This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Moller, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Allie Bastucky is the host of Relatable, a podcast about culture, politics, and theology aimed at helping women build their

worldview on God's Word. After graduating from Furman University, Ali Best started a blog entitled

Conservative Millennial, which garnered an audience of hundreds of thousands. She has appeared

on many programs, including Fox News, Prager University, and The Daily Wire. She's also the author

of two books.

You're not enough and that's okay. That book is on escaping the toxic culture of self-love.

Her second book is Toxic Empathy, How Progressives Exploite Christian Compassion, and that book is the topic of our conversation today.

Allie Bestuckie, welcome to thinking in public. Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

You know, you really are talented at knowing how to start and direct an argument. So,

congratulations to that. Well, thank you. My parents would agree. I'm going to call that a new

spiritual gift. Well, I think, thank you. Yeah, I was trying to convince my parents of that

when I was a toddler trying to persuade them of my point of view.

They would say I've had that knack for arguing since birth.

Well, I think we're living in a cultural moment in which if you don't push back really hard and don't ask fundamental questions of what in the world's going on, then you just become a part of the blob and a part of the problem.

And you wrote your latest book, Toxic Empathy, How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, at a specific time, and I think it's incredibly well-timed, when all of a sudden, the word empathy has become an issue of

cultural controversy, I think for good reason, but I want you to tell me why. Yes. So I started

noticing this a few years ago, especially in the summer of 2020, that was a convergence of a lot

of different issues. We had COVID going on trying to figure out not just

what the government's role was, but what's the church's role, what's the individual's role as a

Christian. But then, of course, we had the George Floyd incident. And we had a lot of Christians

...