Estranged Families Walk the Way of the Cross

“He was despised and rejected by men;
    a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
    he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”

                                                —Isaiah 53:3

Many people whose children or parents have decided to “go no contact” with them see themselves in these famous words of the Prophet Isaiah. Their own way of the cross may not include the physical torture of the Lord, but they bear His loneliness, rejection, and desolation.

For most Christians, today marks the celebration of Palm Sunday and the beginning of what is called Holy Week. On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem with gestures that would confirm the throngs of followers who saw Him as the Messianic king and shouted “Hosanna!” to Him. Over the next week, however, their expectations were turned upside down. His glorious triumph over sin and death was achieved by following a path of suffering and death.

To remember and meditate on those events is to know the unfathomable love of God. It is also to remember that life in Christ is imitation of and participation in His sufferings. On the brink of His death, St. John tells us, Jesus reminds the Disciples that to follow Him is to imitate Him: “Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’” And St. Luke recounts how the Lord warned that He would bring “division” that would separate parents and children.

That suffering and division is felt more and more today. American society has a great deal of family division. A recent YouGov poll showed that 38 percent of Americans are separated from a family member. Sixteen percent are estranged from a child, and 10 percent are estranged from a parent. One study shows that 11 percent of women aged 65-75 with more than one adult child are estranged from at least one. Another study shows 26 percent of the population reporting estrangement from fathers for at least some period of time.

This trend of cutting off family members has been encouraged not only by online influencers but by many “progressive-minded” therapists. Conflict and estrangement in families are not new, therapist Joshua Coleman writes, but “conceptualizing the estrangement of a family member as an expression of personal growth as it is commonly done today is almost certainly new.”

Everyone understands that separation needs to happen in cases of abuse, but those encouraging it today often have a much broader understanding of what abuse is. Coleman writes that “my recent research – and my clinical work over the past four decades – has shown me that you can be a conscientious parent and your kid may still want nothing to do with you when they’re older.”

According to counselor James Scott, in the majority of cases involving estrangement from parents, “it is the adult children who initiate the separation. They often describe the move as a protective measure, a necessary step to find the ‘sense of belonging’ or internal peace that was missing within the original family unit.”

Therapist Rachel Haack says that what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt call “safetyism” is often at work in these break-ups: “Safety, once meaning freedom from physical danger, now includes freedom from emotional discomfort. To be ‘safe’ means to never feel hurt, anxious, or misunderstood.” Unfairly or not, as Coleman observes, this anxiety and discomfort is often cast on parents who were good and kind. The logic, he explains, is that “if parents are supposed to produce happy adults, then, fairly or not, adult children might hold parents responsible for their unhappiness.”

In many of these cases, it must be observed, the anxiety and lack of “safety” felt with family members must be identified with something. While some parents, children, and siblings get cut off because of ordinary difficulties in human relationships, many also get cut off because of differences on political, theological, or cultural questions.

Most of the time, when that is the case, it is self-conscious liberal or progressive individuals cutting off conservative family members whom they portray as having bigoted or intolerant views – often related to religion. A 2023 Cosmopolitan article on the phenomenon is representative in featuring a young woman repudiating and cutting off her Southern Baptist family.

Many of the stories are, of course, about politics. As a writer for New York Magazine explained last year, “It’s OK to Go No Contact With Your MAGA Relatives.” Earlier this month, BuzzFeed published a collection of stories they titled “People Are Getting Brutally, Brutally Honest About What It’s Like To Cut Off MAGA Family Members.”

Thus, the way of the cross is for many. Parents cut off from their children and grandchildren suffer especially. Not only is the rejection extremely painful, but the reality is the rejected family members, like Christ, often have the added sorrow of knowing that those rejecting them are hurting themselves.

Arthur Brooks cites the work of Karl Pillemer, whose 2020 book, Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them, looked at all the best data on the breakups and found that, “although breaking up with one’s family can provide short-term relief from the circumstances that provoked it, over time estrangement is correlated with chronic unhappiness, risk of elevated depression, and poorer physical health.”

Though it might seem, as Rachel Haack says, that “everyone’s cutting everyone off,” James Scott reports some good news. “Longitudinal studies show that these silences are rarely permanent,” he writes. “Approximately 81 percent of mother-child rifts and 69 percent of father-child estrangements eventually lead to some form of reconciliation later in life.”

Isaiah the Prophet described the Suffering Servant as “cut off,” meaning cut off from life entirely. Many of those walking the way of the cross in this way may feel the same. This week, those who do so should remember how Jesus himself was despised and rejected. Those who know others going through this should pray for them, especially. And everyone should take hope in the healing power of the Resurrection that follows Good Friday.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative.