The weaponization of empathy is a spiritual deception. It takes a God-given virtue and twists it into an idol that demands we sacrifice truth, justice, and the innocent on the altar of feelings.
What happens when leadership is shaped by empathy-first moral reasoning rather than judgment, restraint, and the willingness to confront evil?
We are living with the results — and the body count is rising.
Far too many women, including women who profess Christianity, have embraced a vision where compassion is treated as the highest virtue and upholding the law as a moral failure. The issue is not a lack of empathy. It is an excess of it, untethered from discipline and moral restraint.
Hillary Clinton’s New War on “Toxic Empathy”
The battle lines are being drawn. In a 6,000-word essay in The Atlantic last week, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused conservatives of waging a “war on empathy” and abandoning Christian values. She also attacked Christian leaders who have long been warning against the rise of “toxic empathy” — compassion divorced from truth and justice.
Clinton specifically singled out Allie Beth Stuckey, a prominent Christian podcaster who coined the phrase in her New York Times bestselling book Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. The former First Lady called Stuckey a “commissar of MAGA morality” who warns women not to “listen to their soft hearts.” Clinton accused Stuckey of targeting evangelicals, “whose empathy, she warns, has left them open to manipulation.”
Stuckey’s response? “When Hillary Clinton is writing 6,000-word op-eds in The Atlantic attacking warning against toxic empathy, you know you’re over the target.”
She’s right. Progressives are losing their “monopoly on female compassion,” and they’re panicking.
“That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith,” Clinton wrote. Her conclusion? “To be strong, we need more empathy, not less.”
But here’s what Clinton won’t tell you: Her vision of unlimited empathy has a body count — and it’s growing.
Death by Compassion
We have seen the overdose play out: Men competing in women’s sports. The medicalization of confused children. Black Lives Matter elevated as a moral movement built on the foundation of Saint George Floyd. The rebranding of illegal alien criminals as “the undocumented.” Sanctuary cities. Compassionate release. Restorative justice. Different causes, same engine. Empathy elevated above judgment.
But let’s move to consequences.
On August 22, 2025, Iryna Zarutska — a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee — was stabbed three times in the neck on a Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail train. Her killer, Decarlos Brown Jr., had 14 prior arrests, including convictions for armed robbery for which he served five years in prison, plus other felonies for larceny and breaking and entering.
Brown should not have been free. He had been released earlier in 2025 by Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes on a “written promise to appear” — essentially cashless bail — for a pending misdemeanor charge.
In Minnesota, Victoria Eileen Harwell was killed in August 2024 when an Ecuadorian illegal immigrant, driving drunk, crashed head-on into her vehicle. The killer, Llangari Inga, had been in Hennepin County Jail twice. ICE placed detainers in both instances. Both times, the jail refused to honor them and released him without notifying ICE. He remained free to kill Victoria Harwell.
These are hardly isolated incidents. They are happening daily. A New York man executed a mother in front of her three children less than 24 hours after being freed without bail. Two days after another man was released without bail for assaulting a police officer, he was charged in a fatal Metro stabbing. All were free because someone decided compassion demanded their release.
Between October 2024 and March 2025, thousands of compassionate release motions were filed in federal courts. Many were granted. Some of those released were violent offenders who will reoffend and kill.
But according to Hillary Clinton, “To rekindle our light, we must reject cruelty and corruption. To be strong, we need more empathy, not less.”
She’s wrong. Dead wrong. Our strength should come from having compassion for actual victims — like Iryna Zarutska and Victoria Harwell — who suffered horrifically and are now dead because empathy for their killers trumped protection for the innocent.
The Biblical Alternative
Empathy itself is not evil. It is a necessary gift when rightly ordered, indispensable in the home, in motherhood, in nurturing children. But that same instinct, when transferred to nationhood, law, and public order, becomes dangerous.
Scripture is clear. Paul writes that governing authorities are “not a terror to good conduct, but to bad,” and that the ruler “does not bear the sword in vain,” but is “the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Romans 13:3–4). Civil authority exists not to therapize evil but to restrain it.
It’s important for many women to remember this truism: You are not the mother of every criminal. Yet this is precisely how too many women now reason about public life, projecting maternal instincts onto people who require restraint, not consolation.
When “Caring” Leads to Killing
The effects are everywhere. Immigration policy shaped by sentiment rather than law. Criminal justice systems that confuse mercy with leniency. And when violence erupts, men are told to “step up” — to clean up decisions they warned against. That is abdication disguised as virtue.
As institutions have elevated women since the 1970s, they have reoriented around feminine moral reasoning. As writer Helen Andrews argues, everything we think of as “wokeness” — prioritizing safety over risk, empathy over rationality, relationships over rules — is feminization expressed as policy.
Andrews notes,
“When asked which is more important — free speech or an ‘inclusive society’ — two-thirds of men choose free speech, while two-thirds of women choose inclusion. In moral reasoning, women have an ethics of caring, and men have an ethics of justice. Both have value in their proper sphere. But when maternal instincts govern law and punishment, the innocent die.”
Consider Minneapolis. On January 7, 2026, Renée Good, a 37-year-old woman, was shot and killed while obstructing an ICE operation. Good had driven to the scene to join protesters blocking federal law enforcement, stopping her vehicle in the roadway. According to reports, she was affiliated with Minnesota ICE Watch, a group that encourages disrupting ICE operations.
Here is a woman with a family at home, choosing instead to protect illegal aliens from federal law enforcement. This is maternal instinct divorced from discernment, empathy weaponized against the rule of law.
What was she defending? Since President Trump took office, Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have released nearly 470 criminal illegal aliens back onto Minnesota streets — including Victoria Harwell’s killer. Good died protecting a system that releases murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and other violent criminals into American communities.
Iryna Zarutska is dead because a female judge chose compassion for her killer over protection for potential victims. Victoria Harwell is dead because sanctuary policies chose feelings over federal law. Renée Good is dead because she chose obstruction over order, sentiment over safety. Who will answer for these deaths? Not the judges who release violent criminals. Not the advocates who champion cashless bail. Not the activists who obstruct law enforcement in the name of compassion.
The burden falls on those who survive.
The Spiritual War Behind the Policy
Make no mistake: This is not merely a policy debate. Paul warns that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).
The weaponization of empathy is a spiritual deception. It takes a God-given virtue and twists it into an idol that demands we sacrifice truth, justice, and the innocent on the altar of feelings. It sounds compassionate. It feels righteous. But its fruit is death.
When a culture elevates empathy above truth, when feeling for the criminal supersedes justice for the victim, when maternal instinct replaces moral discernment in the public square, we are witnessing a demonic inversion of God’s created order. The serpent promised Eve that rejecting God’s clear command would make her more enlightened, more righteous. The same lie echoes today: Reject the hard boundaries of justice, embrace unlimited empathy, and you will be truly loving.
The deaths of too many innocents, the mourning families, prove otherwise.
This is why women like Allie Beth Stuckey are so dangerous to the progressive project. They expose the manipulation. They call Christian women back to biblical categories where love and truth are inseparable, where compassion serves justice rather than replacing it. And they are hated for it.
The Path Forward
A nation cannot be governed like a nursery. There is real evil in the world, and evil does not respond to empathy. Different spheres require different virtues. The family needs more nurture than judgment. The courtroom needs more judgment than nurture. When we reverse these proportions, we create monsters.
Hillary Clinton is right that Christians must stand up — but not to defend unlimited empathy. We must stand up against the therapeutic capture of our justice system.
Empathy must be disciplined. Judgment must be restored.
We serve a God who is both perfectly just and perfectly merciful. He satisfied both at the cross, where His wrath against sin was poured out on His innocent Son.
Civil authorities are called to execute justice. The Church is called to extend mercy to repentant sinners. When we confuse these roles, the state becomes impotent to protect, and the Church becomes powerless to save.
The Church must teach its daughters that compassion without discernment is cruelty and must train its sons that strength without wisdom is brutality.
Hillary Clinton says we need more empathy. The tragic deaths of Iryna Zarutska, Victoria Harwell, and so many other innocent victims say otherwise. We need justice. We need restraint. We need discernment. We need the courage to say that compassion divorced from truth is not compassion at all — it is cruelty with a halo.
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