A note before you go further: I’ve supported men’s health through Movember for years, and I’m conscious that this piece plays deliberately with a word that describes something devastatingly real.
Suicide is not a metaphor: around 125 people die by suicide each week in the UK, and around three quarters of them are men. Suicide is the single biggest killer of men under the age of 50 in the UK.
There are amazing organisations doing amazing work to try and change those stats including CALM, which offers free, confidential support.
Robert Jenrick thinks Britain has a problem with “suicidal empathy”
He means something more than empathy being partial, or governments having to think about incentives and finite resources. His accusation is that we become so preoccupied with somebody else’s circumstances, so willing to prioritise their needs, that eventually we imperil ourselves.
And the trouble is, looked at from a certain angle, that sounds rather a lot like Jesus.
I’ve wondered before what would happen if Robert Jenrick hung out with Jesus for a bit1. Not because I imagine Jesus quietly handing him an upgraded policy platform, but because spending time with Jesus has an awkward habit of giving us perspective when we’re adamant that we’ve got all the answers.
And now he’s made a claim that brings me back to that question.
As Reform launched proposals it claims would cut around £50 billion a year from welfare spending, including large reductions in disability benefits2, Jenrick described current disability spending as “not generosity … it is suicidal empathy”.
So what has that got to do with Jesus?
Jesus has an almost reckless tendency to come too close.
People interrupt him and he stops. He touches people everyone else has decided not to touch. He eats with the wrong people. He lets another person’s grief become his grief. He weeps. He tells stories in which the respectable people walk past and the foreigner is the one who comes near. He tells us to love enemies, to give without always expecting something back, to forgive again and then again and then again after that.
He leaves the ninety-nine to go looking for one.
This is not obviously the behaviour of somebody committed above everything else to prudent self-preservation.
And eventually it gets much worse. He goes to Jerusalem. He knows what is waiting, and he refuses the obvious routes of self-protection.
And he says this utterly upside-down thing: whoever tries to save their life loses it, and whoever loses their life finds it.
If “suicidal empathy” means allowing someone else’s predicament to become so thoroughly your concern that you willingly accept a cost you didn’t have to bear, then the accusation against Jesus is a strong one.
The Christian response cannot just be: ah, but technically that isn’t empathy.
Because Christianity begins with the even stranger claim that before Robert Jenrick ever gets to hang out with Jesus, Jesus has decided to hang out with Robert Jenrick. And with me, and you, and all of us.
God does not remain in heaven with an impeccably accurate analysis of the human condition. He comes here.
He enters dependence and hunger and tiredness, friendship and grief, rejection and death. He knows what it is to be welcomed and misunderstood, celebrated and abandoned.
Whatever else empathy means, surely it has something to do with this: refusing the safety of distance in order to enter another’s experience.
And that is also the pattern of Jesus’ encounters. He does not minister to “people with a disability” as a demographic. Bartimaeus has a voice. He does not deal with “the unclean” as a category. A woman becomes daughter. “Tax collectors” become Zacchaeus sitting across a table. “Foreigners” become a Samaritan who turns out to know more about neighbourliness than the people who should.
Again and again the movement is from category to person. From distance to encounter. From abstraction to relationship.
Which makes this an interesting thing to bring into politics, because politics is extraordinarily good at moving in the opposite direction.
Benefit claimant. Taxpayer. Migrant. Foreign national. Economically inactive. Disabled. Elite. Reform voter. Woke activist. Illegal.
Some of those categories describe something real. Governments could scarcely operate without categories.
But none of them is a person.
And following Jesus seems to involve a repeated journey back towards people our categories make it easier to look past. His invitation by contrast is to come near, to see, to know, to love.
Which makes things dangerous, because love does not always stop at understanding.
Grace certainly doesn’t.
Grace takes us further still, beyond deservingness. Somebody else’s predicament does not simply become intelligible to me; love begins to give where nothing is owed.
The Christian claim is not merely that God empathises with our predicament. In Jesus, God enters a rupture he did not cause in order to restore people who cannot restore themselves.
He is present. He identifies with us. He loves us, individually and together. He bears the cost. He gives himself. And Christians call this grace.
There is something outrageous about grace because it breaks the normal accounting of deservingness. The younger son really did squander the inheritance. The debtor really did owe the money. The late workers really did work fewer hours. The criminal beside Jesus really was guilty.
Grace doesn’t require us to pretend otherwise. It just refuses to let bookkeeping have the final word.
Which is why, from the standpoint of Reform’s advocacy for self-preservation, the Cross is actually the disastrous endpoint of caring too much.
Except Christianity does not end with Jesus dead.
Jesus rises.
That matters enormously in the context of a phrase containing the word “suicidal”. Christianity is not a cult of self-destruction. It does not say annihilation is virtuous or that having no boundaries is holy.
What Christianity says is harder to grasp: the life poured out in love is not ultimately lost. The one who loses their life finds it. God makes life out of death.
Self-preservation, in other words, is not the deepest law of the universe. Love is. Sam Freedman’s excellent piece on the war against empathy approaches the same argument from another direction.
Freedman traces the phrase back through Gad Saad and Elon Musk’s enthusiasm for it, before putting it in the context of a much older argument about pity, empathy and reason. It’s an argument worth having because affective empathy is partial. We react much more strongly to the suffering immediately in front of us than we do to suffering we cannot picture.
But Freedman notices the much bigger move being made. A critique of miscalibrated empathy turns into the suggestion that our society’s problem is an excess of concern for the wrong people. And eventually that starts looking less like hostility to bad decision-making and more like hostility to compassion itself.
That lands with me because I spent enough time inside DWP to distrust any explanation of disability and work which concludes that the principal thing Britain has got wrong is caring too much.
Social security is complicated because people’s lives are complicated. Work can be transformative, but badly designed systems and misaligned incentives can trap people. It’s right that as a society we think about the collective impact of taxation and what we ask employers to carry.
But we can’t do that at the expense of the disabled person terrified that trying work might destabilise the support holding their life together. Or for the person desperate for the dignity and community of work that cannot find an employer prepared to accommodate them. Or of their family. Or of the civil servant that’s trying to construct rules for millions of radically different lives.
The Christian answer to the partiality of empathy cannot be to stop coming close. It has to be to widen the circle, and then use wisdom.
Freedman reaches Nietzsche along the way. And Nietzsche, at least, understood that attacking pity, weakness and egalitarianism would eventually bring him into conflict with Christianity. For him, Christianity was part of the problem.
And that is what makes the arrival of this language around Reform worth reflecting on: the movement gathering around the party includes people who think very seriously and explicitly about Christianity. Theirs is not expected to be a Nietzschean worldview.
Danny Kruger, Reform’s head of preparation for government, has written extensively about family, covenant and obligation. James Orr, its head of policy, writes about Christianity and Western civilisation. Tim Montgomerie, until his suspension from the party, was honorary president of its Christian Fellowship and has long brought evangelical Christianity into conversation with conservative politics.
These are not interchangeable people. They don’t all think the same thing. And Jenrick himself seems less inclined than some of them to foreground his faith.
But the Christian Fellowship for Reform almost perfectly captures the tension. On its own website it begins by declaring its belief that Jesus saves people “through dying in our place”. It then explains its support for Reform through values including personal responsibility, family, strong communities, enterprise and national sovereignty.
I don’t think those things necessarily need to contradict one another.
But sit with those words: dying in our place.
Those are words that ought to make Christians cautious about treating the taking on of somebody else’s cost as obviously pathological.
So it would be very easy for the response to all of this to ask “how can these people call themselves Christians?” But I don’t think that’s actually the interesting question.
Christians can disagree substantially about welfare, migration, taxation, criminal justice, markets, borders and the state. Jesus has not hidden the most humane approach to PIP in a parable.
The interesting question is what has hanging out with Jesus done to your politics? Has it made you come closer rather than move away? Has another person’s burden become harder to dismiss? Where has grace interfered with your otherwise perfectly reasonable calculation of what somebody deserves? Where has love cost something?
There is a Christian-conservative argument that can be made about family, inherited institutions, obligation, belonging, responsibility and the dangers of radical individualism.
But Christianity isn’t an inheritance left behind by Jesus for Western civilisation to preserve.
Christianity is following Jesus.
And there is a peculiar tension in becoming intensely committed to preserving Christianity as a cultural inheritance while talking about empathy as though the kind of costly nearness embodied by Christ were itself the danger.
That matters to me because of what Kingdœmocracy is trying to explore: not a Christian manifesto or a method for deriving the approved Kingdom position on every budget line, but ways of helping Christians seek routes towards empathy rather than escape routes from it. Common Good tries to hold the breadth of public life before God; PrayReps puts names to the people carrying public responsibility and asks whether we will pray for them as they shoulder it.
The rhythm God’s been leading me to seek through both those tools is scripture before commentary, prayer before argument and reflection before reaction.
Prayer doesn’t produce a secret divine spreadsheet telling us the right welfare settlement, but it makes it harder to keep another person safely abstract.
And prayer does something else: it puts us in the presence of Jesus.
How do I get near enough to understand? Whose life have I only encountered as a statistic? Who becomes less frightening once I know their name? What happens when somebody I thought of as a burden becomes a neighbour? And what happens when the stranger turns out to be family?
That last question rubs up against something particularly important about Christianity. Because the practice of our faith is more than neighbourliness.
The practice of our faith takes place around the Communion table where there are different histories and politics and classes and failures and fears and needs. People who would not naturally choose one another come forward and receive the same Christ.
The table does not require us to pretend we agree. It does something more difficult. It makes us family before we have sorted everything out. And family changes the way an argument about responsibility works.
Think about the prodigal son. The elder brother’s account of events is spot on. His brother did take the money and he squandered it.
“The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’
“‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’” (Luke 15:28-32)
But listen to the distance that has opened up in him: This son of yours.
And the father, wonderfully, will not allow it: This brother of yours.
Your brother.
The politics of deservingness gets much harder when the person on the other side of the ledger is your brother.
Not impossible. Families need truth and responsibility and boundaries and repair. But different.
And none of this begins with manufacturing heroic quantities of niceness by ourselves. That’s not a sustainable basis for anything.
Grace needs a wellspring.
Christians believe we love because God loved us first. We forgive because we have been forgiven. We welcome because we were made welcome. We come to the table having been invited. We are not the source. The Father is.
And that may be the crucial difference between outrageous grace and simply telling already exhausted people they must try harder to care.
So Robert, I think you might be remarkably close to something even more controversial: your accusation of “suicidal empathy” is a claim against Jesus.
He comes too close. He allows our predicament to become his concern. He loves people who have not earned it. He takes on a burden he did not create. He gives himself, even to death on the Cross.
If self-preservation is the highest standard, that’s a pretty bad set of choices.
But for Christians, the story turns on what happens next: Jesus rises.
The mistake isn’t noticing that love can be costly. The Cross says it can cost everything. The mistake is assuming that the highest purpose of life is avoiding the cost.
Hanging out with Jesus changes the calculation because Jesus first chose to hang out with us.
So perhaps Christians should, in that carefully redeemed sense, plead guilty to something rather like suicidal empathy.
Maybe Robert Jenrick is talking about Jesus after all.
- Which as far as the small number of people who arrive here via Google goes seems to have good SEO when people search his name ↩︎
- Those claims are contested ↩︎