Empathy, Sympathy, and the LGBTQ+ Movement

Empathy means standing in someone else’s shoes. In a world where kindness is the most important virtue, empathy is the highest manifestation of this love. But is empathy always a good thing? Is empathy ever dangerous? When did empathy become more virtuous than sympathy?

do we need empathy or sympathy?

Empathy is a relatively new word; it didn’t enter our language until the twentieth century. The dictionary defines empathy as “the power of mentally identifying oneself with (and so fully comprehending) a person or object of contemplation.” When people say, “My thoughts and prayers are with you,” they are likely referring to the power of empathy, which holds that if you mentally identify with something or someone, you comprehend (apprehend with your senses) their pain. And your ability to feel with them helps break the isolation of their experience, which in turn helps them heal. My dictionary contrasts empathy to sympathy: “Pity is feeling sorry for someone; empathy is feeling sorry with someone.” If you pity someone, you are observing some identifiable and objective problem experienced by that person. Being the object of pity means that something is terribly wrong, and something must be done about that. Sympathy identifies an objective problem and seeks an objective solution.

The character of Satan in John Milton’s magnificent Paradise Lost, a seventeenth- century epic poem that boasts ten thousand lines of iambic pentameter, has a word for us about this matter of pity. In the poem, the character of Satan says, “The mind is its place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. . . . / Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” In other words, Satan would rather be anything but pitied. Rather than be the object of pity or the agent of prayer to God, calling out to him for mercy and begging him for the grace to repent, the fallen angel would rather play mind games, somehow “making” an imaginary heaven out of a real hell. The seventeenth-century poet John Milton helps us ask the twenty-first-century question, Do people in real trouble benefit from pity or empathy? Do people in real trouble need real help (sympathy)? Or do they just need to reframe their troubles?

In contrast to empathy, sympathy is an old word with an old history. It describes “the quality or state of being affected by the suffering or grief of another; a feeling or expression of compassion or condolence.” Sympathy recognizes a problem that someone else has, and sympathy grieves and longs for a solution. This means that when your daughter comes home from college and tells you that she is a man named Rex, you ought to feel sympathy, because something is terribly, dreadfully wrong with your daughter. But LGBTQ+ propaganda wants you to feel empathy instead. LGBTQ+ propaganda wants you to reframe your point of view, not help fix your daughter’s problem.

While empathy is not always unwarranted, we are never called to empathize with sin. In this context, empathy puts you squarely into Milton’s satanic paradigm—the mind is so powerful that it makes a reality of its own will.

Author Joe Rigney has traced the movement in this term, empathy, and he suggests that while empathy certainly has a place in our lives, we all tend to use the term selectively. We empathize with perceived victims only. (Who, for example, wants to empathize with a murderer or rapist?) Selective empathy is one of the key contributors to tribalism and polarization. To Rigney, empathy is dangerous because if the highest form of love is standing in someone else’s shoes, no one is left standing in a place of objective truth. If someone is drowning in a river, jumping in with him may break up his loneliness, but having two drowned people produces an even greater problem. Sympathy allows someone to stand on the shore, on the solid ground of objective truth where real help might be found. Empathy’s intent is good—connecting with another person in pain. But when the person in pain needs to be rescued, empathy leads to alienation. This constant state of alienation reiterates the false idea that there is no real help available and that all we have is loneliness—the autonomous individual seeking meaning in his own pain.

Words matter. And we are living in a world that has become a war of words. Christians are called to be peacemakers, not passive dupes in this war. Words do more than communicate ideas; they shape our imaginations. Change the words, and you change the world. And Jesus is still the Word made flesh. Jesus is also our high priest who offers us sympathy, not empathy:

Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Heb. 4:14–16)

This matchless description of the person and work of Jesus invites us to a place so perfect that it exceeds our imagination: the throne of grace. Jesus is prophet, priest, and king, but this passage in Hebrews focuses our attention on his priesthood—Jesus as man’s representative before God.

the need to know jesus

Any Christian struggling with homosexuality needs to know the resurrected Jesus, the Son of God, as high priest. Jesus is fully man and fully God, which is fully a mind-boggling mystery. God loved us so very much that he gave us Jesus (John 3:16), and Jesus fulfilled the terms of our ransom. Jesus obeyed the law perfectly, and he did this as a man. Jesus died a shameful death on the cross, taking ownership and making payment for the sins of all his people for all of time. Puritan John Flavel wrote:

Christ Jesus set himself wholly apart for believers. We may say, “Lord, condemnation was yours, that justification might be mine; agony was yours, and victory mine; pain was yours, and ease is mine; agony was yours, and victory mine; the curse was yours and the blessing mine; a crown of thorns was yours, and eternal life mine!”

Jesus loves his people more than we can ever understand this side of eternity.

The resurrected Jesus is our high priest, and he sympathizes with our weaknesses. Christ’s sympathy is far greater than human empathy because God is able to do more than reframe our troubles. He can cure us of all our infirmities. He offers us sympathy, not mocking or shame. Even if we are suffering because of our sin, Jesus does not heap shame on us. He calls us to come boldly to him. He is the great physician who knows our sin disease better than we do. His power to resist temptation was real. Christ fought sin as a man. His fight was not a sham. His hunger and want and temptation were real. And to his people, Jesus is offering real healing, real cure. But his terms are not what we would expect. Jesus suffers with us, but Jesus does not sin with us. He will cure us on his terms, which include stepping into the power that his resurrection offers to fight sin every day of our life on earth. His power to resist temptation is given to us by grace.

Sometimes we just want someone to say that we are okay just the way we are. But that is not what Jesus offers. Are we willing to be healed on Jesus’s terms? Or are we insisting that Jesus heal us on our own terms?

John 5 records a story of a man who had to confront this problem head on. He had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years, lingering by the healing waters at the Sheep Gate. He trusted that the water would heal him, and he was waiting for someone to put him in. But day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year, no one did. Then Jesus arrived. But Jesus didn’t put him in the water either. Instead, in sympathy, Jesus asked him a question: “Do you want to be healed?” (John 5:6).

Let that linger for a moment. Do you want to be made well? Do you want to be made well on Jesus’s terms or your own? Does the Christian who calls himself gay want to be made well on God’s terms?

Importantly, the sick man didn’t take offense at this question, as perhaps someone like the rich young ruler might have (see Luke 18:18–25). After all, why would the man be sitting there for decades if he didn’t want to be made well? The question was meant to reveal that Jesus heals on his own terms, not ours. For the man to be healed, he needed to embrace the terms that Jesus was going to set.

The paralyzed man answered, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool” (John 5:7). True enough. While we don’t know what was happening in the man’s heart as he looked up at Jesus, we do know that he embraced the terms that our Lord offered. We know this because of two things. First, when Jesus said, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk” (5:8), the man obeyed. He trusted that he could do what God asked of him through the power of Jesus. And what is the power of Jesus? It’s grace. Unmerited favor. Jesus gives us the power to do that which we could not imagine or do on our own terms. We obey in grace. But this is not passive; it still requires trust and faith and grit and strain and action on our part. Trusting Jesus is an action. Accepting Jesus’s terms of sympathy means abandoning our own notions about how we need to be helped. It means doing what he says.

The second matter revealing the now-healed man’s heart happens in the next scene. The very next time Jesus encounters the man, he is in the temple. The setting implies something important—the man knows that God has healed him. (Whether he was worshiping, the text does not say.) Jesus approaches the man and says, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you” (5:14). We know that not all suffering is the consequence of active sin, but Jesus’s words imply that this man’s sin was. So we know from this encounter that the man received Jesus’s terms in two ways, in active obedience (5:9) and in repentance (5:14). Both his active obedience (walking, after thirty-eight years of paralysis) and his repentance (receiving Jesus’s gentle rebuke), as well as his evident change and healing, suggest that this man needed the saving grace of our high priest.

Excerpted from Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age by Rosaria Butterfield © 2023. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.