Forget empathy, the new war is on lament

This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on February 18, 2026.

Ever since Joe Rigney released his book about empathy being a sin, the TheoBros of conservative evangelicalism have been piling into his bus, demonizing empathy for those they run over as “the greatest rhetorical tool of manipulation in the 21st century,” and as “the progressive gaze.”

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler recently climbed aboard the anti-empathy bus. It’s the latest example of Mohler’s flip-flopping.

In 2014, he said Christians should “lead with empathy.” But now Mohler claims: “I don’t think empathy is a thing. I don’t think it’s real. It is a substitute for real Christian morality.”

Joe Rigney

For those who may be unfamiliar with Rigney, he’s an associate pastor at slavery apologist Doug Wilson’s Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. His diatribe against empathy was published by Wilson’s Canon Press. Prior to his move to Moscow, he was one of the pastors at Cities Church in Minneapolis, ruling alongside his fellow elder and local ICE director David Easterwood. He also was the president of Bethlehem Seminary, whose chancellor is John Piper.

But while the TheoBros have set their sights on empathy, Piper has been silently stewing about another deep concern — the sin of lament.

“I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” Piper muttered during a recent episode of the “Ask Pastor John” podcast. “Because I’m concerned about this whole frequency by which we talk about lament as though we know what we’re talking about.”

Piper was responding to a woman who lives with chronic illness and says she often questions God’s love for her. She asked: “In Jeremiah 20:14, the prophet himself cries out, ‘Cursed be the day on which I was born!’ Is such raw lament even permissible for the believer, or is this blasphemous? I’ve felt this same thought bubble up in my mind and heart, but I’m afraid to voice it. It seems greatly dishonoring to the Creator to wish to have never existed.”

So Piper began his response by claiming, “There is a way to define lament so that it is a sin.”

‘Five Statements on Lament’

While the woman is endlessly suffering in her Nevada home, Piper responds by giving her “five theses about lament”:

1. It is never right, it is always sin, to feel or think or say critical things about God and God’s ways.
2. It may be right to feel or think or express perplexity at God’s ways and to seek help from God to understand as much as possible — to cry out for it.
3. It may be right to feel or think or express how painful God’s ways are in your life and to seek God’s help to understand and endure.
4. The sin of having critical feelings or critical thoughts of God is not made worse by the sin of expressing those words to God aloud.
5. God disapproves of being criticized because it dishonors God, but God forgives those who repent and trust Christ.

While the episode of “Ask Pastor John” may appear on the surface to be answering a woman’s question about how she should think about lament during her chronic suffering, the undercurrent of Piper’s narrative is the sacralization of power and the projection of his own ego onto God.

Everything God does is right

John Piper

“The reason it is always wrong and never right to criticize God is that he never does anything wrong,” Piper says. “Everything he does is right and good and wise and holy.”

To bolster his point, Piper quotes six verses about God’s ways being perfect, true and just. Then he suggests: “It is wrong to criticize God because he never does anything wrong. He never does anything worthy of criticism. To accuse him of wrong is to dishonor him, and dishonoring him is the opposite of righteousness. It is sin.”

Piper mentions the example of Job’s wife telling Job to curse God and die and then quotes Job telling her, “You’re talking like one of the foolish women.”

Then while affirming the infallibility of Scripture, Piper says Jeremiah’s cursing of the day he was born was indeed sin: “Jeremiah’s birth and the purpose of it was not his or any man’s idea. It was God’s idea, God’s design, God’s purpose. To curse God’s purpose is sin.”

Piper’s view of sovereignty

But what exactly do the works of God entail? Does God only do right, good, wise and holy things? Or can God behave like the worst abusers on earth and require us to call it good?

Many Christians would agree with Piper that God does what is right, good, wise and holy. But the devil is in the details.

Continue reading at Baptist News Global.