2026-06-30 06:45:00
Once upon a time, Sara Herschander writes, going through life meant interacting with the world around you — turning a fiddly key in a lock, scratching out notes on paper, dialing a phone number on an actual keypad. But increasingly, all of those tasks — and many others — feel the same: You just tap at a screen. In this month’s Highlight cover story, Sara explains how we’re losing touch with our sense of, well, touch — plus why young children are suffering the worst effects of all that screen time, and whether a return to a more tactile world is imminent. Also in this issue: Good news about America’s birthday. How organ donation is complicating the line between dead and dying. The rise of extremely convincing AI thirst traps. And the great American quest for the great American novel.
By Bryan Walsh
By Shayla Love
By Pratik Pawar
Coming June 30
By Alex Abad-Santos
Coming June 30
By Marina Bolotnikova
Coming July 1
By Constance Grady
Coming July 1
By Sara Herschander
Coming July 2
2026-06-30 05:00:00
Historically, being ultra-wealthy meant that there was an obligation to share a chunk of it with the world. Gilded Age industrialists like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie made lasting cultural and philanthropic contributions, many of which still bear their names. But increasingly, our modern billionaires don’t seem inclined to follow suit.
To show just how little they’ve given, let’s look at the Giving Pledge. Over 15 years ago, some of America’s ultra-rich promised to give at least half of their wealth to charity throughout their lives or when they died. Even Elon Musk, briefly the first-ever trillionaire in history, signed it. That pledge is now on life support.
Bella DeVaan is the director of the Charity Reform Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies, where she co-authored a study looking at how the pledge is impossible to fulfill. To explain the study’s findings, DeVaan spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about why the pledge isn’t the road to a more equitable future and how philanthropy should be done instead.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Can you remind us what the Giving Pledge was and who signed it?
The Giving Pledge was a voluntary philanthropic commitment founded by Bill Gates, his then-wife Melinda French Gates, and Berkshire Hathaway chair Warren Buffett in 2010. Since then, north of 250 people in the world have signed onto this pledge. And it’s people with tons of money who feel like signing onto something like this is something that they could do, or at least want to be seen as pledging to do.
The Giving Pledge is now 16 years old. My team did a study at 15 — old enough for a driver’s permit. And we feel like there’s a significant body of evidence that the pledge is unfulfilled and unfulfillable. Of the 32 original signers who are still billionaires, they had collectively gotten 283 percent wealthier — or 166 percent adjusting for inflation — since they signed onto the pledge, and only one couple in the group fulfilled their pledge.
So the idea is to get poorer over time, and meanwhile, almost everyone, or if not everyone, has gotten significantly richer.
That’s exactly right. Mackenzie Scott, who is one of the most prolific and generous pledgers, has given away $26 billion. [But] she’s decreased her wealth by less than $6 billion since her separation from Jeff Bezos. So if that’s what the most generous philanthropist is struggling to keep up with, everybody else is faring far worse.
Is it because they don’t genuinely want to give their money away, or is it because they’re simply doing so well all the time and getting exponentially richer all the time that it is really hard to do?
If we want to give them some credit, yes, it is mathematically incredibly challenging to give away as much money as their skyrocketing wealth. But I definitely think these billionaires are not stepping up to the plate and giving as much as they should and even as much as they’ve committed to.
A great caveat of the Giving Pledge is that you get to fulfill it upon your death in your will. That could look like giving your children control of your charitable intermediaries. A big part of our study was finding out that 80 percent of all the gifts that these pledgers have given go into private foundations, often that they control.
That’s what it looks like when you can make a donation that seems like you’re parting ways with your wealth and delivering some kind of benefit to the public, but actually that money doesn’t reach public charities or public works or on-the-ground aid until it leaves the foundation, and there’s a significant lag time in there.
And what’s wrong with all the money going to their foundation that then goes and distributes money to, I don’t know, needy children, medical research firms, whatever it might be?
A weigh station lengthens the journey, right? We figured out that out of all of the living pledgers who are still billionaires, when they signed on, their median foundation payout rate was 9.2 percent a year.
If you’re getting so much wealthier and your foundation is only giving away a single-digit percentage of your foundation’s wealth every year, and you’ve gotten a tax incentive and reduction up front for your gift — which the general public is subsidizing up to 73 cents per dollar — that’s a very significant investment. You’re asking the public to shoulder it and that money is trickling out back to the public. It’s not keeping pace.
Is there any good news here, Bella? Have we accomplished anything? Have we eradicated any diseases? Have we cured any diseases?
It depends who you ask, but I would say no. I think that the great indignity of philanthropy and concentrated wealth at this scale is that multiple things can be true at once.
It can be true that billionaires overexert their power, that they are able to influence the state of science, innovation, the deliverance of public aid, the shape of housing policy, and that can make significant inroads and deliver benefits to people. There’s no arguing with that. But at the same time, they can be hoarding wealth, not doing enough, resting on their laurels, banking on this idea that the reputational benefit of signing the pledge is enough.
That those two things can be true at the same time, while regular people are struggling to make ends meet, means that the system is in need of a dramatic overhaul. And if the billionaires who promised to give half their money away are doing this poorly at it, that tells us everything that we need to know.
Tell us about an overhaul. If you designed the Giving Pledge or a system that’s altogether different, what would it look like?
If it were up to me, the number one most meaningful intervention is to figure out how to tax wealth, figure out how to restructure our economy so that people can’t accumulate these fortunes in the first place, over which they can exercise such plutocratic control.
But knowing that we live in a society that has all these billionaires already and has all these foundations with piles of money that haven’t been deployed for the public benefit, I think we have to increase transparency so that donors can’t use donor-advised funds and other popular intermediary and foundations to conduct dark-money giving or play shell games to change the timing of tax benefits, so that philanthropists have to make the gift and then see their tax benefit instead of getting it upfront without having any obligation to move money.
I’m hearing tax the Rich, I’m hearing reform tax code, I’m hearing change public policy. But as you could admit, less likely to happen. And I just wonder, have all of those things become less en vogue 15 years down the road?
Elon Musk talks about empathy as a weakness. He made cuts to USAID programs that directly resulted in hundreds of thousands of people dying. And people still love him and want to invest in his companies and make him even richer! Do you think we’ve seen a cultural shift around giving around empathy itself?
Yes. In these political conditions, the Giving Pledge is what we’re stuck with. We’re stuck with waiting for a voluntary effort to reshape society instead of knowing that we’ll get structural reform that would be guaranteed to deliver it.
These are all very concerning trends. Philanthropy in America has always been an expectation of the wealthy people in the country. Reaching back to Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller, that is what is expected of a rich person in America. That value is no longer closely held at all.
Regular people are as generous as they can be. We see this in remittances. We see this in small donations to your local food bank, to your religious institution. Everyday people are as generous as they can be, and I think that our ultra-wealthy people need to take after them more.
2026-06-30 00:15:24
The premise of the Republican Party’s lawsuit in Watson v. Republican National Committee is that three 19th-century federal laws require thousands of lawfully cast ballots to be tossed in the trash — and somehow no one noticed this fact for the better part of two centuries.
In a nonpartisan judiciary, the case would have never reached the Supreme Court. It would have been unanimously rejected by lower courts and ignored by the justices. But, in the highly partisan judiciary that governs President Donald Trump’s America, the Republican Party convinced four justices to sign onto their attempt to trash numerous ballots.
Watson, in other words, is less a victory for democracy and the rule of law than it is a warning of what could come if Trump gets to replace even one more member of the Supreme Court. No reasonable judge could agree with Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent, but four of the Court’s nine justices did so, regardless.
The case involves three federal laws that set the date for presidential, US House, and US Senate elections. While these statutes were enacted at different times and use different wording, they all do more or less the same thing. The statute governing House races, for example, which was enacted in 1845, provides “the Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year, is established as the day for the election.”
The Republican Party’s argument in Watson (which was also made by the Libertarian Party of Mississippi) is that this law prohibits states from counting absentee ballots that are mailed prior to federally determined Election Day, but that arrive sometime after that date. Mississippi, the defendant in the case, is one of 30 states that allows at least some mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day to be counted. In Mississippi, voters enjoy a five-day grace period, so long as the ballot is mailed prior to the deadline.
It should go without saying that, when Congress set the Election Day in 1845, it did not intend for literally everything involving an election to occur on that day. Prior to an election, states must determine which candidates shall appear on the ballot, print those ballots, distribute them to polling places and individual voters, register voters, and perform numerous other tasks. Many states also allow for early voting.
Similarly, after Election Day, states must finish counting the ballots, verify that its initial count was accurate, certify the results of the election, and perform other various tasks. The premise of the Republican Party’s lawsuit is that the task of gathering the ballots that have already been cast is somehow special, and it must happen on Election Day.
But there’s no legal support for this position. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett writes for herself, her three Democratic colleagues, and Chief Justice John Roberts, when federal law set the date for the “election,” it “set the day when the electorate must make its choice.” Voters must actually cast their ballots by the deadline, but the same deadline does not apply to the ministerial task of gathering all those ballots into a state office where they will be counted.
Moreover, as Barrett points out, other federal laws simply assume that states get to decide what happens to late arriving ballots. The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, for example, provides that overseas military voters ballots must be delivered to state election officials “not later than the date by which an absentee ballot must be received in order to be counted in the election,” and that the ballot will not count if it arrives after “the deadline for receipt of [that] ballot under State law.”
The fact that Watson v. Republican National Committee was taken so seriously by the federal judiciary, and ultimately the Supreme Court, is a stain on that institution.
That’s powerful evidence that Congress thought that states, and not a 19th-century federal law, decide the deadline when absentee ballots must arrive.
The most powerful evidence, however, is the fact that, for more than a century, states have counted absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day, and no one has ever thought this was legally problematic. During the Civil War, Barrett writes, Nevada and Rhode Island tasked military officers “with collecting soldiers’ ballots on election day and then sending the ballots to state election officials for counting— which meant that ballots were not received into official custody until after election day.”
Similarly, during the 20th century, numerous states started allowing voters to mail their ballots, and states that permitted late-arriving ballots to be counted were allowed to count them. In the 1940s, for example, seven states enacted new laws allowing some late-arriving ballots to be counted, but “Plaintiffs offer no evidence that any of these laws was ever even challenged under the election-day statutes.”
And it’s not like the federal laws setting Election Day are particularly obscure. Every state complies with these laws, as every single state holds their election on the same day — with some variations to the rules governing early voting, absentee ballots, and similar matters. For more than a century, states across the country have read the federal law, concluded that it permits late-arriving ballots to be counted, and enacted laws that said as much.
But, in Watson, four Republican justices claim that they know better than every lawyer and state lawmaker who read the federal law next to state laws like Mississippi’s and concluded that the state law is permitted.
Much of Alito’s dissent echoes familiar Republican Party arguments that mail-in voting is a bad idea. He spends several pages of his opinion arguing, for example, that if late-arriving ballots are counted, that could lead to a candidate who was down in early returns coming back to win an election. And that would somehow cause people to think that voter fraud was responsible for this flip.
Of course, if the Republican Party thinks this is a good reason to eliminate laws like Mississippi’s, it can always lobby Congress or the Mississippi legislature to do so. But the fact that Alito and his Republican Party think that Mississippi’s law is a bad idea is irrelevant to the question of whether it is preempted by current federal law.
To the extent that Alito tries to make a legal argument for his position, he primarily argues that all ballots must be gathered by the state on Election Day because “this is what the election-day statutes required when all voting occurred in person.”
Alito is correct that, prior to the Civil War, elections were typically held on a single day and people who were not present in their home state for that election were out of luck. Absentee balloting did not become widespread until the war, because it was necessary for Union soldiers in the field to cast their ballots.
But the fact that America did not have absentee ballots in 1845 does not mean that, when Congress set the date for elections in that year, it intended to lock in place 180-year-old election practices. As Barrett writes, Alito’s argument boils down to a claim that “because we are governed by 19th-century election-day laws, we are also governed by 19th-century voting practices.” That theory would abolish a host of modern-day practices that did not exist in 1845, including early voting.
The fact that Watson was taken so seriously by the federal judiciary, and ultimately the Supreme Court, is a stain on that institution. The actual premise of this lawsuit is that, because the Republican Party controls six seats on the Supreme Court, it could simply ask the justices to implement their preferred rules for federal elections, and the Court would do so regardless of whether there is any legal support for the GOP’s position.
In the end, however, only four justices concluded that the Republican Party gets anything it wants, regardless of what the law says.
2026-06-29 23:15:00
After two successive women lost the race for president — and with the GOP increasingly claiming the testosterone-fueled “manosphere” — a lot of Democratic insiders are starting to worry the party is a bit too low-T. Even its successful new faces, like Jon Ossoff and James Talarico, might still be too soft. (This might explain why a recent Instagram post from @Democrats showed Talarico gnawing on meat.)
They’re racked with anxiety: Where are the masculine Democrats? They believe American voters need a manly man, someone who isn’t “smoothgroined,” who can drink beer and watch video games and eat a hamburger and have sex without a condom, who “has the solid physicality of a man who makes his living outdoors,” who will bring young men back into the Democratic fold. They want a bro.
But wait: Actually, the newest icon of Democratic power fits that bill almost exactly. He’s a Carhartt-wearing, marathon-running, fully bearded dude who loves to chow down. He’s obsessed with the Knicks and recently made a basketball-themed campaign ad. When he was campaigning last year, he toured the edgy “manosphere” podcast world and easily traded riffs about bench pressing and shitposting. Analysts describe his politics using testosterone-forward metaphors like “muscled,” “power broker,” and “kingmaker.”
This is, of course, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — who’s able to go one-on-one with President Donald Trump, wears the hell out of a suit, and channels the populist energy of Bernie-bro politics more effectively than anyone else under 80. “His vision, whether you like it or not, is incredibly bold and in your face,” which is a traditionally masculine attribute, says Pawan Dhingra, a sociologist at Amherst College.
“Zohran’s a good hang,” streaming star and certified bro Hasan Piker said of Mamdani in a 2025 interview with the New York Times. “He’s just a dude, and it’s good to be a dude sometimes.”
So, why isn’t Mamdani the Democrats’ new icon of masculinity?
Instead, the pro-masculinity discussion has mostly held up Graham Platner, the controversial Democratic nominee for Maine’s Senate seat, as the butch future of the party. Ken Klippenstein approvingly described Platner as “tatted up, ex-Marine riff-raff” in contrast to the “asexual, Harvard-educated McKinsey consultant” he feels represents the classic Democratic machine candidate. Sebastian Junger wrote that Platner “doesn’t scan ‘Democrat’” (a good thing, in Junger’s estimation) because he “might be the only Democratic candidate or congressman I wouldn’t want to mess with.” James Carville, who has been vocal in his belief that Democrats’ image is too feminine and naggy, mused that while Platner might be “fucked up” from his time at war, perhaps “we need a combat veteran right on that Senate floor who is fucked up.”
But while Platner hasn’t yet proved he can win in a general election, Mamdani has. What’s more, he’s achieved that misty goal Democrats are always chasing: He’s proved he’s able to connect with men and with Trump voters while also energizing the Democratic base. In the 2025 New York City mayoral election, registration surged, general election turnout hit a 50-year high, and exit polls showed that he picked up a solid half of the male vote — more than any other candidate — as well as 9 percent of 2024 Trump voters. Earlier this week, Mamdani’s get-out-the-vote effort helped push three Democratic Socialists of America allies through their primaries, in a clear demonstration of his political might.
Mamdani and Platner are both highly masculine figures. They both have populist platforms. And they’ve both run as party outsiders (and one of them has won a general election). So why does only one of them keep showing up in think pieces about why Democrats need to embrace and appeal to men?
The real issue, Dhingra says, is that when people talk about getting men to vote Democrat, “there’s a male vote and there’s a masculine vote.” Those are two different things.
The male vote is what we can confidently say Mamdani won in 2025. The masculine vote is what pundits are talking about when they say Democrats need to win over men, and that is a lot more vibes-based.
“We have a notion of masculinity that’s kind of white, middle-working-class, muscular, patriarchal to some degree,” Dhingra says. When they’re talking about the masculine vote, political commentators and strategists look for evidence of that specifically white masculinity, even if they don’t say that outright.
Platner, with his military background, his embrace of guns, and his career in manual labor, fits that white working-class image, despite having a wealthy family. Cosmopolitan Mamdani, who attended a private liberal arts college and was a campus activist and a comedy rapper in his youth, does not. Even his love of sports is a little off, Dhringa says. Mamdani is a soccer guy, and in the United States, soccer is coded as suspiciously European. “The fact that it’s sports but it’s not like that is a metaphor,” Dhringa says. “He’s getting the male vote, but he’s not masculine.”
Dhringa, the author of the forthcoming book Success Won’t Save Us: How Asian Americans Can Fight White Supremacy, sees this issue as part of a bigger pattern. “We’ve consistently reduced masculinity to white maleness and femininity to white femaleness,” he says. Outside of politics, conversations about the crisis of masculinity tend to focus on the problems affecting white guys, like high rates of suicide. “We’re only talking about the plight of white men,” Dhingra says. “Does anyone even know about the friendship experiences of Black men? No. We know that white men suffer from this.”
Dhringra points to mass incarceration, which disproportionately affects Black men and is overwhelmingly talked about as a race problem. “It was not a crisis of manhood,” he says of these discussions. “But now that more white men are ending up in jail or showing these other negative social indicators, now we have a crisis of manhood.”
It’s certainly possible that at least part of this disconnect is about Mamdani and Platner’s policies. To some of the commentators who are deeply concerned about Democratic masculinity, especially Carville, support for Israel is a requirement. But Mamdani has repeatedly reiterated his belief in Israel’s right to exist, and Platner, who opposes sending US aid to Israel (and wore a Nazi tattoo for years), is not exactly Israel’s staunchest ally. And Carville’s concerns are not universal: Klippenstein, another Platner fan, has been enthusiastic about Mamdani’s “magic” — just not necessarily about his dudeliness.
And while Mamdani’s criticism of Israel might trouble some Democrats, it speaks to the younger generation of voters Democrats are theoretically trying to woo. In contrast, Platner’s campaign has been plagued by one scandal after another, including allegations of “unsettling” behavior with ex-girlfriends. His partisans argue that such a grimy past adds to his real dude cred — but it remains a weak spot for a party that still relies on women to power its voting bloc, regardless of how much effort it’s putting into courting men.
Calling all political weaknesses (generously) even, it’s more likely that race is playing a role in the Mamdani paradox. But Dhringa says Mamdani’s mysterious absence from the masculinity conversation has more to do with his general not-whiteness than with his specific Indian heritage and Ugandan upbringing. Dhringa says that 20 years ago, South Asian American men were overwhelmingly stereotyped as nerdy and effeminate, but their image now is more complicated. He cites a plethora of powerful South Asian American CEOs like Google and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, as well as political figures like Mamdani for the Democrats and Kash Patel for Republicans.
“Twenty years ago I had a pretty simple answer I would give” on how Americans view South Asian men, he says. “Now I don’t.”
Vox reached out to Carville and Klippenstein for comment and did not hear back from them. Junger declined to comment.
Ultimately, the manliness conversation has other downsides: It also flattens masculinity into one violent, unintellectual stereotype. “Masculinity has different dimensions to it, and one person never embodies all the dimensions,” Dhringa says. Manly men don’t have to be as solitary and withholding as John Wayne in an old Western. They can be leaders who use their masculine charisma to connect with and protect other people.
That’s the kind of manliness Mamdani represents. Democrats have the opportunity to embrace him as an avatar of the party, to try to leverage his confidence and swagger to boost other candidates, to learn from the strategies he’s employed to connect with the base they’re looking to cultivate. They have the opportunity to look for and cultivate talent in other Mamdanis: men who might not fit the white working-class profile, but who do know how to hang with the dudes when they have to.
2026-06-29 19:00:00
The days are already getting shorter. The start of the school year is inching closer. You haven’t even had time to make a bucket list yet, let alone check things off. Though the summer has just officially begun, you may be prematurely mourning its departure.
For people who live in a climate where warm weather only makes itself known a few months a year, summer means late sunsets, leisure, and outdoor recreation. Maybe even a vacation. Knowing how few blissful moments you actually have may inspire an ironic anticipatory anxiety: suddenly, you’re dreading winter while sitting at the beach.
If summer is particularly meaningful to you or you have a tendency to downplay positive moments in order to stave off future disappointment, you might be more inclined to mourn summer’s decline. But you can savor the season — and beyond — by keeping your calendar populated with events.
All of the hallmarks we’ve come to associate with summer — no school, a slowdown at work, family trips — are relatively modern. Prior to the 19th century, kids attended school during most of the summer and only the wealthy took vacations during the warmer months. While labor unions fought for shorter work hours during the early 1900s, they largely ignored the issue of paid vacation time, Cindy S. Aron writes in Working At Play: A History of Vacations in the United States. However, by 1930, many industrial workers were offered paid vacations by their employers. In the years following World War II, even more Americans had vacation time and were hungry for summer travel. Now hordes of Americans flock to beaches, lakes, national parks, and public pools, send kids to camp, and road-trip across the country from June through August. Workers, unofficially and officially, slack off on Fridays, or even the season on the whole.
Given all of summer’s relative pluses (though there are some minuses, namely the heat and humidity, made worse by climate change), the thought of the inevitable conclusion can incite preemptive sorrow. Research has found that when people come to the end of a meaningful period of life — college, a job, your lease at your favorite apartment, and, yes, even summer — they experience feelings of both happiness and sadness. The melancholy stems from the fact that a chapter is closing, researchers found. Because summer can be a meaningful time for a lot of people, you might see its impending termination as a reminder of the fleetingness of those uniquely summery events. “In the context of an ending, it makes us sad because we’re looking back at those good times and we’re saying those good times are gone,” Jeff Larsen, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, tells Vox.
The problem is that mourning the end of abundant sunshine well before Labor Day rolls around may hamper your ability to savor it in the first place. Downplaying positive moments by thinking they won’t last or that we’re undeserving of them, known as dampening, has been shown to reduce happiness and could distract you from making the most of summer while it’s here. Dampening is “a very human tendency,” Filip Raes, a professor of clinical psychology at KU Leuven in Belgium, tells Vox. “We don’t do this because we don’t want to enjoy positive experiences; more often we do it because we’re trying to protect ourselves.”
People tend to believe dampening will soften the blow of disappointment; if we enjoy something too much, we’ll feel even worse when it’s over, the thinking goes. “It’s a protective strategy in many cases, but it backfires,” Raes says. “Rather than shielding us from future disappointment, it reduces the enjoyment in the moment. We’re sacrificing today’s happiness just to feel less bad in the end.”
Rather than focus on what’s on the horizon, Larsen and Raes say you should make an effort to savor the season. “Maybe the people who are thinking about summer and its ending throughout the summer, they’re going to do a better job of sucking the marrow out of it,” Larsen says. Part of that is recognizing summer is indeed fleeting, trying not to feel guilty if you dampen during the warmer months, and actually enjoying the season by making meaningful plans: day trips to the lake, weekly walks at dusk with a friend, catching fireflies with all the neighborhood kids.
Research has shown that anticipating positive events — in other words, having things to look forward to — bolsters positive mood and minimizes stress. On the other hand, “savoring summer” doesn’t necessarily mean saying yes to every invitation and packing your downtime. In fact, overscheduling can make leisure feel like work, research suggests. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of possibilities, but try to make just one solid plan per weekend — say, going to the public pool on a Saturday — and leave one day free for spontaneous afternoon ice cream hangs. You can also mimic summer travel at home by replicating travel experiences: booking tours, exploring new neighborhoods, and asking for recommendations from locals. (You can also use these tactics in the fall and winter; anticipation isn’t reserved for summer.)
When fall rolls around, and you look back on these memories with fondness, you can say you savored summer, even if you’re bummed you have to pack the shorts and flip-flops away.
“If you find yourself feeling sad about time being limited, it tells you something,” Larsen says. “It tells you that this time that you’re in the middle of, or maybe you’re in the end of, you’ve enjoyed it, and it tells you that it’s meaningful to you.”
2026-06-29 18:30:00
Hi readers! I’m Shayla Love, a science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal while she’s out on parental leave. I’ll be diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send me any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.
My mother is religious, and I can tell that it brings her peace of mind to think I share some of her religious views. For this reason, I currently attend church with her on Sundays. However, I hesitate to tell her directly that I do not necessarily share her beliefs, as this would likely upset her and would not substantially improve my own quality of life.
At the same time, attending church while knowing I do not fully believe feels somewhat disingenuous. I am unsure whether continuing this practice is the more ethical choice or whether honesty, despite its potential emotional cost, would be the better path. On the other hand, would it not be selfish to prioritize my own sense of integrity over my mother’s peace of mind, especially when the “cost” to me is relatively small: attending church once a week in order to preserve this tacit understanding?
Dear Pew-Warmer,
Your question raises two interesting issues: whether to tell your mom that you don’t share her religious beliefs and whether to still attend church with her, even if you don’t share the faith. They might seem to be part of the same quandary, but teasing them apart a little more, we’ll see that your church attendance doesn’t necessarily require as much dishonesty as you may think.
First, no matter what you decide, it could be helpful for you to know that you’re far from alone in managing different beliefs within a family. The amount of mixed-faith families has been steadily increasing, often because — like you — children grow up to have different beliefs from their parents. And this includes people who decide to no longer follow any prescribed religion at all. A Pew Research Center survey done in 2007, for example, found that 44 percent of Americans had changed or left the religion they were raised in. Relationships between people of different religious leanings are common now, too. A different Pew survey from 2015 found that 39 percent of couples married after 2010 identified as mixed-faith (again, including people who identify as non-religious).
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How do all of these people deal with being married or related and believing such different big things? It’s not easy. In a more recent Pew survey from 2023, more than a third of parents said it was extremely or very important that their children have the same religious views as them, which is in line with your sense that your mom would like to share her faith with you. And this is where much of your tension seems to lie. But, perhaps, I can bring you some solace by sharing that the overall data on all of this is more nuanced. I reviewed some qualitative studies — which include interviews — on religion in families to hear from people on both sides of precisely what you’re grappling with.
In general, parents do seem to wish for their kids to have the same faith as them. As a highly religious Christian father said in one study: “How to pass our belief to our next generation is a burden to me. … We want them and their next generations to have God’s blessings.” And that makes sense, especially for a parent who belongs to a faith tradition that comes with everlasting consequences for people depending on their beliefs and behaviors.
But, of course, religion is more than a narrow set of rules and consequences. Each contains an elaborate offering of traditions, beliefs, and values. Many very religious parents responding to the same survey said they understood it was up to their children to choose whether to continue in the tradition or not and that what truly important to them was knowing that their children shared the same values. Religion served as a proxy for that. That same 2023 Pew survey referred to earlier found that the majority of religious parents thought it was more of a priority to pass on ethics and values, as well as traits like ambition and being hardworking, than religious belief alone.
There can even be upsides for relationships when some core beliefs differ, as one 2022 study suggested. Interfaith families — by having to accommodate multiple beliefs — have the opportunity to actually become stronger. The authors concluded that such “families are not more turbulent or problematic than other family relationships” but actually had many additional strengths, like improved communication skills.
I won’t try to predict your mom’s response based on others’ replies in a study. Nevertheless, I think these findings suggest, at the very least, that it’s not automatic that parents cannot handle it when their children don’t follow their own faith. From the experience of these families, I suggest, if you decide to be more honest with your mom about this, you should emphasize the moral qualities you have in common — and that you plan to maintain. It could be helpful to stress that your decision is a genuine one; taking any other position wouldn’t be true to what you really feel.
No matter the outcome of this conversation, though, your quandary about whether you should go to church at all won’t be solved. You say that it might feel disingenuous or pose a problem for your integrity to attend church services if you don’t believe. That assumes that your presence at the church is endorsing a belief in God, or in the theology of that religion, or that the latter are required for the former.
I wasn’t raised with religion, and, instead, grew up around several atheists who worked as scientists. A few had a pretty disparaging view of the belief in God, which they saw as empirically unsound. Yet, as I got older, I began to notice some streaks of religiosity in their positions, like a dedication to the idea that science is the only tool with which to understand the world, a view that’s sometimes called “scientism.” Science is an excellent way to figure out how the world works, but there are other aspects of life — like art, music, spirituality — where it can fall short. I bring this up to say that religious thinking can rear its head even in the non-religious. And within a religious framework, you may discover non-religious elements too. A sociologist from the late 19th and early 20th century, Emile Durkheim, would push back on the idea that going to church means you believe in God, which helps me understand what I saw in my family.
Durkheim wanted to understand how religion functioned in society. He dismissed the idea that religion, at its core, was about supernatural events and God (or gods). In his 1912 book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he examined Australian Indigenous religions to come up with theories about what all religions had in common. He argued that religion emerges when a group of people get together and agree upon what is sacred and what is profane, and then they act in ways that support those categories.
I’ll add that Durkheim’s views on religion have been questioned over the years. For starters, he vastly oversimplified the Indigenous religions he focused on. Yet, I think one of his central ideas — that religion is primarily an expression of agreement within social groups — is useful in making the act of your going to church less about your individual endorsement and more about participating in a group with shared values.
Durkheim didn’t think that the concepts of “sacred” and “profane” applied only to those within organized religions; it was a more general principle in how societies were organized. Secular groups like sports fans and political parties also gathered together to perform rituals about their shared definitions of what is sacred. Following Durkheim, you could see your choice as less a theological one and more a social one. There could be plenty of values at your mom’s church that mean something to you, like community, taking care of others, and acting morally.
Durkheim’s theory does require you to be a participant, however, in upholding these values. If that doesn’t apply to you, there is still a way to engage with those with differing beliefs with curiosity, like the psychologist William James.
His book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, was based on a series of lectures he did at the University of Edinburgh. He was assigned to do 20 talks, and he thought he would dedicate the first 10 to describing “man’s religious appetites” and the rest on various philosophical interpretations. Instead, he became so engrossed with recounting people’s religious experiences that the subject took up all of his lectures.
James was not a very religious man himself, and so, his thirst for learning about religion is remarkable. In the introduction to The Selected Letters of William James, the novelist and literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick wrote how James’s tolerance for “nuts and cranks, his mediums and table-tappers, his faith healers and receivers of communications from the dead” sometimes confused his peers. How could a man of science be so interested in visions and conversions?
Like Durkheim, James wasn’t focused on whether religion was true. He had very little interest in theology itself; he fixated on the psychological — the feelings that came with being religious.
James thought that these feelings — which we all share — were the deeper source of religion. All organized religions came later; they were emotions transformed and organized. He recognized that there were true emotions at the heart of religious conventions, and that people turned to religion to solve human concerns: melancholy, uncertainty about the future, morality, the need for community, expressions of joy. Yet, he was an outsider. He didn’t require himself to be a convert in order to be curious.
James and Durkheim have different approaches, but they both offer clues as to how to turn toward shared social values and how to be curious about others’ emotional lives while not having to commit (or pretend to commit) yourself to beliefs that you don’t have.
You say that the cost of going to church once a week would be relatively small for you, and, so, I’ll assume that your concerns don’t include participating in a religion that is openly hostile to you or your identity. It would be difficult to participate in shared sacred-making with a group of people that places you in the “profane” category. And being curious about others is a highly generous act that, if not reciprocated, feels dismissive. I hope that by opening yourself up to your mom’s emotional life that underpins her faith, she can do the same in return, even if your own interior landscape isn’t transmuting into religious belief. And it may well be that a genuine connection is what she wants — not a false one.
A final thought related to Durkheim: He came up with a lovely concept called “collective effervescence”: when many people have the same big feelings together, and the emotions crash together into one big collective firework of expression. To see an easy example of this, watch videos of what happens at events like World Cup matches as teams and fans celebrate big wins. This experience comes about by shared feelings of any kind. If it still feels discomfiting to go to church with your mother, perhaps you can find another way to share ecstatic emotions together and come up with a new definition of the sacred.
This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.