Great stuff. Bulls-eyes something that’s been a favorite theme of mine, for years and years. Many years. All the years since I realized people showing off their empathy for others, were doing a lot more damage to those others — and to me too, for what that’s worth — compared to those who didn’t care so much about what others thought. One Michael Clary writes at RodMartin.org:

Stop Falling for Weaponized Empathy
For all the gullible Christians angrily venting about ICE, your Christian love is not pure. You’re functioning as agents of chaos. Stop it.

Weaponized empathy is everywhere right now. And Christian, you have got to stop being so gullible and falling for it.

Seriously, your naivete might feel warm, nice, friendly, and loving. But that’s not how true Christian love works.

I saw a post by the radical progressive “pastor” Benjamin Cremer that was getting shared a lot on Facebook. The post listed all the “un-Christlike things” he claims that ICE is supposedly doing, such as using “children as bait,” “shooting unarmed protesters,” “teargassing families,” and “terrorizing immigrant communities and people of color.”

[snip]

But here’s the truth: it isn’t Christlike to be gullible. It isn’t Christlike to believe and share debunked propaganda. It isn’t Christlike to be led by your emotions. It isn’t Christlike to outsource your critical thinking skills to the left-wing activists in the media.

So why are Christians so gullible? It’s because they’ve been trained to think “love” means whatever it feels like in their happy place. They assume Jesus just wants us to be nice and get along and never do unpleasant things like hold people accountable for their actions. They equate “love” with their feelings. They assume Jesus wants them to go around and feel sorry for people, no matter what they’ve done to bring harm upon themselves, because Jesus is all compassion and zero accountability. And if people are held accountable in ways that cause them pain, then that is not being “Christlike.”

I can only speak for myself, but I’m so far down this road as to start wondering about the strength of this seductive power. People fall for it when it doesn’t end up helping anybody, and surely they must be able to see this. Because it’s an opportunity to show off how empathic they are, how nice and wonderful they are. How much they care about people. What brings such potency to that sort of a draw? Why the eagerness? Christians may value community esteem, but only to a point; they’re supposed to know and understand the reckoning of the omnipotent God supersedes the opinions of everybody else.

Why not just do things you know are good for people, and whatever anybody else thinks about it, well, like whatevs. That’s supposed to be the big motivation. That should outrank everything. Why doesn’t it?

Compensating for something? What’s in their past? What is it they don’t like about themselves?

So, for all the gullible Christians who are angrily venting about ICE, your Christian love is not pure. It is not blameless. You are functioning as agents of chaos. You bear the blame for your irrational outrage, even if you present it as love and care and compassion…Allowing anti-Christian and anti-American radicals to manipulate you through weaponized empathy is a sin. It is wrong to carelessly wield the name of Christ, making false accusations against law enforcement and making excuses for criminals.