No. 57 Sept 2026
Family
Contempt
Peace
Issue No. 5Monday, 7 September 2026
When your family stopped talking about anything else
Labor Day opens the sprint to the midterms on 3 November, and in a fair number of houses the argument already started months ago and never really stopped. Research published this year puts a number on something you may already know from the inside, namely how many relationships don’t survive it.
One · What happened
Somebody in the family went quiet
Two researchers at UC Irvine, Mertcan Güngör and Peter Ditto, published a study on 5 May in the journal PNAS Nexus that asked a plain question across several national surveys. Had politics ever cost you a relationship? 37% of American adults said yes, and the share saying yes has been climbing for years now.
Among the people who said yes, the relationship that ended was rarely the one you might guess first.
Who the political breakup happened with
- 62%
- A friend.
- 40%
- A family member.
- 29%
- A coworker.
- 10%
- A romantic partner.
Friendships end more often than marriages do over this, and the researchers think they know why. A friendship is close enough that politics can come up at all, and light enough, with no shared mortgage and no shared kids, that nothing else is really holding it in place once it does.
None of that is news to you if it has already happened in your family. The timing matters, though. Labor Day, which falls on 7 September this year, has marked the unofficial start of the general-election stretch for generations, and the vote is 8 weeks out. The ads are about to get worse, and so is the group chat.
Two · What it is doing
The person who stopped talking back stops being a person
The same study asked something more interesting than who left whom. It asked what happened afterward, inside the person who did the leaving. People who had cut somebody off over politics rated the other side more coldly than people who hadn’t, and they consistently overestimated how extreme that side’s actual beliefs were, by a margin that held up across all of the surveys.
Once contact stops, your imagination is the only thing left filling in the person who used to be there, and imagination is not kind to people we are angry at. A brother turns into a position, and an aunt into a headline you already hated before she ever said anything. Nobody sat down and decided to think of them that way. The caricature is just what’s left once the actual, complicated human being stops showing up to correct it.
37% of American adults say politics has cost them a relationship. For 40% of those, it was a family member.
The caricature is easier to be angry at than the real person ever was. The real aunt remembered your birthday most years and got one specific thing badly wrong about the world. What’s left is just the wrong thing at full volume. Contempt for a caricature costs you nothing, because a caricature can’t be hurt and never has to be forgiven, and in my opinion that is the whole appeal of it.
Three · Where the ground is
What Jesus actually forbids
You are allowed to believe your family member is dangerously wrong about the country. Holding him in contempt is a different thing, and that one is forbidden outright, and most people I talk to have the 2 mixed together.
Jesus is more specific about this than most people remember. In Matthew 5 he goes past murder and says that calling your brother a fool puts you in danger of judgment, and calling a whole person a fool is the exact move a caricature makes possible. Scripture is full of people holding hard positions and saying so to people’s faces, and none of them get judged for the position. What Jesus names is the contempt.
Paul writes a line in Romans 12 that gets skipped past too quickly. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Paul knows it won’t always be possible, since some ruptures aren’t yours alone to close, and he still puts the obligation on you no matter what the other person does. You don’t get to wait for them to move first.
The speck and the extremity
An old teaching lands almost too neatly on the study’s finding. In Matthew 7 Jesus asks why you can see the speck in your brother’s eye and miss the log in your own, and that is pretty much the distortion the researchers just measured with a survey, because the estranged see the other side’s fault at a magnification their own never gets. The speck is real in that story. Jesus just wants your own eye dealt with first, before you trust your reading of his.
That doesn’t mean every estrangement is a sin waiting to be undone. Proverbs 20 says it’s an honor for a man to keep aloof from strife, and a relationship that was built entirely on contempt on both sides may need to come back in a different shape than the one it had before, if it comes back at all. The command is to seek peace. Restoration on the other person’s old terms is a separate question, and Scripture doesn’t require it of you.
Where this page stops
If a relationship ended because somebody in it was abusive or threatening or just unsafe to be around, stop reading here. Safety is the goal there, and that’s a decision to make with your pastor and with an advocate on a domestic violence line, on the strength of a lot more than a webpage. And if losing this person has started showing up in your health, sleep gone, appetite gone, a decline your doctor would spot before you would, get seen. A body can get sick from grief, and praying about it does not tell you what it is.
Four · Today
Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”
None of this requires you to change your mind about the vote in 8 weeks. It requires one act of contact, today, aimed at a specific person and not at the argument.
- 01
Message the specific person you’ve gone quiet with.
Ask about their health or their kid. Ordinary contact is the whole content of the message, and any reference to the last conversation disqualifies it. Send it today, before the argument in your head talks you out of it, because it will try.
- 02
Decide your exit line before you need it.
One sentence, chosen ahead of time, that ends a table argument without you surrendering it or winning it. “I love you and I’m not going to fight about this today” works fine. Nobody comes up with one mid-argument.
- 03
Write the strongest honest version of the other side’s reason.
Privately, on paper, and make it the best version, the reason a thoughtful person could actually hold it, and skip the version you argue against online. You don’t have to agree with it. You just have to prove to yourself that you can still see it.
- 04
Set your number of online arguments for the next 8 weeks.
Decide it now, as an actual number. Zero is an acceptable answer. Whatever you pick, write it down somewhere you’ll see it again in October, because a vague intention to stay out of it will have dissolved by then, and I say that from experience.
- 05
Pray for the person you’ve gone quiet with.
Use the actual name of the actual person you’ve gone quiet with, and ask God for their good, and leave their opinions out of the prayer entirely. It’s a strange thing to do for somebody you’re angry at, and of everything on this list it’s the one most likely to change you, whatever it does or doesn’t do for them.
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