(RNS) — When Bishop Mariann Budde stood in the pulpit at the Washington National Cathedral at an inauguration week prayer service and asked President Donald to show mercy on migrants, she seemed to be treading on firm theological ground.
“Blessed are the merciful,” the Gospel of Matthew recounts Jesus as saying in his most famous sermon, “for they will be shown mercy.”
Joe Rigney was having none of it. The prominent evangelical Christian pastor, commentator and seminary professor saw in Budde’s words a sign of “feminist cancer” invading the church, and said her call for mercy stands in the way of criminals getting what they deserve.
“When it comes to upholding strict standards of justice, empathy is a liability, not an asset,” Rigney wrote in a column for World Opinions, an evangelical publication, not long after the prayer service.
Christian leaders have long disagreed about how the Bible’s values apply to public policy. In the case of Budde’s sermon, however, the values themselves are up for debate. The idea that empathy and mercy are sins has gained traction, particularly among fans of Trump and supporters of Doug Wilson, a controversial evangelical Idaho pastor and publisher.
Joe Rigney. (Photo via WNG)
Conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, author of “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” claims that empathy is used by liberals to mislead Christians. Rigney, whose book “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits” is due out later this year, sees empathy as a sign that “wokeness” has infiltrated the church.
In an interview with RNS, Rigney said Budde’s sermon showed why women should not be allowed to speak in church services. He argued that the Bible commands its readers to withhold mercy or pity when grave sins are involved. “The Bible obviously commands us to be tenderhearted and compassionate in various places,” he said. “And then it also says in various places that there are times when pity and compassion are entirely inappropriate.”
Rigney claimed that Budde and other liberals’ desire to show compassion and mercy for immigrants ignores instances of harm done by those in the country illegally, citing the murder of Laken Riley, a young Georgia woman killed by an immigrant. “It’s selective empathy,” he said.
He pointed to a passage in Deuteronomy that commands readers to show no pity when dealing with issues such as idolatry. Rigney said the misuse of empathy is “the main mechanism by which all things woke infiltrated the church and society.”
Franklin Graham, an evangelical leader and longtime Trump ally who also criticized Budde’s sermon, said that the new president’s actions on immigration are about enforcing the law.
“That has nothing to do with compassion,” he told “American Agenda,” a Newsmax program. “It has to do with what’s right to do. If you want to have compassion, then have the law the same for everybody. Don’t have a law for one and another law for another group. No, it’s one law fits all, and we need to stay with that.”
Franklin Graham appears on the “American Agenda” Newsmax program. (Video screen grab)
New Testament scholar Scot McKnight said Rigney misses the point about mercy and compassion in the Bible. God cares about justice, McKnight said, but God also shows compassion. McKnight pointed to a passage from the Gospel of Matthew, showing how Jesus responded when faced with human suffering.
“When he saw the crowds,” Matthew writes, “he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
McKnight suspects that Rigney and those who agree with his views believe some people are undeserving of God’s mercy, but said that mercy as it is presented in the Bible seeks to restore those who have done wrong and seeks to redeem them.
“Their biggest fear is that people are going to be too empathetic and therefore they’re not going to hold the line on righteousness,” he said. “They made a mockery of the gospel of grace and the gospel of compassion. They end up denying the very thing that Jesus was doing.”
The ongoing war on “wokeness” and social justice that has divided congregations and communities, turning issues that even conservative Christians once embraced — immigration reform, refugee resettlement and racial reconciliation — into political minefields.
PEPFAR, the global AIDS relief program that launched in 2004 as part of George W. Bush’s support for a “compassionate conservatism” and championed by megachurch leaders, seems to have lost some support. The funding for the program was paused earlier this week by the White House, then unfrozen after Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued an emergency waiver.
Peter Wehner, a contributing writer for The Atlantic magazine and senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, said that compassionate conservativism has fallen out of favor with Republicans during the Trump years. “For many people in MAGA world, compassion is viewed as weak, hardly a virtue, and certainly not something that should be a goal of government,” he said in an email.
Vice President JD Vance speaks with “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan on CBS. (Video screen grab)
Trump acolytes have questioned the wisdom of funding faith groups that resettle immigrants or assist refugees. On “Face the Nation” Sunday (Jan. 26), Vice President JD Vance dismissed the U.S. Catholic bishops’ recent championing of migrants as concern about keeping federal funding flowing more than about immigrants. World Relief, an evangelical nonprofit, and other faith-based ministries have also been criticized.
“If it can’t survive without taxpayer dollars, it’s not ministry,” wrote author and activist Megan Basham on X on Wednesday. “It’s a government agency.”
William Wolfe, a former Trump official who now runs the Center for Baptist Leadership, called refugee resettlement a grift and part of the “national suicide” of America during a discussion on X in which other speakers accused World Relief and Catholic groups of being anti-Christian and emotionally manipulative.
Groups such as World Relief gained additional access to federal funds in large part due to the “charitable choice” movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, in which Republicans and Christian conservatives advocated for government funding for faith-based ministries.
Brian Fikkert. (Photo courtesy Chalmers)
Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, a conservative former senator from Missouri who sponsored the original charitable choice legislation, told a White House faith-based conference in 2003: “Charitable Choice was intended to level and broaden the playing field so that secular and sacred organizations could have an equal opportunity to cooperate with government and bring the most effective programs to help feed the hungry, heal the sick, and shelter the homeless.”
Brian Fikkert, founder of the Christian anti-poverty group Chalmers Center for Economic Development and co-author of “When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor … and Yourself,” said he’s baffled by claims that mercy or empathy is sinful.
“God is described as a God of both justice and compassion, and he manages to combine both,” he said. “He calls us to emulate him with deeds of justice and compassion, particularly for the poor, the oppressed, the needy, the foreigners who are in the land. Our entire predisposition ought to be an openhandedness, a compassion, a sense of mercy.”
Fikkert agrees that America should have secure borders and that government officials should be concerned with those who commit crimes, but he said that is not an excuse to treat immigrants with cruelty or scapegoat them.
Instead, the Bible, which teaches that immigrants are made in God’s image, is filled with examples of God telling leaders to be merciful. “The idea that Scripture would forbid a king or a government from being merciful or kind to the poor is just ridiculous,” he said.
