“It’s illogical to support institutionalizing sin.”

Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy identifies and critiques the emotional manipulation embedded in progressive rhetoric, arguing that empathy—an impulse that feels virtuous but is neutral without being paired to action—becomes dangerous when untethered from biblical truth and linked instead to harmful ideologies. Stuckey aptly demonstrates how linguistic tricks (euphemisms, aberrant readings of Scripture, partial truths, and Christianese) mask moral perversions. For example, phrases like “planned parenthood” obscure the organization’s eugenicist roots and brutal abortion practices, while slogans like “love is love” reduce love to an ouroboric tautology that makes room for not only homosexuality but also bestiality, pedophilia, and necrophilia.

The book addresses five contentious issues—abortion, gender, sexuality, immigration, and social justice—through anecdotes, data, and Scripture, aiming to equip Christians against the siren call of progressive ideology. Stuckey’s ability to dissect progressive platitudes is incisive, and her critique of the progressive hijacking of Christian compassion has merit. However, her execution often falters.

For starters, her reliance on shock value, particularly in the chapters on abortion and gender, detracts from her arguments. Not because graphic descriptions of infanticide or phalloplasty are out of bounds, but because, along with the abundance of evocative anecdotes, they are primarily used to engage our emotions—the exact tactic that Stuckey is criticizing. Righteous anger is not an incorrect response to heinous crimes against humanity, but ersatz righteousness is precisely what this book is trying to combat; so to use the same tactics does not seem the wisest course of action.

Another leftist tactic that Stuckey borrows: proof-texting, borrowing out-of-context Bible verses to prove her points. That’s not to say that she is incorrectly applying the Bible to the issues she is addressing, but that she is making her point and throwing out a quick pull quote reference to Scripture to give her word the authority of God’s Word. But—progressives can do this too! For every “You wove me in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139), you get a “There is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). I happen to agree with Stuckey that twisting Galatians 3 to affirm sinful lifestyles is an incorrect application of the verse, but that becomes obvious with Scriptural context. Her points would become clearer with context as well. Her audience is clearly Christians unfamiliar with their Bibles, so she should be more rigorous in making the case from Scripture. I think that this tendency to zip along with quick-grab Bible references helps her to make quick summaries of right-wing policies on things like immigration and police reform (areas that she even admits have much more nuance to them than abortion or transgenderism, from a Christian perspective). Topics like these would have been better left out of the book, I think, though she does occasionally give thoughtful analyses of minor issues like whether or not heterosexual couples struggling to conceive should use IVF or surrogacy (the only ways homosexual couples can “have babies”). That said, I understand this is written in a popular, conversational style and such a deep dive on any one of the single issues she tackles could be its own lengthy tome and would require a much longer, more concentrated writing effort. I get it.

And but so then this book is more or less another one of those grab bag cultural critiques, albeit stronger than one like The Battle for the American Mind, that is putting its finger on the right issues and making directionally correct assessments, but that lacks the rigor and fastidiousness to be conclusive.

Anyway, some of the nitty-gritty details that I’ve heard elsewhere but am thankful for the reminders: Planned Parenthood was founded by a eugenicist and is predominantly in the business of killing unborn black babies. The methods they use to murder these children are gruesome, and it has been reported that numerous children that survived late-term abortion attempts were then left to die—even in cases where the emotionally devastated mothers changed their mind upon holding their babies in their arms. Sexologist John Money convinced the parents of David Reimer to raise him as a girl after a botched circumcision, then forced “Brenda” and his twin brother Brian to participate in traumatizing sexual roleplaying experiments while still children; Money photographed the experiments. David detransitioned in his early teens after telling his parents he always felt like a boy, and both brothers died by suicide in their thirties. Money’s work is one of the foundational studies upon which modern gender theory is based. And, of course, despite progressives decrying capitalism, many of these issues are not only morally disordered but also in the thick of booming industries—sex reassignment surgeries, hormone treatments, surrogate parenting, border smuggling, public intellectual grifting. It’s worth noting that the people advocating for these policies and practices also profit from their perpetuations.

Countercult apologist Walter Martin (The Kingdom of the Cults) liked to use the analogy of the counterfeit dollar. The best way to spot a counterfeit currency is not to study the surfeit of fake money that one might encounter, but to become so familiar with the genuine article that any deviation from it will be obvious. We do not need to be intimately familiar with each and every heresy and pseudo-gospel to call one out when we see it; we just need to be familiar with the true Evangelion. This is especially helpful when non-Christians or pseudo-Christians try to speak out of both sides of their mouth, requesting that genuine Christians leave their beliefs and convictions out of the political arena while also twisting the meaning of Scripture to try to convince them to change their minds.

Stuckey closes her book with a stirring appeal not only to Scripture but to Christianity’s historical role in coming alongside the marginalized and the broken, taking a big picture view to demonstrate that without Christian morality having once saturated our culture, we would not believe in the personhood of women or children at all, we would not only not welcome the foreigner but would be hostile to them, we would not deem the elderly or homeless worth caring for, we would not believe that mankind bears the image of God. Which, to be clear, non-Christians (or non-monotheists, to be fair) do not believe that humans are image-bearers; but then we’re back to B.F. Skinner trying to foist a homespun moral system on top of a meaningless quagmire of cells and chemical reactions.