Hollow Culture, Brittle Relationships, and Spiritual Poverty

Noelle Mering’s new book, titled No Contact: How a Seductive Ideology Broke Families and Friendships and How We Can Repair Them, looks at the distressing rise of family estrangement.

It’s a phenomenon the author compares to a wildfire, in which multiple forces converge and ignite the tinder of a society parched by spiritual and familial drought.

Many families torn by family estrangement can point to the election of 2016 as pivotal. Others had their first taste in the COVID year of 2020, the year Mering says, “We all became strangers and threats to one another.”

But although recent politics may have ripped the veil from the “seductive ideology” threatening our families and our civilization, it’s nothing new. Mering makes that clear in this thoughtful and empathetic exploration. Its roots are spiritual and ancient and reach back to the original non serviam.

“No Contact” doesn’t stop at analysis; it offers concrete solutions—and the hope that the fire burning through our families will clear a path to healing.

Mering is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Washington, DC-based think tank. Her articles on culture, politics, and religion have appeared in Catholic World Report, National Catholic Register, The Federalist, Newsweek, National Review, and other publications.

She is the author of Awake Not Woke, A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology, and the co-author of Theology of Home I, II, and III. Mering and her husband live in Southern California; they have six children. Her Substack is Family Revival.

Mering spoke recently with CWR about her new book.

CWR: What led you to write No Contact?

Noelle Mering: Going around the country over the last five years [after writing Awake, Not Woke], increasingly, at every Q&A, I’d have one person, if not multiple people, stand up and say, “What do I do about my adult kids?” Often, if it was a Catholic audience, they would say they left the faith, and then, oftentimes, it would be followed by “Our relationship’s really fractured,” or maybe even “We’re totally estranged.”

That became increasingly worrisome. I was, obviously, only getting their perspective, but they didn’t strike me as people who would normally warrant such a recrimination.

Initially, I was going to write a book about buttressing family life, like guiding principles for family life. But for various reasons, it seemed more crucial to talk about why, first and foremost, it is going awry, and examine that.

And that was before I heard about the phrase “no contact.” I was going to write a book called The Politics of Estrangement, and then my agent said, “Wait ’til you hear about the ‘no contact’ thing.”

CWR: There were societal forces involved, right?

Noelle Mering: The societal forces that were happening at the time were COVID, the increasing militancy of the anti-racism movement, Black Lives Matter after George Floyd, and then the ubiquity of the trans stuff.

Those three things have all been huge over the last six years, and they kind of converged around the same time. COVID made all the kids come home, and then kids coming home allowed parents to see some of their education, get a window into what the public school system was up to. And the George Floyd incident kind of ignited a new Critical Race Theory in schools movement, in the workplace, and in all our institutions—all that became far more aggressive. So they all, in some ways, fed each other.

CWR: Do you think that without those forces—in particular, COVID isolation, being under the same roof with their kids all the time, and having their eyes opened to what was going on in the public schools—parents could have gone on in happy ignorance?

Noelle Mering: That’s a good question. I don’t know how ignorant they could have remained, because the kids were becoming so militant. Ideology tends to break individuals, but it also breaks relationships. I think this was the ideology breaking the family, and that’s happened in various ways.

Divorce is a similar sort of familial estrangement, and then abortion, of course. There are so many ways in which family members are pitted against each other, man and woman, parent and child, and now child against parent. So [the no contact movement] feels like another manifestation of that same sort of division.

CWR: In Awake Not Woke, you did a great job of tracing the Marxist connection, and similarly in this book.

Noelle Mering: The idea of family abolition has been around for a long time. Marx and Engels called for it— the “abolition of the family”—in the Communist Manifesto.

As with most things that are academic ideas, they foment in the academy for a long time, but then they do seep out. So, people may not read any critical theory about family abolition, but they have absorbed it. Even down to the pundits.

It’s so normal now to think of Thanksgiving dinner as being when you fight with your family, and you know, maybe that’s always been around. I’m sure families have always fought and debated things. But I think it’s fairly new that we’ve had administrations leverage that sort of conflict. I think it was both Biden and Obama who did some version of “how to correct your conservative uncle at Thanksgiving or Christmas.”

CWR: In light of those holiday discussions, you talk about low differentiation and high differentiation as factors in family estrangement.

Noelle Mering: The concept is not original to me, but it illuminated a lot. “High differentiation” means you can evaluate something based on asking yourself three questions: Number one: Do I know who I am and what I believe? Number two: Am I able to express what I believe, even if I’m in a room with people who disagree with me? And number three: When someone does that back to me, do I take that as a threat or not?

An example I gave in the book was when we were on a work trip for my husband years ago, and one of his co-workers was giving me a hard time about my Catholic and conservative beliefs. I finally just said to him, basically, “Whatever!”

And he said, “Aren’t you upset? Don’t you care about what you believe?” I said, “No, I care a lot about what I believe. I just don’t need you to assent to it in order for me to know it’s true.”

It was easy to do with that guy because he was a stranger. It’s much harder to do with an aunt, uncle, cousin, or friend. But I think that a healthy culture, a pluralistic society, will be marked by high differentiation. That doesn’t mean that disagreements don’t matter. It just means we are able to understand that the fact that somebody disagrees with me is not a personal threat.

Part of the problem is that we want false uniformity. Unity is something deeper. Christ ultimately is the principle of unity. The modern dilemma is that we are ushered into social conformity because we fear the dynamism of difference that is allowed by having a deeper meaning.

CWR: One thing you talk about is “choosing your family”—a concept that has grown as children have been encouraged to question traditional family structures. It’s a huge part of the transgender movement in particular. But it would seem the term also has relevance on a positive level, as an antidote to the “no contact” movement.

Noelle Mering: Families that are all choice and no duty are unstable. But relationships that are all duty and no choice are impersonal. The Catholic call, really, is to choose the things that we owe some sort of allegiance to, and to choose our sufferings. We’re supposed to choose everything, except sins or things that are not within God’s will.

“Choose what you did not choose”—choose those whom you’re obligated to, choose what you’ve been given. That’s the challenge.

CWR: You’re saying, make a conscious choice to choose the family you’ve been given.

Noelle Mering: Chosen family can be a wonderful thing, right? We all have friendships that become like family, and there’s something innocuous and even lovely about saying, “Oh, this is my chosen family.” But it’s not a replacement.

CWR: Your book also has much wisdom—practical and spiritual—about coping with estrangement and healing it. From the perspective of a parent with an intact, close-knit family, the question that comes to mind is, how do I make sure this doesn’t happen to my family? Do you address that as well?

Noelle Mering: Remedial measures and preventative measures seem like topics for two different audiences in a way, but I think they’re actually relevant to both audiences.

When it comes to preventative measures, one of the images I love is the idea that when you first become a parent, you have all the control but little earned moral authority, and as your kids grow up, you should be lowering control as you’re gaining authority in their eyes.

We need to parent differently at each stage of our children’s lives. It’s so easy to keep that hold on it and think we’re going to remain in that original place. But paradoxically, that undermines our authority. It’s the parent who respects the interior freedom of their child who, I think, the child is more willing to go to for counsel.

When there’s too much control, kids need a way to differentiate themselves, and they can sometimes do that in an emotional and messy way, by trying to estrange themselves.

So I think that’s a big preventative measure. How do we give them their interior freedom?

And when we’re growing in moral authority, that means that we are becoming people of nobility. The parental role is really a call to nobility—and that means virtuous living. All the things that implies can be a great aid to avoiding family estrangement. A lot of estrangements are a messy tangle: there’s addiction, there’s “my mom really messed up in certain ways”—plenty of complaints all around.

So, part of the way we inoculate ourselves from that is by being able to live in a manner that we can truly say, “Of course, no one lives perfectly, but I really tried to be a healthy and emotionally mature person, with virtue.”

CWR: You talk about the difference between authoritarian and authoritative parenting, and that’s also a get-ahead-of-the-curve kind of thing, right?

Noelle Mering: Yes, the two extremes being permissive parenting and authoritarian parenting.

I think part of the reason why parents have leaned toward the permissive side so much is because the culture has done a good job of conflating authority with authoritarianism. Our conception of authority has kind of collapsed into authoritarianism. The question-authority phrase—think Timothy Leary in the 1960s—was not “question corrupt authority.” The meaning of that was “question authority itself.”

CWR: You also discuss politics and the political divide, contrasting the family today with families years ago, when you could vote for different people and still talk to each other. Seemingly, you can’t now. The things that you voted for become so divisive. Is this because we don’t have a moral common ground anymore?

Noelle Mering: I think there are two things contributing to that dynamic.

One is that politics occupies space that it ought not to occupy now. It’s making claims about anthropology and metaphysics. We’re not arguing about the means to a shared end. We’re arguing about what the end even is.

Secondly, I think the political is so totalizing now. And I think that’s the point: Once power is the last metric through which you view your relationships, then politics is everything.

There’s a novel called The Anniversary, which won Italy’s most prestigious literary prize. It’s about a son going no contact with his family. In an interview with the author [Andrea Bajani] he says Italians have this little notion that the family is a pre-political institution—it comes before the state. He rejects that idea. That rejection has always been a very ideological, academic, esoteric idea. Now it’s very common.

CWR: Explain that a little more.

Noelle Mering: It’s the idea that the family is a social construct that we can evolve out of. You hear that throughout the “no contact” movement. People say, “You have guilt in going no contact because society and culture taught you that you owe a special duty to family. But that’s just what they’ve taught you. It’s not something that is natural to you.”

CWR: Why is transgenderism so often involved in family estrangement?

Noelle Mering: There are two reasons. One is that your parents have a canon of memory that is far deeper and broader than your own memory of yourself.

Transgenderism is self-rejection—trying to reject who I was and who I am. That’s why they talk about deadnaming. That person is dead. Then I am recreated.

It’s an inversion of Christianity in many ways. But if you’re trying to kill who you are, then the parent is always going to be an existential reminder of an identity that won’t die.

CWR: The parent remembers that person. And the transgender person desperately wants that person dead.

Noelle Mering: So the parent is always going to be a threat to that effort.

The second reason why I think it’s so common with transgender and gender ideologies is that [“transitioning” frequently includes] what has become almost like an evangelical ritual, in transitioners’ “found families,” of sharing their testimony of trauma.

Parental trauma is a huge part of that. “How I wasn’t able to be who I was. My parents thought I was this person; they always treated me like that, but I never was, and I was always having to hide.” I think that coming up with a story of trauma in your past is really incentivized in the transgender community.

CWR: On the positive side, you give a great deal of beautiful and practical advice. One thing that struck me was parents’ role in safeguarding memories: how memories can be the common ground that a family can have to spark discussions and unify it, when morals and politics aren’t enough.

CWR: In my own extended family, we have some serious political divisions and even some religious ones. [With that as context,] I started noticing that we started sharing more about family history. Younger generations would lean in and really wanted to chart the terrain of their ancestry. And the older generations loved telling them stories about their parents or their siblings, or what it was like growing up.

These can be bonding experiences because it is unique to this network of people. It’s unique to them. But they’re also reminders of the history of this lineage, which has generated the kind of family that we are.

In some ways, the essence of ideology is forgetfulness or erasure. But the family is a generative institution, so storing up those memories and sharing them, recreating them together in your imagination, is a powerful way of connecting those kind of synapses in our minds—and in our family culture—so that we become whole again.

CWR: What is the main audience of your book?

Noelle Mering: I didn’t want it to be just for one group of people. My most obvious audience is probably conservative parents who’ve been cut off, or maybe their kids are woke, and they have some strain. But I really tried to write it thinking about people I know, who I love and who are on the left, and what would be not offensive to them, but would give due justice to what’s actually going on.

I tried to write it in a way that was not insulting to somebody else’s perspective. …

That might make it less of a sensational book, and maybe harder to sell, but it was important to me that it was done like that.

I think my ideal audience would be somebody who maybe is not even religious or not even particularly political—or is even left of center—but sees this happening and wants to understand it. How can I persuade such a person that this is a bad thing, that this is a phenomenon driven by something that’s not natural to us?

CWR: Circling back to politics and how it divides us: Politics used to be about things that you could talk about, like taxation, streets. and schools. Now it’s about abortion and transgenderism—about moral issues, because we don’t have a common moral framework.

So, would you say this book is really about politics, or is it about dealing with people on different sides of moral issues?

Noelle Mering: That’s a great question. I think the deeper issue is that we’ve lost our principle of unity, and the greatest principle of unity is Jesus Christ. So we have the modern dilemma: we have advanced technologically, [but] we’re deeply spiritually poor.

That dilemma leads to a hollowness in our culture and our relationships, which makes them very brittle and not very durable.

I think that’s the deeper thing: politics provides a tribalism and a belonging that has far greater claim on people who don’t have a place to belong, and don’t have real unity. So, we start seeking this contrived sense of uniformity that tribalism really capitalizes on.

That’s the deeper dynamic, that spiritual poverty.

Read original article