Al Mohler doesn’t believe empathy is a real thing, but he does believe Hillary Clinton has ruined the idea of social justice.
In his Feb. 3 podcast called “The Briefing,” the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary joined the conservative evangelical war on empathy and responded to Clinton’s recent essay in The Atlantic titled, “MAGA’s War on Empathy.”
In that essay, the former U.S. secretary of state and senator laments conservatives’ apparent disregard for empathy for immigrant families and peaceful protesters. She draws examples from Minneapolis and the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
“Whatever you think about immigration policy, how can a person of conscience justify the lack of compassion and empathy for the victims in Minnesota, and for the families torn apart or hiding in fear, for the children separated from their parents or afraid to go to school?” she asks. “That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith.”
The evangelical war on empathy has been well documented for several years, beginning with John Piper, Joe Rigney and Allie Beth Stuckey as thought leaders.
Clinton, Mohler says, was formed by a “very liberal Methodism” in her youth and the liberalism of the Social Gospel. While clothing the naked and feeding the hungry are good things all Christians should do, the Social Gospel as understood by Clinton opened the door to all sorts of cultural liberalism, he complains.
The telltale sign? She puts LGBTQ Americans in her list of those Christians should have empathy toward. Liberal Protestantism, Mohler warns, is “about ditching the theology in order to keep the ethics.”
That led to dropping belief in the virgin birth and embracing same-sex marriage, he says. “These same denominations predictably freed from biblical authority now are also the ones who are pushing for, endorsing and conducting same-sex marriages. And so you understand, we really are looking at a worldview divide here.”
In Clinton’s view, “the good guys are the liberal Protestants (and) the bad guys are the conservative evangelicals,” Mohler says.
“I don’t think empathy is a thing. I don’t think it’s real.”
Repeatedly, he raises homosexuality and same-sex marriage as red flags he contends require “a total redefinition of Christianity … right down to its doctrinal core structure.”
“It’s not so much that I think empathy is wrongly defined. It is the fact that I don’t think empathy is a thing. I don’t think it’s real. I think it is a substitute for a real Christian morality,” Mohler says. “A real Christian morality is not empathy, but sympathy. And it’s feeling with, it’s compassion, feeling with, and then taking the requisite actions driven by Christian conviction.”
Clinton’s kind of empathy “is about social posturing,” he says. “If you buy into the empathy argument, well, you have people who immediately transfer that to identity politics and the moral revolution.”
Thus he also critiques Bishop Marian Budde of the Episcopal Church, who at his inauguration urged President Donald Trump to “show mercy” to immigrants, refugees and the LGBTQ community.
“She really wasn’t addressing this to President Trump sitting in the congregation,” Mohler charges. “She was addressing this to the media, and they lapped it up like kittens with a bowl of milk.”
When conservatives argue there are only two genders created by God — male and female — that is not a lack of empathy but the presence of sympathy, he said. “It is a sympathetic understanding of what will lead to human flourishing and human good. And I’m going to argue that what the left has been arguing for in empathy is actually a dead end.”
“What the left has been arguing for in empathy is actually a dead end.”
It is not loving to affirm transgender people, he continued. “I do not think you’re demonstrating love to them. I do not think you’re helping them. I do not think you’re adding to human flourishing. I think you’re just adding to the confusion.”
Mohler also took on the label of Christian nationalism, which Clinton defines as “the belief that God has called certain Christians to exercise dominion over every aspect of American life with no separation between church and state.”
Conservative evangelicals can hardly avoid being labeled Christian nationalists, Mohler warns. “If you don’t want to be called a Christian nationalist, you’re really going to have to go into full retreat because if you believe, for instance, … that God has made us in his image and has made us male and female, and you believe that a sane society reflects that objective ontological understanding of what it means to be male and female … then you’re going to be called a Christian nationalist. If you believe that marriage should be the union of a man and a woman … you’re going to be called a Christian nationalist. There’s no way around it.”
To avoid being called a Christian nationalist, he says, “you’re going to have to go along with every progressivist policy, every redefinition of marriage and sexuality, the denial of male and female as fixed and biological categories. You’re going to have to buy the entire agenda.”