The Confusion of Love With Empathy: The Rampant Use of Emotional Blackmail

What is empathy?  For awhile I've understood empathy only in contrast with sympathy.  I've just assumed that empathy is an attempt to identify with or feel someone else's experience or feelings that I haven't had or don't have.  With sympathy, I've had the same experience or feeling.  I could say, I know what you feel.  I've talked about that with the Lord Jesus Christ as our high priest, "touched with the feeling of our infirmities" and "tempted in all points as we are" (Hebrews 4:15).

It never occurred to me that empathy itself might be more of a social construct, a postmodern invention to justify feelings as an argument.  It's not wrong to feel for someone.  This would be to obey Romans 12:15:  "Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep."  However, scripture also says, "Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying" (Proverbs 19:18).   "Let not thy soul spare for his crying" stands up against "weep with them that weep."  Proverbs 19:18 could be called an ancient description of "emotional blackmail," where a child uses feelings or emotions to manipulate his parents.

Kevin DeYoung writes:

One of the marks of the confusion of our age is that we have come to value feeling the right thing over doing the right thing. 

That actually may be giving the current mood too much credit. It would be nearer the truth to say we value professing to feel the right thing over doing the right thing. We live in an age of sentimentality where feeling the joys, or particularly the pains, of another (or at least expressing that we do) is considered virtuous in itself.

In a previous era, someone might get away with saying and was right to say to another person, "I don't care how you feel," when that person was not doing the right thing.  Someone also would have been credited with love for a loving deed for a person rather than the expression that made a person "feel better."

Empathy itself only recently arose in vocabulary.  Susan Lanzoni writes in The Atlantic:

The English word “empathy” came into being only about a century ago as a translation for the German psychological term Einfühlung, literally meaning “feeling-in.” English-speaking psychologists suggested a handful of other translations for the word, including “animation,” “play,” “aesthetic sympathy,” and “semblance.” But in 1908 two psychologists from Cornell and the University of Cambridge suggested “empathy” for Einfühlung, drawing on the Greek “em” for “in” and “pathos” for “feeling,” and it stuck.   At the time the term was coined, empathy was not primarily a means to feel another person’s emotion, but the very opposite: To have empathy, in the early 1900s, was to enliven an object, or to project one’s own imagined feelings onto the world.

If empathy was scriptural, then it shouldn't be new.  Since it is new, believers should ask, "Why is it new?"  And then, "if empathy is new, should it be treated as a kind of Christian virtue or necessary component of the Christian life?"

I assert that empathy, a modern understanding of feelings and emotions, has been forced on scripture.  Truth can be found in empathy as a concept, but as a whole it is false.  Whatever is true in empathy does not justify empathy as a whole.  What the Bible says about all related issues of feelings and emotions, of course, is true.  Feelings can be found in scripture, but the priority and emphasis is on thinking and then deeds.  In his description of love, Jesus said (John 14:15), "If ye love me, keep my commandments."  The Apostle John confirms that in 1 John 5:2, "By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments."

What today is called "empathy," C. S. Lewis called "the passion of pity," especially since empathy wasn't used by Christians as a scriptural virtue.  In The Great Divorce, Lewis writes:

Ye must distinguish. The action of Pity will live for ever: but the passion of Pity will not. The passion of pity, the pity we merely suffer, the ache that draws men to concede what should not be conceded and to flatter when they should speak truth, the pity that has cheated many a woman out of her virginity and many a statesman out of his honesty-that will die. It was used as a weapon by bad men against good ones: their weapon will be broken.

He continues later:

Using pity, other people’s pity, in the wrong way. We have all done it on earth, you know. Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity. You see, I know now. Even as a child you did it. Instead of saying you were sorry, you went and sulked in the attic . . . because you knew that sooner or later one of your sisters would say, ‘I can’t bear to think of him sitting up there alone, crying.’ You used their pity to blackmail them, and they gave in in the end.

Lewis says that this passion of pity, what we call empathy today, "can be used for a kind of blackmailing."  People weren't using the term "emotional blackmail" at that point, but that's what he was describing in 1945.

John 11 presents a case of potential emotional blackmail rejected by the Lord Jesus Christ.  John 11:5-6 say:  "Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus.  When he heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was."  John says that Jesus' purposeful delay was love.  Later in v. 32 John writes:  "Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died."  Weeping (v. 33), Mary blamed Jesus for her distressful situation.  It's true.  John says that the love of Jesus caused it.  Despite emotional blackmail Jesus would have anticipated, Jesus distressed Mary and Martha anyway.

Scripture provides multiple other examples of attempts at emotional blackmail as a means of manipulation.  Jonah sulked under the shade of a little tree that God had actually given him out of true pity, and said to God (Jonah 4:9):  " It is better for me to die than to live."  God didn't accede to Jonah's feelings then.  He destroyed the tree, leaving Jonah in the heat without the shade, and rebuked Jonah for his actions.  Today someone would call this abuse by God, who didn't care about Jonah's feelings, that God lacked empathy with Jonah.

In 2 Samuel 6, Michal despised David's celebration of the return of the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem, and she says (v. 20), "How glorious was the king of Israel to day, who uncovered himself to day in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself!"  David didn't apologize for hurting her feelings.  He did more of what bothered her, despite her offense, and the last verse of the chapter connects her wrong emotions to why from then on she never had a child.  God concurred.

In 2008 Lyle Dorsett wrote a biography of A. W. Tozer and he provides an account by Tozer's wife of their marriage.  After Tozer died, his wife remarried and she testifies of the superior love of her new husband, that Tozer was devoted to God, but not her.  She was happier with her new husband.  Does that mean her new husband was more loving or a better lover of her than Tozer?  John Piper came to the defense of Tozer with the following:

Sean Lucas (in his review of the book) seems to say that Tozer’s wife’s greater happiness with her second husband implies Tozer’s “failure to love passionately his wife.” When she remarried after his death she said, “”I have never been happier in my life. . . “Aiden [A. W. Tozer] loved Jesus Christ, but Leonard Odam loves me.” Lucas may be right to infer from this sentence that Tozer loved his wife poorly. But Tozer’s wife’s statement does not prove it. 

We would need to be as penetrating in our analysis of her spiritual condition as we are of A. W. Tozer’s. Not feeling loved and not being loved are not the same. Jesus loved all people well. And many did not like the way he loved them. Was David’s zeal for the Lord imbalanced because his wife Michal despised him for it? Was Job’s devotion to the Lord inordinate because his wife urged him to curse God and die? Would Gomer be a reliable witness to Hosea’s devotion? I know nothing about Tozer’s wife. She may have been far more godly than he. Or maybe not. It would be helpful to know. 

Again I admit Lucas may be totally right. Tozer may have blown it at home. Lucas’ lessons from this possibility are wise. But I have seen so much emotional blackmail in my ministry I am jealous to raise a warning against it. Emotional blackmail happens when a person equates his or her emotional pain with another person’s failure to love. They aren’t the same. A person may love well and the beloved still feel hurt, and use the hurt to blackmail the lover into admitting guilt he or she does not have. Emotional blackmail says, “If I feel hurt by you, you are guilty.” There is no defense. The hurt person has become God. His emotion has become judge and jury. Truth does not matter. All that matters is the sovereign suffering of the aggrieved. It is above question. This emotional device is a great evil. I have seen it often in my three decades of ministry and I am eager to defend people who are being wrongly indicted by it. 

I am not saying Tozer’s wife did this. I am saying that the assumption that her feeling unloved equals her being unloved creates the atmosphere where emotional blackmail flourishes. 

Maybe Tozer loved his wife poorly. But his wife’s superior happiness with another man does not show it. Perhaps Lyle Dorsett’s new biography of Tozer, A Passion for God, penetrates to the bottom of this relationship.

Recent articles on empathy and emotional blackmail online and in print have revisited Piper's statement.  Much attention is given to the third paragraph.  I wondered about the opinions of secular psychiatrists.  The most rudimentary form of emotional blackmail is performed by small children when they throw a tantrum when they don't get their way with a parent.  A parent doesn't love his child by acceding to the tantrum.  This is Proverbs 19:18 quoted above.  Easily someone could point to the fall of man in the garden to say that Adam abdicated to the emotions of Eve.  He didn't  acquiesce to an intellectual argument, that we know (1 Tim 2:14).  I believe that part of the curse of sin is the attempt of the woman to rule her husband related to emotional blackmail, what Genesis 3:16 calls 'her desire to her husband.'

Adult children often relitigate their upbringing to blackmail their parents.  Their parents loved them like Jesus loved, but their parents didn't make them feel like they think they should have felt.  They didn't feel love, because of parental expectation.  They aren't talking about biblical love -- in other words, all that their parents have done for them.  Feelings are the main basis of their complaint.  Parents used physical discipline for bad behavior. Their feelings are the main evidence now for emotional blackmail as they blame their new unsciptural behavior on those feelings.  Susan Reimer writes in 2007:

Somewhere along the parenting timeline, we stopped raising our children and started wooing them. Sometime over the past 30 years, we stopped demanding obedience from our children and started seeking their love and companionship. 

It was a serious tactical error because it shifted many of the powers in the parent-child relationship to the child. And one of those is the power to hurt.

Emotional blackmail is old, but instead of being rejected, it's now growing in acceptance among evangelicals.  Evangelicalism itself is being blackmailed, very often afraid to invalidate the feelings of a growing number of millennials, who won't endure criticism of their worldly and ungodly lives.  This has extended in many cases to toleration, for instance, of even homosexuality.  The fear of hurting someone's feelings results in not loving them.

God judges love by action, not feelings.  God loves by what He does.  He gives and gives and gives.  The same God out of love rejects and judges sin.

Out of sentiment and often because of emotional blackmail. church leaders may not love.  They accept worldly and ungodly behavior and their blackmailers call this love.  Leaders who do love are said to be unloving, because of how their blackmailers feel.  The blackmailers don't feel love when their behavior is not accepted.  Instead of looking at all that was done and comparing that to God's love in scripture, they judge based on perceived empathy with their feelings.  If they don't feel that empathy, they judge that as not loving.  They can find many others who will approve of their assessment, who feel the same way they do.

What has happened?  Professing Christians who emotionally blackmail are not relying on scripture for their belief and practice, perhaps from listening to false teaching by Christians and secular psychologists.  The world itself has also turned to empathy as a crucial practice and emotional blackmail as a valid argument.  Love can be almost whatever someone says that it is.  Feelings are the most deceptive replacement for actual love.  This has brought cataclysmic results to individuals and institutions, such as the family and the church.  The United States itself has been greatly damaged by this false means of judgment.

I understand how painful it is for leaders to be accused of not loving people.  They are loving according to scripture, but being accused by emotional blackmailers for not loving.  The blackmail itself is not love, as a reaction to what actually is love.  This is difficult to endure.  Remember the encouragement of Jesus, who said true believers will be reviled and falsely accused as a regular feature of the Christian life.

I join many others right now calling on professing believers to consider the place of empathy in Christianity and the reality of emotional blackmail.  Much bad practice arises from the influence of the perversion of love I've described.  Let us return to biblical love and repent of the fraudulent replacement of empathy.