This holiday season, it is not your duty to educate Aunt Susan.
Originally published by Noelle Mering’s Family Revival Substack
We didn’t used to think of the holiday dinner table as a flashpoint for heated family disagreements about health care, abortion, and Donald Trump. But somewhere along the way, we began to…or maybe we were taught to. In 2022, the Biden White House released talking points for correcting your wayward relatives over the holidays. A decade earlier an ad with a young man clad in a plaid onesie who came to be known as “Pajama Boy” was part of a “Healthcare for the Holidays” campaign by Organizing for Action, which was intended to encourage young adults to leverage family gatherings to talk Obamacare with their relatives. The implicit message was this: someone’s humanity now hinges on whether they are on the correct side of the all-seeing eye of History. And, conveniently, that eye always looks out from the side you already occupy.
The holiday that once signaled the beginning of a season of gratitude now signals the time to air our grievances with all of the very wrong things those people across the table from you represent. After the 2024 election and right before holiday gatherings last year, Jimmy Kimmel’s wife, Molly McNearney, spoke on the ‘We Can Do Hard Things’ podcast about how she struggles to deal with her conservative family. “I’m in constant conflict. I’m angry all the time, which isn’t healthy at all,” she admitted. “When I see these terrible stories every day, I’m immediately mad at certain aunts, uncles, and cousins that put him in power. I wish I could deprogram myself in some way.” Sadly, she says she is now estranged from a number of relatives.
McNearney suggests her relatives have been deliberately misinformed even as she says they truly believe what they believe. Yet the broader truth is universal: in a highly polarized environment most everyone is usually adamant that it’s the other side that’s deceived, never themselves, making self-examination a perpetual challenge.
McNearney’s solution was to send certain family members emails listing her “ten reasons not to vote for this guy,” ending with a plea: “I’m begging you. Please don’t.” Some relatives ignored her; others responded with what she describes as “truly insane responses.” It should surprise no one that such a truly insane email did not change hearts or minds, much less elicit obedience. Sadly, McNearney says she’s now estranged from a number of them.
What’s striking is not just the estrangement, but her candor. She says she wishes she could deprogram herself. Embedded in that phrase is an uncomfortable recognition: that the problem might not live only in them, but somewhere in her too. She senses that her interior world has been captured, she knows this isn’t healthy and perhaps she suspects, even subconsciously, that the fault is not entirely external to herself.
It is no surprise, then, that the polarization of the country cuts straight through the family table. Politics has colonized our souls. This is the topic of my forthcoming book, No Contact: How a Seductive Ideology Broke Families and Friendships and How We Can Repair Them (Forum, 2026).
The holidays, of all times, are when this colonization becomes most apparent. But they are also a chance to reclaim our humanity. Here are a few simple ways.
1. Attend to what is good.
What we give our attention to shapes our interior life. If I spend my mental energy cataloguing the wrongness of everyone around me, I shouldn’t be surprised to find myself perpetually irritated. Gratitude is not a sentimental ornament of the season; it’s a discipline. Make a habit to notice what is good, both in the world and in the person in front of you. Attend to that and it will subtly reorient your inner landscape.
2. Don’t assume bad intent.
Most political disagreements aren’t battles between good people and malicious ones. More often they’re collisions between differing priorities, fears, and hopes— stemming from deeper (and often unexamined) metaphysical and anthropological presuppositions. The person across the table is probably very focused on things you’re not focused on, and less focused on what you think matters most. That doesn’t make them wicked; it makes them ordinary individuals in a hyper-politicized landscape that feeds off of anxiety and confusion and festers through confirmation bias. You are probably guilty of it too.
3. Let your behavior lead your feelings.
Treat the people you most dread seeing as if they were the ones you were most eager to welcome. Act warmly, even if you don’t feel it. Behavior shapes emotions in us and can elicit similar feelings in the other. If any break in our civic stalemate is to come, it is through remembering and renewing mutual trust through shared affections.
The holidays cannot fix the polarization of the country. But they can remind us that the family is a pre-political institution, and that when that ordering is inverted, it’s not a sign of moral clarity but of ideological triumph. Tribalism is one of the great pathologies of our age, not only the left–right divide but the hegemonic lens of identity politics that reduces human beings to avatars of collectivized group identity and invites others to do so in reaction. The antidote is to re-humanize the world. That effort starts with ourselves, and then extends to the relationships entrusted to us. The holiday table is a great time to begin.
And maybe that is how we deprogram ourselves.
