A growing number of young Americans are severing ties with their own parents, not over abuse or neglect, but because Mom and Dad watch Fox News or won’t celebrate LGBTQ lifestyles.
That’s the disturbing trend explored in “No Contact,” a new book by Noelle Mering. The work examines how cultural Marxism has fueled a movement of adult children abandoning non-abusive family members over ideological disagreements, from voting patterns to religious convictions about gender and sexuality. Mering argues that the majority of family cutoffs today stem from political and religious disputes. Children raised in an increasingly secular culture now view a parent’s traditional beliefs as grounds for permanent estrangement. The offense? Refusing to enthusiastically endorse progressive positions on sexuality or declining to vote Democrat.
“Today, political disputes are not merely about means but about ends, dealing with questions that go directly to the heart of what it means to be human,” Mering writes. “Increasingly, younger people project this concept of political alignment as the determinant of moral stature onto an older generation that generally doesn’t view disagreements in the same way.”
The book arrives at a moment when family breakdown has become endemic in American life. Divorce carries no social stigma. Abortion ends millions of lives before birth. Parents outsource childrearing to daycares, screens, and government schools. Elderly parents are warehoused in facilities and rarely visited. The “no contact” movement, Mering suggests, is simply the latest chapter in this broader abandonment of sacred obligations.
One of the book’s most pointed sections addresses how therapeutic language has been weaponized against families. “Therapy-speak has come to pervade everyday conversation,” Mering observes. The result is that ordinary discomfort gets labeled “trauma” and traditional parenting becomes “abuse.”
“Discomfort is pathologized, challenging relationships are toxic, everyday struggles point to childhood trauma, and ideological dissent is framed as psychological violence or genocide,” she writes of the prevailing mindset.
This cheapening of real suffering isn’t just dishonest. It’s cruel to genuine abuse victims whose experiences are trivialized when every uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinner gets called “traumatic.”
Mering traces this phenomenon to the West’s abandonment of Christianity. When a culture loses its moral foundation, psychology rushes to fill the void. But without an objective standard outside itself, therapy becomes a power game rather than a path to healing. Words like “narcissist” and “toxic” become weapons wielded by the selfish against the decent.
For families watching loved ones drift toward estrangement over politics, the book offers both explanation and hope. The sexual revolution promised liberation. It delivered isolation. The path back runs through the very institutions progressives have spent decades dismantling: faith, family, and binding vows that mean something.
