Hillary Clinton speaks out against 'toxic empathy' — but misses the point

There is a reason some modern political slogans feel impossible to challenge without sounding cruel, un-Christian, or “extreme.” It’s not because they are true. It’s because they are designed to stop you from thinking.

That insight comes from James Lindsay, who recently explained a sloganeering concept most Evangelicals have never heard of but encounter every day: tifa. The word comes from Chinese Communist political strategy and refers to short, emotionally loaded slogans engineered to hijack moral instincts and shut down critical thought.

In plain English: tifa are thought-terminating clichés. They sound compassionate. They feel righteous. But they smuggle in falsehoods, moral confusion, and ideological commitments that most Christians would reject if stated honestly.

Think of phrases like “trans women are women,” “abortion is healthcare,” or “no human being is illegal.” Each is short. Each feels morally coercive. And each dares you to disagree, because disagreement is immediately reframed as hatred, cruelty, or a lack of empathy.

This matters because many Christians are being told — often by other Christians — that the faithful response to cultural conflict is to find a “third way,” lower the temperature, avoid “polarization,” and speak with more nuance. Divorced from concrete moral questions, such responses can be entirely appropriate. But when deployed reflexively, those generic calls are often a trap.

How “tifa”(提法) works on Christians

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Hillary Clinton speaks out against 'toxic empathy' — but misses the point

There is a reason some modern political slogans feel impossible to challenge without sounding cruel, un-Christian, or extreme

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“Empathy is not a thing,” said Dr. Albert Mohler on the Feb. 3 edition of “The Briefing,” a show in which Mohler analyzes current events, giving his take on them from a Christian worldview. Mohler made his statement while addressing an opinion piece Hillary Clinton wrote in which she called out commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, as well as Pastors Joe Rigney and Douglas Wilson.

“I want to say even as I’ve been challenged on this in the last few days, it’s not so much that I think empathy is wrongly defined. It is the fact that I don’t think empathy is a thing,” said Mohler, who is president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS).

“I don’t think it’s real. I think it is a substitute for a real Christian morality,” he said. “A real Christian morality is not empathy, but sympathy and it’s feeling with—it’s compassion, feeling with—and then taking the requisite actions driven by Christian conviction.”

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