Empathy is not a sin: four reasons why

Dear Editor,

In March’s Evangelicals Now, Bill James seeks to address what he calls “The problem with empathy.” A few Christian writers and speakers have sought to argue in recent times that whilst we ought to sympathise with others, we shouldn’t empathise. Some have gone so far as to call empathy sin.

James argues that empathy’s problem is its relationship to contemporary approaches to compassion which he says “is expressed as the affirmation of someone’s experience without challenge or criticism.” He goes on to suggest that in church: “If we empathise with someone who has fallen into sin, we fully understand why they have sinned, the pressures that they face, and the difficulty of their situation. So much so that we are reluctant to confront, or to follow the path of church discipline. Even if there is an acknowledgement that sin has been committed, we regard it as completely ‘understandable’ and so refuse to draw the line.”