The Story of Our Trilogy
We began this three-part discussion looking at the manipulative presentation of Charlie Kirk’s statements about empathy. His enemies took them out of context and gave them the opposite meaning that they had in that context. We encouraged: 1. Get your facts straight. 2. Discover the context. 3. Listen to understand rather than to destroy, and 4. Define your terms and encourage your “opponents” to do the same.1
The Recipients of Empathy
We looked at the meaning and history of the word empathy as a recent addition to American vocabulary. Then we revealed how this concept of empathy is used manipulatively by an emotional-thinking movement to weaponize “Useful Idiots” (Their term not mine). They want activists against specific groups who fall into their specific disfavor moment by moment as the need of the hour demands.2
The Goal of Empathy
At present, it is the traditional values and beliefs, morals and religious convictions of Western Civilization that finds itself on the chopping block. Cis Gendered, Homophobic, Misogynistic, White, Christian, capitalistic males and their Stockholm-syndrome defenders must be stopped in their evil persecution of the “marginalized.” You must empathize with the latter, and set yourself against the former.
The ultimate cause, of course, is a Maoist type of cultural revolution, but empathy serves to provoke “righteous” violence by “Useful Idiots” in an immediate emotional cause with little thought or care for the real-world consequences of their actions even on the very people they claim to be fighting for.
No worries though. For neither the deaths of Useful Idiots, nor the deaths of their mascots du jour matter to those who would rather rule over a burning garbage dump than be common in a paradise. And that is where we pick up today.
Help that Helps and Help That Hurts
Let’s be honest and straightforward about something that any thinking person knows. You do not help people by giving them what they want. You help people by giving them what they need.
Want is easy. Just say, “What do you want?” Then kill, steal, and destroy to give it to them.
Need, however, is difficult. I can sympathize with a suffering person, but, if I really want to help them, I need to see past pity, I need to look to the real sources of problems, and craft a functional plan for dealing with them. It takes effort and thought. Need demands a proper understanding of human nature, and of human response to good and perverse incentives. It demands standing against unhealthy inclinations, ignorance, dysfunctional cultures. Need demands discipline and self-restraint on the part of both the sufferer and the helper.
Empathy Weaponizes Wanting
Empathy, however, lives and dies in the realm of want… wants met… pain alleviated… living with the sufferer in their moment of suffering without the detached perspective needed to confront real problems… especially when the real problem is the sufferer himself… ignorance, poor choices, self-destructive patterns of thought and behavior, delusional engagements of reality.
Empathy serves wants by imagining that one is melded with the sufferer, feeling their feelings and wanting for them what they want for themselves. This is highly limiting, as noted in our previous discussion because it only proposes to enter into the suffering of certain people. You can sympathize with the perpetrator and the victim of evil acts, but you cannot empathize with them both. You’d go mad. So you have to choose.
User Friendly Churches and the Curse of Empathy
I was first entering the ministry in the late 80s. “User Friendly” churches were springing up. I actually got involved with planting a “User Friendly church.” I was doubtful about the process but wanted to understand and learn. It was not very hard. Find out what people want in a church and give it to them.
Dones and Nones Don’t Really Know
Recently, while working with Jonathan Cashman in writing our book Go! Making 21st Century Disciplemakers, we spent a lot of time reading books focused on all the failures of the modern church by those seeking to “restore” people who have been called the “Nones” and the “Dones.” This “Emergent Church” or “Emerging Church” movement has a lot to say about deconstructing traditional faith and practice. (Keep in mind that “deconstructing” is the opposite of “reformation.”)
What it often comes down to with these groups is empathizing with the frustrations of the “church hurt” and unbelievers then offering them what they want rather than what they need. The problems of people are often presented as being rooted outside of themselves. Systems are blamed not human hearts. Procedures and methods are blamed not innate human selfishness.
Our book sympathizes with the “Nones” and “Dones,” but seeks to prepare churches to give them what they need. We must reach to them to encourage a confrontation of the Jesus of Scripture. We must make disciple-making disciples. And that involves teaching them to obey all that Christ commanded. And all that Christ commanded includes wrestling in faith and wisdom with the whole counsel of Scripture.
Neither Do Millenials and GenZ
If you ask Millenials or GenZ folk what they want in a church and empathize with their frustrations with the present church, you will never be able to give them what they actually need, nor what they will actually respond to in the end. One said to me, I paraphrase, “The Church would be great if you could get over all this morality stuff and support women’s rights (meaning supporting abortion).” My wife’s response was keen. “And to what exactly would we be offering that is worth winning people to?”
Anti-fragile Creatures Rarely Want What They Need
People are anti-fragile. They do best in challenging environments… best under stress… best with a mission and obstacles to overcome. People need something worth dying for to find something worth living for. And their natural selfish instincts always work against what they actually need to be happy and healthy.
The Careful Crafting of People We End Up Hating
Let’s illustrate. Men are always men, and women always women. But there has been a radical and aggressive push by the left, the humanists (who always end up destroying the most humans by the way), since the 1960s with the Marxist hippie movement and Marxist second wave feminists. A part of this radical push, has been trying to make women into what men want most at an animal level—whores who give easy sex—and men into what women want most at an animal level—weak, doting, sniveling, manservants.
The problem is that while wanting sends you down those roads, need makes that achievement odious and repulsive. Men don’t respect easy women and will never truly love them or trust them. Women don’t respect weak men and will always despise them and betray them.
Not Empathy… Goodness
Abandon the very idea of empathy. Choose goodness instead. Sympathize, but keep enough perspective and concern for the real-world and eternal-world good of others. Give people what they need and help them resist self-destructive wants.
~Andrew D. Sargent, PhD
- https://drandrewsargent.com/2025/10/empathy-the-christian-and-charlie-kirk-part-1-context-matters/ ↩︎
- https://drandrewsargent.com/2025/10/empathy-the-christian-charlie-kirk-part-2-useful-idiots-emotional-thinkers/ ↩︎
