Toxic Empathy That Excuses Evil Sees Challenger In Mary Slessor
Empathy is treated like the great moral trump card of our time, the feeling that should settle debates and shape policy. We are told it must guide our politics, soften judgments, and define moral standing. To lack it is a moral failure in the popular imagination.
Empathy itself is not the enemy; properly understood, it is a gift from God and a call to compassion rooted in Scripture, which bids us to “weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15) and to bear one another’s burdens. A hard-hearted people is a dangerous people.
But there is something more dangerous: empathy severed from truth and moral clarity. When sympathy becomes untethered from responsibility, long-term consequence, and the revealed moral order, it shifts from a healing force into a weapon. Feeling deeply does not guarantee acting rightly.
That distinction is not theoretical; it plays out in real lives and real cultures. I recently read Walter C. Erdman’s book Sources of Power in Famous Lives, published in 1936, and found a striking chapter on Mary Slessor who the author hailed as one of “God’s heroines,” possessing a life story “more incredible than the wildest fiction.”
Mary Slessor’s Example
She served as a missionary on the Calabar Coast of West Africa, walking alone into regions defined by violence, superstition, and the routine killing of unwanted children, especially twins. In that context, mothers who bore twins were often driven from their villages and condemned to live like outcasts. The cruelty was systemic and ritualized.
David Livingstone captured the darkness of that world when he wrote: “a land mysterious and terrible, ruled by witchcraft and the terrorism of secret societies; where the skull was worshipped and blood sacrifices were offered to Jujus; where guilt was decided by ordeals of poison or boiling oil; where scores were murdered when a chief died; where men and women were bound and left by the waterside to placate the god of shrimps … a land of darkness and fear.”
Mary lived among those people for decades and confronted the practices that destroyed children and families. She challenged witch doctors, exposed secret murders, rescued infants marked for death, and refused to treat mass cruelty as a cultural curiosity we must tolerate. Her influence grew until colonial officials relied on her as a moral and civil authority, and the Bible was her constant guide.
Where our age too often excuses wrongdoing in the name of feeling, Slessor allowed Scripture to shape and discipline her compassion. She loved the people enough to name what was sinful and to bear the cost of opposition. That kind of costly compassion looks nothing like sentimentalism.
This tension is visible in modern debates. Empathy is frequently elevated above truth and used to justify policies without weighing consequences or moral claims. Research from institutions such as the Brookings Institution shows that certain emotional frames resonate strongly in civic activism, especially among younger women who often lead cause-based mobilization.
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When empathy is trained to see only one victim, it renders others invisible. The abortion debate often centers the mother’s fear and hardship in vivid terms while treating the unborn as an abstraction, so compassion narrows rather than enlarges and one life is seen only by refusing to see another. That ethical flattening costs lives.
Another hazard is policy shaped by emotion alone: calls to empty prisons without full regard for victims, to dismantle parental authority in the name of protection, or to open borders driven by moving stories but blind to social consequence. Sincere sorrow for suffering does not excuse poor judgment that harms communities long-term.
Mary Slessor’s story corrects this confusion. Her sympathy was raw and real, but it was ordered under Scripture and moral judgment. She proved you can be tender and resolute, compassionate and courageous, naming sin and protecting the vulnerable.
Our nation does not need less empathy; it needs better empathy—empathy informed by God’s truth, anchored in moral reality, and willing to embrace costly, Christ-shaped obedience. That kind of compassion saves lives, corrects cultures, and protects the weak.
Mary Slessor’s life is not a quaint relic; it is a challenge. We urgently need her kind of compassion today.