims, minimize harm, or prioritize institutional reputation. Critics point to cases where pastors warned against “empathizing” with alleged abuse survivors, arguing that doing so might bias the process. The rhetoric about empathy gave theological cover to what in many contexts looks like ordinary stonewalling.

Second, it hardened resistance to social justice conversations. Calls to listen to Black Christians on racism, women on sexism, or LGBTQ people on exclusion were framed as demands for empathy that would erode doctrinal clarity. By labeling such listening as spiritually dangerous, some leaders could dismiss entire categories of testimony without engaging their substance.

Third, it deepened an existing split between different evangelical tribes. Many evangelicals, including many Calvinists, reject the “empathy is a sin” line and argue that compassion and emotional solidarity are central to Christian discipleship. They point to Jesus weeping at Lazarus’s tomb, to Paul’s command to “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep,” and to centuries of Christian care for the suffering. For them, the anti-empathy rhetoric is a distortion driven by politics, not Scripture.

Fourth, it affected pastoral style. In some circles, a harsh, confrontational tone became a badge of faithfulness. To be gentle or emotionally attuned risked being labeled “empathetic” in the negative sense. That created a feedback loop: pastors who were already drawn to authoritarian styles found theological justification for staying that way, while more emotionally aware leaders felt pressure to harden up or leave.

These changes did not transform all of American Calvinism, but they carved out a distinct subculture where suspicion of empathy is part of the air people breathe. That subculture, in turn, influences online discourse far beyond its actual numbers.

Why it still matters: empathy, authority, and the future of faith

On one level, the “empathy is a sin” debate is a niche fight in a specific corner of conservative Protestantism. On another, it reveals a broader struggle over how religious communities handle suffering, authority, and change.

At stake is not just a word, but a posture. Do you start with the experience of the person in front of you, then test it against your convictions? Or do you start with your convictions and keep the person at arm’s length so their pain cannot unsettle you? Different Christian traditions answer that question in different ways, but the recent anti-empathy rhetoric pushes hard toward the second option.

It also shows how theology and politics bleed into each other. The fear of empathy did not arise in a vacuum. It grew in a time when stories of abuse, racism, and exclusion were challenging church structures, and when conservative Christians felt besieged by social change. Labeling empathy as sin was one way to blunt those challenges without having to reconsider core commitments.

For observers outside the church, this history helps explain a puzzle: how some believers can affirm a religion centered on a suffering savior yet appear remarkably unmoved by the suffering of others. It is not that their tradition has no resources for compassion. It is that a particular recent reading of that tradition has trained them to treat certain kinds of compassion as a threat.

For people inside the church, the debate forces a choice. They can follow the newer line that treats empathy as spiritually suspect, or they can recover older Christian practices of entering into others’ pain while still wrestling honestly with questions of truth and ethics. Either way, the argument over empathy is not going away. It has become one of the fault lines along which American evangelicalism is sorting itself out.

So when you hear a pastor say “empathy is a sin,” you are hearing more than a hot take. You are hearing the echo of decades of culture war, theological anxiety, and institutional self-protection, all packed into a single word.