A note before you go further: 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 Movember every year, and 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”.
Try it on Jesus
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.
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