Toxic Empathy

Where do your convictions come from when a painful story tugs your heart? In Toxic Empathy, Allie Beth Stuckey argues that in today’s culture wars, your empathy is being expertly weaponized. She contends that progressive narratives often demand you prove you’re a good person by affirming whatever feels compassionate in the moment—even if it contradicts Scripture, science, and common sense. The book’s core claim is stark: empathy is a God-given capacity, but it is a terrible guide when it’s detached from truth; real love always rejoices in the truth and sometimes says "no" to what a hurting person wants (1 Corinthians 13:6).

Stuckey frames her case through five cultural slogans—what she calls "lies"—that hook Christians via compassion: "Abortion is health care," "Trans women are women," "Love is love," "No human is illegal," and "Social justice is justice." Threaded throughout is her charge that Christians are being catechized more by viral anecdotes, euphemisms, and soundbites than by the Bible. She invites you to exchange feelings-first decision-making for a truth-first, love-shaped obedience to God.

What She Means by "Toxic Empathy"

Empathy, at its best, helps you pause, imagine another’s suffering, and move toward them with kindness. But Stuckey shows how empathy can be hijacked. You’re told: if you really care, you’ll support abortion access for tragic pregnancies; if you’re truly loving, you’ll affirm gender identities; if you’re compassionate, you’ll back open borders; if you’re Christian, you’ll endorse social justice crusades. The sleight of hand is subtle: feelings are conflated with love, and affirmation is presented as the only moral response. In this paradigm, disagreeing with the proposed solution becomes proof you lack compassion.

A Christian Counter: Truth-Filled Love

Against this current, Stuckey urges you to submit empathy to biblical love—which actively seeks another’s good according to God’s standards. That means testing slogans against Scripture and reality, even when the story is heartbreaking. She offers a practical toolkit of red flags to spot manipulation: euphemisms that sanitize harm ("gender-affirming care"), Christian words with new meanings ("equity" redefined as forced equal outcomes), emotional bullying ("if you were kind, you’d agree"), and calls for compassion that always terminate in specific political ends.

Five Flashpoints, One Throughline

Each chapter pairs a moving real-world story with a wider analysis. You’ll meet Samantha and Luis, whose baby Halo had a lethal diagnosis—a narrative used to justify late-term abortion. You’ll walk with Laura Perry Smalts, who transitioned to "Jake" and later detransitioned, discovering that hormones and surgeries didn’t heal her wounds. You’ll see how redefining marriage to "love is love" inevitably rearranges childhood itself via donor conception and surrogacy. You’ll weigh the pain of deportations against the mounting body count from sanctuary policies, fentanyl trafficking, and cartel control at the border. You’ll feel the grief over Elijah McClain’s death alongside the measurable surge in homicides where police were defunded and laws were relaxed.

Across these flashpoints, Stuckey brings in scholars like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams on disparities and incentives, Nancy Pearcey on a holistic view of the body, and Heather Mac Donald on policing data. She also draws on Christian voices—Rosaria Butterfield, Christopher Yuan, Voddie Baucham—whose testimonies and arguments push back against therapeutic definitions of love (compare: Pearcey’s Love Thy Body and Sowell’s The Quest for Cosmic Justice).

Why This Matters Now

In a world that rewards outrage and edits complexity out of viral moments, it’s easier than ever to shame Christians into silence. Stuckey argues that muddled empathy is especially deadly for kids: abortion ends lives; gender medicine sterilizes minors; donor conception and surrogacy engineer motherlessness or fatherlessness; porous borders feed cartels and endanger families; soft-on-crime policies harm the very neighborhoods activists claim to serve. She wants you to recover the church’s historic vocation: defend the least of these with courage, clarity, and compassion.

By the end, you’ll have a map for resisting manipulation without growing cold. You’ll learn to test slogans, name reality, use precise language, and choose the reform that actually helps the person in front of you. Most of all, you’ll be equipped to pair tenderness with truth—so your empathy doesn’t become the lever that pries you away from love.

Stuckey gives you a practical diagnostic for the moments your heart is pulled by a viral story or a charged slogan. She’s not asking you to care less; she’s showing you how to care better—by noticing red flags that often accompany manipulation. If you’ve felt cornered by the line "If you loved people, you’d support X," this chapter is your release valve.

Red Flag #1: Euphemisms that Blur Reality

Listen for soft words masking hard truths. "Reproductive rights" erases the baby; "gender-affirming care" hides sterilization and mastectomy; "pregnancy tissue" euphemizes a distinct human life. Stuckey urges you to always ask, "What is the plain-language description of the action proposed here?" and refuse to debate inside the euphemism. Use accurate terms, kindly.

Red Flag #2: Bible-Language with New Meanings

Watch for Christian vocabulary smuggled into secular agendas. "Equity" in Scripture means impartial justice; in activism it often means equal outcomes enforced by power (as Vice President Harris publicly summarized). "Justice" becomes preferential treatment for groups deemed oppressed. The bait is compassion; the switch is partiality (compare Voddie Baucham’s critique of the "faulty social justice gospel").

Red Flag #3: Compassion that Always Ends in Policy

Notice when "be kind" is a passcode for specific laws: "love is love" = redefine marriage and family; "black lives matter" = defund police and redistribute wealth; "no human is illegal" = oppose border enforcement. Genuine neighbor-love focuses on people; manipulation drives you to pre-chosen political outcomes.

Red Flag #4: Emotion over Argument

If your questions get labeled "hateful" or "fragile" instead of answered, you’re in an empathy shakedown. Stuckey recounts 2020’s black-square moment, where dissent about rioting or data was branded racist. Her counsel: don’t take the bait; calmly return to facts and first principles.

Red Flag #5: Half-True Prooftexts

Expect a true premise yoked to a false conclusion: "Christians must love the foreigner; therefore open borders." "The early church shared; therefore socialism." She calls you to read in context and distinguish personal ethics from state policy (see also Nancy Pearcey’s careful biblical-ethical distinctions).

Case Study: The Black Square

Stuckey describes her 2020 Instagram feed filled with black squares and scripture-laced captions. She sympathized with grief over George Floyd and agreed racism is evil. But the instant leap from sorrow to "abolish police" and system-level indictments triggered these red flags. When she posted concern about riots and asked "why not both?" she hit the emotional wall—accusations rather than reasons. That experience catalyzed her deeper reading (Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, original CRT sources), which confirmed that slogans were outpacing facts and fueling harmful policies.

Your Takeaway

Caring is non-negotiable for Christians. But the most loving response is the one aligned with reality and God’s Word—even if it contradicts the demanded performance of empathy. Keep your heart soft and your definitions sharp.

Stuckey begins with Samantha and Luis in East Texas, whose daughter, Halo, was diagnosed in utero with anencephaly and lived four hours after birth. This is the kind of devastating story used to argue that "abortion is health care." Stuckey asks you to sit with Samantha’s anguish—and then also to sit with Halo’s humanity. The chapter’s central move is a moral reframing: abortion is never merely a medical act; it’s the intentional ending of an innocent life.

Seeing the Whole Person(s)

Empathy narrows your focus to the mother’s suffering; love widens it to include the child. Stuckey details second-trimester procedures (dilation and evacuation; digoxin injections) and first-trimester chemical abortions, not to shock you but to reintroduce reality where euphemism rules. She cites nurse Jill Stanek’s testimony about babies born alive after abortions and left to die, and notes CDC estimates that dozens of children have died post-delivery after failed abortions (Charlotte Lozier Institute aggregates similar data).

The Personhood Question

If a fetus is human, the core dispute becomes personhood. Stuckey challenges criteria like sentience or dependence, pointing out how they justify infanticide as much as abortion (echoing critiques of Peter Singer’s logic). If size, location, or wantedness determine worth, no one is safe. By contrast, the Christian view grounds equal dignity in the image of God from conception.

Hard Cases and Life of the Mother

What about ectopic pregnancy or severe complications? Stuckey quotes OB-GYN testimony clarifying that delivering a baby early to save a mother’s life is not morally the same as aborting—intent matters. In Samantha’s case, she would have delivered either way; abortion would have denied the parents time to hold Halo and grieve humanly.

The Dark Roots and the Modern Machine

Stuckey traces abortion’s alliance with eugenics—Margaret Sanger’s birth control movement, forced sterilizations, disproportionate abortion of black babies today—arguing the movement still fulfills a selective-reduction logic (compare: Angela Franks’s work on Sanger). She also highlights billion-dollar philanthropy and profit incentives that keep abortion central.

Love in Action: Pregnancy Centers

To rebut the claim that pro-lifers "only care about babies," Stuckey profiles Prestonwood Pregnancy Center in Dallas. You meet Maria, a refugee who nearly chose abortion at Planned Parenthood but encountered practical help and the gospel at Prestonwood: vitamins, Medicaid enrollment, parenting classes, a car seat, a crib, meals, and a community. Maria chose life and later faith. This is the pro-life movement’s daily, quiet work.

Law Matters—and So Does Mercy

After Dobbs, abortions dropped by tens of thousands. Stuckey emphasizes that while not all evil vanishes when outlawed, the law is a teacher and a restraint (Romans 13). She also holds out profound hope for post-abortive women and men: the parable of the prodigal son, the promise that no one is beyond Christ’s mercy. The chapter concludes where it began: with tears—but now tethered to truth strong enough to carry them.

This chapter is both tender and terrifying. You follow Laura Perry Smalts, who became "Jake" with testosterone, a double mastectomy, and a hysterectomy—only to discover that none of it healed the wounds that drove her dysphoria. It felt euphoric at first, then empty. Eventually, through her mother’s persistent love and the gospel, Laura detransitioned and now lives as the woman God made her to be.

What Transition Really Entails

Stuckey lays out the medical realities often hidden behind affirming slogans: cross-sex hormones alter cardiovascular risk, fertility, bone density, and mental health; surgeries create lifelong dependencies (e.g., dilation after vaginoplasty; high complication rates after phalloplasty). For minors, these are not "pauses"; puberty blockers plus hormones functionally sterilize many (see systematic concerns raised in the U.K. Cass Review and by U.S. pediatric dissenters).

Corrupted Science, Captured Medicine

She traces intellectual roots to Alfred Kinsey and John Money—researchers whose ideas about child sexuality and gender are now widely discredited, but still haunt clinical practice. Money’s "gender identity" experiments included the tragic Reimer case. Stuckey argues that today’s pipeline—fast-track affirmation, minimal assessment, rapid prescriptions—is closer to ideology than science, reinforced by profit motives (see also whistleblower testimony from U.S. gender clinics).

The Social Contagion Factor

Why the explosion in adolescent trans identification, particularly among girls with no childhood history of dysphoria? Stuckey points to "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" research (Lisa Littman) showing peer clustering, co-occurring mental health issues, heavy social media use, and pornography influences (e.g., "sissy porn") as accelerants. She notes the mismatch between historic gender dysphoria patterns (rare; mostly boys; early onset) and today’s surge.

Women’s Spaces and Safety

The aphorism "trans women are women" doesn’t stay theoretical. Stuckey catalogues harms to women and girls: sports (Riley Gaines competing against and sharing a locker room with a male; cyclists losing podiums to males), prisons (female inmates assaulted by males housed with them), shelters, and spas. If words create legal reality, then women lose the sex-segregated protections their mothers won.

A Better Way Back

Laura’s arc—alienation, affirmation, medicalization, despair, repentance, restoration—models a path for families and churches. Her parents refused to use her male name yet never closed their home. Scripture softened their tone while stiffening their spine. Over time, the truth she once resented became the mercy she craved. That, Stuckey says, is the pattern to emulate: courage without cruelty; tenderness without capitulation (see Rosaria Butterfield’s similar emphasis on hospitality plus honesty).

If you’ve ever wondered whether "love is love" harms anyone, this chapter answers by following the ripple effects to children. Stuckey affirms every person’s dignity and acknowledges the appeal of stories like author Glennon Doyle’s public shift—from a broken marriage to a joyful same-sex union with Abby Wambach. But she asks you to consider what necessarily changes once marriage is untethered from its male–female, child-welcoming purpose.

Why Marriage Exists—Biblically and Socially

Scripture roots marriage in creation (Genesis 1–2), Jesus reiterates it (Matthew 19), and Paul shows it represents Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5). Socially, its public purpose is to bind a child’s mother and father to each other and to the child (Alan Keyes’s in-principle argument). Change that definition, and you redefine family formation by law—and by technology.

Children Are Re-Engineered

Same-sex couples can’t conceive together; law and markets step in. Stuckey tracks what follows: egg and sperm selling (children with barcodes in lab reports), commercial surrogacy (pregnancies separated from motherhood), and routine motherlessness or fatherlessness by design. You meet Lance Bass’s twins and hear his lament that they sought maternal comfort from his mom, not him—an echo of a primal need. You hear Ross Johnston (raised by two moms) describe longing for a father, and Olivia Maurel (born via surrogacy) speak of a deep wound from separation at birth.

Not All Technologies Are Equal

Stuckey distinguishes between adoption (a merciful response to existing loss) and gamete markets/surrogacy (the creation of loss by design). She doesn’t spare heterosexual use of these technologies when they yield the same harms—yet she notes that for same-sex couples, they are a first step by definition, not a last resort. The moral logic you affirm downstream of "love is love" is the moral logic you must defend here too.

Public Stance and Private Friendship

Can you be "personally opposed" to redefining marriage but "politically supportive"? Stuckey argues no. Law teaches, shapes norms, and affects kids. She cites Jack Phillips’ decade-long legal ordeal as proof that once the state redefines marriage, dissenters get punished. Yet she stresses that friendship and witness begin with the gospel, not a debate about sex—pointing to the conversions of Christopher Yuan and Rosaria Butterfield, whose journeys began with hospitality and Scripture before sexual ethics changed.

Immigration is where empathy feels most obvious. You meet Maribel Trujillo Diaz, a hard-working mom deported to Mexico, separated from her American-born children—including a toddler with epilepsy. Stuckey fully admits the heartbreak and your instinct to say, "Let her stay." But then she places Maribel’s sorrow alongside other names: Kate Steinle shot on a San Francisco pier by a repeatedly deported felon; Mollie Tibbetts murdered by an illegal immigrant in Iowa; families shattered by fentanyl smuggled through cartel-controlled corridors.

Two Truths, Both Heavy

First, most illegal immigrants are not violent criminals; many look like your neighbors. Second, every preventable crime by a person who should not be here is a failure of love for citizens. Compassion can’t be a one-way street. Stuckey compiles data on record apprehensions, rising encounters with individuals on terror watchlists, and the reality that U.S. border policy now empowers cartels to rape, extort, and traffic along smuggling routes—especially harming women and children (see Doctors Without Borders’ reporting).

Order Is a Christian Good

Drawing on Scripture (Nehemiah’s walls; Romans 13), Stuckey argues that borders are moral tools to secure peace. C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton provide a humane vision: patriotism as love for a particular home and people—a love that makes you more, not less, capable of serving others. Sovereignty is not supremacy; it’s stewardship. A nation cannot care for everyone; it must prioritize its citizens or it fails all.

Refugees, Asylum, and Precision

Stuckey separates categories: a refugee is fleeing targeted persecution and is processed before entry; an asylum seeker presents at a port of entry and must meet the same standard. Economic migration is not persecution. Christians should advocate welcoming well-vetted refugees and asylum seekers to the degree capacity allows—and support robust, legal immigration that strengthens communities. But refusing to enforce the law is neither merciful nor sustainable.

The Church’s Part

Stuckey closes by returning responsibility to the people of God. It’s the church’s job to feed, clothe, befriend, and evangelize—and to advocate policies that harmonize compassion with security. Your empathy finds its strength, not its surrender, in a just border.

Elijah McClain’s death in Aurora, Colorado grieves every conscience. Stuckey insists you name it as a tragedy and pursue accountability. But she also asks you to look at what followed in city after city: "defund the police" budgets, decriminalization of entire categories of crime, radical bail reform—and then the statistical spike in homicide and victimization, often in the very communities activists claimed to protect. Good intentions turned lethal.

Two Competing Visions of Justice

Social justice today often means engineering equal outcomes among groups ("equity"), using the state to discriminate now to remedy past discrimination (Ibram X. Kendi’s explicit thesis). God’s justice (mishpat) is different: truthful, proportionate, impartial, and direct. It punishes the guilty, protects the innocent, refuses favoritism, and doesn’t assign guilt to children for their ancestors’ sins (see Deuteronomy 16:19; Ezekiel 18; Romans 13).

Disparity ≠ Discrimination

Stuckey leans on Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams: group differences in outcomes have many causes; you cannot automatically infer oppression. She notes progressive overestimates of police shootings and cites research indicating no higher likelihood of police shooting Black suspects versus white when controlling for variables (Roland Fryer), while underscoring that "unarmed" does not always mean "not dangerous." Facts don’t erase injustice; they prevent new ones.

What the Data Say Post-Defund

After budgets were cut and prosecutions declined, major cities saw arrests plummet and homicides surge to historic highs. High-profile cases exposed repeat violent offenders released quickly, who then committed worse crimes. Stuckey argues these policies express partiality (to the offender) and abandon the vulnerable (the would-be victim)—the precise inversion of biblical justice.

Tough Questions, Clear Anchors

Stuckey even addresses the death penalty: citing Genesis 9 and Romans 13, she argues Scripture authorizes it for murder, not because life is cheap but because it’s sacred. Christians can debate prudence and safeguards; what they can’t do, she says, is replace God’s justice with emotivist activism that breeds chaos. When you aim at cosmic fairness through force, you usually get tyranny (see Sowell’s The Quest for Cosmic Justice).

Stuckey ends where discipleship begins: courage with kindness. She knows you’ll be told you’re harsh for speaking unpopular truths. She’s been there—on TV sets, in comment threads, and in churches. Her counsel: anchor your empathy in Scripture, your language in reality, and your tone in the fruit of the Spirit. Then risk the conversation anyway.

Speak Clearly, Live Gently

Don’t outsource boldness to "influencers." Use accurate terms (woman/man; mother/father; baby/child). Refuse compelled speech (pronouns that entrench deception). Replace performative empathy with concrete help: show up at a pregnancy center, support a single mom in your church, tutor a refugee, back reform that reduces crime without abandoning police.

Share Arrows

One of Stuckey’s most winsome metaphors is "sharing arrows"—standing with believers in the heat. She raised funds for Jack Phillips when lawsuits battered his livelihood. That support didn’t just pay bills; it restored courage. Who near you is taking arrows for the truth? How can you shoulder their load this week?

Center the Children

A throughline of the book is child-protection. Abortion kills children; gender ideology sterilizes or mutilates them; donor conception and surrogacy sever primal bonds; border anarchy exposes them to traffickers; soft-on-crime policies put them in harm’s path. Let the most vulnerable set your priorities. Historically, Christianity transformed the ancient world precisely by making children people (see O. M. Bakke’s scholarship)—and the church can do it again.

Stories That Show the Way

Daisy Strongin listened to arguments she disagreed with, couldn’t refute them, and eventually detransitioned and came to Christ. Rosaria Butterfield’s neighbors combined hospitality with unwavering doctrine, and the gospel did what arguments alone could not. Christopher Yuan found identity in Christ that re-ordered every other desire. These aren’t "gotchas" but guides: keep telling the truth, keep the table open, let God give the growth.

Stuckey’s final word isn’t "fight harder" but "hope deeper." Toxic empathy will keep trying to guilt you into silence. Don’t harden your heart. Harden your spine. Then love—on God’s terms.