In 2020, political writers who favored Joe Biden seemed to all coalesce on the same word: empathy.

Time magazine ran a big story about “Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the Importance of Empathy.” The Atlantic enthused that “in the entire history of American presidential campaigns, there may never have been a wider gap in empathy than between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.” In the Conversation, readers learned that “Joe Biden’s ‘Empathy’ May Boost U.S. Foreign Policy.” CNN reported on how “nearly every top Democrat says the same thing about former Vice President Joe Biden when they make their endorsement: He is a man defined by his decency and empathy.” 

Either Biden was so noticeably empathetic that these accounts all arrived at the descriptor independently or else political writers who heap praise on Democrats during campaign seasons aren’t very original. You can judge that for yourself, but either way, something was clearly going on with left-wingers and the term “empathy.” And four years later, it still is. “We need a world where empathy replaces fear, where compassion replaces violence, and where no one’s humanity is up for debate,” tweeted the Black Lives Matter account on the day Daniel Penny was acquitted of the homicide of Jordan Neely, a homeless man who had been threatening to kill his fellow passengers in a New York City subway car. 

Empathy for Neely doesn’t paint the whole picture though. If Penny hadn’t acted, there could have been many innocent victims in that subway car. The questions the age of empathy raises are “Who do we have empathy for, and why?” Empathy can put us in another’s shoes, but it can’t tell us where to walk. In Allie Beth Stuckey’s words, someone else’s pain “isn’t determinative of what’s true or false, right or wrong.” And in Stuckey’s new book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, she drills into the way talk of empathy has taken over public discourse even as it has become politicized, often serving as a byword for the fellow-feeling liberals reserve exclusively for one another. 

Stuckey pinpoints a major source of our troubled political discourse: We live in an age of toxic, weaponized empathy. And this empathy-mongering is particularly directed at women, weaponizing our good natures against us. We see this in phrases such as “If you really care about women, you’ll support their right to choose” and “If you’re really a Christian, you’ll fight for social justice.” While her book digs into arguments about issues on which most conservatives will agree — opposing abortion, securing the border, rejecting the radical premises buried beneath the unobjectionable name of Black Lives Matter activism — it is specifically targeted at evangelical Christians, offering not just data and anecdotes to back up its arguments but also Scripture. It’s the kind of book you might see in a Christian book club or that a mother might give to her daughter going off to college. 

The problem with empathy is that it can direct our hearts but not our heads. And as Stuckey shows, there are two sides to every story, and the head is best suited for adjudicating between the two. Abortion-rights activists, for example, will highlight the most anomalous, tragic story of a mother whose baby is to be born with fatal abnormalities to justify abortion. Never will you hear from them about babies born alive and left to die after failed abortion procedures or the reality of the pain an unborn child feels during a dilation and extraction abortion. 

Toxic Empathy does, however, contain some assertions that will be polarizing even among its audience. In her chapter “Love is Love,” for example, Stuckey asserts that it is illogical to be “privately against, but publicly for” same-sex marriage. Near the end of her chapter on social justice, Stuckey suggests that opposition to the death penalty is a manifestation “of social justice ideology within evangelicalism.” Stuckey writes that not all opponents are motivated by so-called social justice, “but I do see this as another product of empathy-manipulation.”

Each chapter is set up roughly this way: Here is the most sympathetic example you’ll get from the Left on this issue, whether it’s abortion, transgenderism, gay marriage, illegal immigration, or social justice. Then, here is a story you may not have thought about (a detransitioner who never found fulfillment in her “male” body, for example) and the data to show this issue isn’t as simple as liberals make it seem. Each chapter typically concludes with a Biblical argument. 

The chapter on transgenderism is one of the most powerful, as the strongest arguments for supporting gender transition are always based purely on emotion. But once again, stories of children and adults happily living as another gender are all over the news. Not so the stories of detransitioners or the story of how we got here in the first place. “The history of transgender treatment isn’t built on solid science and empathy,” Stuckey writes. “It’s built on the eccentric ideas of perverse, powerful men who all had the goal of deconstructing traditional morals to achieve their sexualized vision of how the world should be.” 

But the point of the book is not just to flip empathy on its head. While the book is not aimed at everyone, for conservative Christian readers looking for a primer on how to engage with their progressive friends when it comes to some of today’s most hot-button issues, Toxic Empathy is a good start. Toxic Empathy came out in October, just one month before Donald Trump won the popular vote and Republicans swept the House and Senate. If there were ever a time to think that the average, not-very-online liberal could be warming to conservative ideals, it is now. And for those who won’t be swayed by reason, Stuckey is willing to offer some sympathetic examples of her own, confirming that when leftists suggest we conform to our empathy, so often what they really mean is their progressive ideals. 

Ultimately, what matters is who you empathize with and who you don’t notice you don’t empathize with. As Allie Beth Stuckey shows her readers, that’s why empathy is a poor guide to being kind, honest, or good.