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Yesterday, The New York Times reported that people around Donald Trump are trying to figure out how “to quickly install loyalists in major positions without subjecting them to the risk of long-running and intrusive F.B.I. background checks.” Trump’s people, unsurprisingly, are worried about whether they’d pass a background check: As Atlantic contributor Peter Wehner wrote in September, the MAGA-dominated GOP “is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks”—who tend to have a hard time getting security clearances. The first Trump administration was rife with people (including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner) who were walking national-security risks, none worse than Trump himself. A second term, in which Trump would be free of adult supervision, would be even worse.

By the way, elected government leaders (even if they are convicted felons) do not go through background checks or have actual security clearances. Their access to classified information is granted by virtue of the trust placed in them by the voters; the president, as the chief executive, has access at will to information produced by the military, the intelligence community, and other executive-branch organizations.

For many other federal workers, however, security clearances are a necessary component of government service. Over the course of some 35 years, I held relatively ordinary secret and top-secret clearances while in various jobs, including my work for a defense contractor, my time as an adviser to a U.S. senator, and then in my position as a professor at a war college.

All of these, even at the lowest levels, involve allowing the government to do some uncomfortable peeping into your life—your finances, your family, even your romantic attachments. Clearances are meant to mitigate the risk that you will compromise important information, so the goal is to ensure that you aren’t emotionally unstable, or exploitable through blackmail, or vulnerable to offers of money. (Want to get a really thorough investigation? See if you can get cleared for CNDWI, or “Critical nuclear weapons design information.”)

You screw around with this process at your own professional and legal peril. Don’t want to admit that you cheated on your wife? Too bad. After all, if you’ll lie to her and then lie to the government about lying to her, what else will you lie about? Are you a bit too loose at the poker table, or are you a casual drug user but don’t think either is a big deal? That’s not for you to decide: Better fess up anyway. (And of course, you have to promise not to do it anymore.)

Once you have a clearance, you’ll be subjected to refresher courses on how to keep it, and you’ll have to submit to regular reinvestigations. You must also sit through “insider threat” training, during which you are taught how to recognize who among your co-workers might be a security risk—and how to report them. Red flags include not only signs of money issues, emotional problems, or substance abuse but also extreme political views or foreign loyalties.

Which brings me to Elon Musk, who runs SpaceX, America’s private space contractor and an organization presumably full of people with clearances. (I emailed SpaceX to ask how many of its workers have clearances. I have not gotten an answer.) Trump is surrounded by people who shouldn’t be given a clearance to open a checking account, much less set foot in a highly classified environment. But Musk has held a clearance for years, despite ringing the insider-threat bells louder than a percussion maestro hammering a giant glockenspiel.

Leave aside Musk smoking marijuana on Joe Rogan’s show back in 2018, a stunt done with such casual smugness that it would have cost almost anyone else their clearance. (The feds, including the U.S. military, don’t care about state laws about pot; they still demand that clearance holders treat weed as a prohibited substance.) But sharing a joint with bro-king Rogan is nothing. Six years later, The Wall Street Journal reported much more concerning drug use:

The world’s wealthiest person has used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, often at private parties around the world, where attendees sign nondisclosure agreements or give up their phones to enter, according to people who have witnessed his drug use and others with knowledge of it.

An attorney for Musk denied the report, but even the rumor of this kind of drug use would be a five-alarm fire for most holders of a high clearance. But fine, even if the report is true, maybe all it means is that Musk is just a patriotic, if somewhat reckless, pharmaceutical cowboy. It’s not like he’s canoodling with the Russians or anything, is it?

Bad news. Musk (according to another bombshell story from The Wall Street Journal) has reportedly been in touch multiple times with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The discussions, confirmed by several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials, touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions. At one point, Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, said two people briefed on the request.

Now, it’s not inherently a problem to have friends in Russia—I had some even when I was a government employee—but if you’re the guy at the desk next to me with access to highly classified technical information, and you’re chewing the fat now and then with the president of Russia, I’m pretty certain I’m required to at least raise an alert about a possible insider threat.

So why hasn’t that kind of report happened? Apparently, it has: Last week, the NASA administrator Bill Nelson said that Musk’s alleged contacts with Russia “should be investigated.” But the United States government seems to think that Musk is too big to fail and too important to fire. As an opinion piece in Government Executive put it this past winter:

In the case of Musk, it is clear the government has decided the benefits of his maintaining eligibility are worth the risks. It’s an easier case to make when you’re creating groundbreaking technology and helping get humans to Mars. It may be a harder case for you to make if your name is Joe and your job is to get a truck to the naval yard … That may seem like a double standard, but that’s if you forget that there is no universal standard.

If Trump is reelected, Musk likely won’t have anything to worry about. But at what point does Musk’s erratic behavior—including allegations of drug use, accusations of some two years of regular discussions with the leader of Russia, and his obvious, intense devotion to one party and its candidate—become too much of a risk for any other U.S. administration to tolerate?

It’s bad enough that Musk could be careless with classified data or expose himself to blackmail; it’s even more unsettling to imagine him undermining American security because of poor judgment, political grudges, and unwise foreign associations. Remember, this is a man who had to pay a $20 million fine for blabbing about taking Tesla private and had to agree to have some of his social-media posts overseen by a Tesla lawyer—and that’s not even close to classified information.

As a former clearance holder, I also worry that indulging Musk (and allowing future Trump appointees to bypass the clearance process) would be a toxic signal to the conscientious public servants who have protected America’s secrets. They have allowed the government to intrude deeply into their personal lives; they have worked to keep their finances tidy; they have avoided the use of prohibited substances and the abuse of legal ones.

If only they were more important; they could get away with almost anything.

Related:

What Elon Musk really wants Elon Musk has reached a new low.

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This is Trump’s message. The truth about polling Why major newspapers won’t endorse Kamala Harris Anne Applebaum: Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal.

Today’s News

Two ballot boxes were set on fire in Oregon and Washington. Hundreds of ballots were burned in Washington, and the police said that they believe the fires were connected. Philadelphia’s district attorney sued Elon Musk and his America PAC for “running an illegal lottery” scheme by promising to pay $1 million a day to registered voters who signed America PAC’s petition defending the First and Second Amendments. The Pentagon announced that if North Korea joins the war in Ukraine, the U.S. will not set any new limits on Ukraine’s use of American-supplied weapons. In an updated estimate, the Pentagon said that roughly 10,000 North Korean troops have entered Russia.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: We’ve strayed from the spirit of Halloween, Stephanie Bai writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Pamela Littky / Disney / Hulu.

MomTok Is the Apotheosis of 21st-Century Womanhood

By Sophie Gilbert

If you’re interested in modern beauty standards, the social value of femininity, and the fetishization of mothers in American culture, Hulu’s recent reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a rich, chaotic product. I watched the entire series in a couple of days, gasping and Googling, shriveling inwardly every time I caught a glimpse of my haggard self in the mirror compared with these lustrous, bronzed, cosmetically enhanced women. The stars of the show are young wives and mothers in Utah who have become notable in a corner of the internet called MomTok; their online side hustles include performing 20-second group dances and lip-synching to clips from old movies, the financial success of which has helped them eclipse their husbands as earners. As an encapsulation of 21st-century womanhood, it’s almost too on the nose: a discordant jumble of feminist ideals, branded domesticity, and lip filler.

Read the full article.

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One of the more puzzling, albeit obscure, subplots in the final weeks of this campaign season has been Donald Trump’s thunderingly incompetent effort to court Mormon voters.

Earlier this month, the former president’s campaign launched Latter-day Saints for Trump, one of several “coalition” groups designed to coordinate outreach to specific subsections of the electorate. (See also: Catholics for Trump, Jewish Voices for Trump, and Latino Americans for Trump.) The campaign’s special attention to the LDS vote makes sense. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, once the most reliably Republican religious group in the country, have been considerably less loyal to the party in the Trump era. And enough of them live in the closely divided battleground states of Arizona and Nevada to make a difference.

But almost immediately, Latter-day Saints for Trump devolved into a Veep-like comedy of errors. The official website went live on October 7 with a photo of Russell M. Nelson, the president of the Church and a man considered by its members to be a prophet of God. When a reporter for the Church-owned Deseret News asked if the campaign had gotten permission to feature the image, given the Church’s neutrality in partisan politics, the campaign quickly scrubbed the photo from its homepage.

A few days later, users on X discovered a page on the Trump-campaign website selling Mormon-branded merch—including Latter-day Saints for Trump coffee mugs ($25) and koozies (two for $15). When people pointed out that Mormons somewhat famously don’t drink coffee or alcohol, the campaign hastily rebranded the merch, and a social-media pile-on ensued. (“Next: Jews for Trump pork chops.”)

[From the January/February 2021 issue: The most American religion]

Meanwhile, Mormon-targeted campaign events have been scheduled with an odd indifference to Latter-day Saint religious practice. A canvassing event in Nevada, for example, was held the same weekend as General Conference, a semiannual series of Church broadcasts in which senior leaders deliver sermons and spiritual counsel. (The timing was a “challenge,” admitted the Utah GOP chair, who helped organize the event.) And when Trump held a rally in Prescott, Arizona, with an array of MAGA-Mormon luminaries—including Senator Mike Lee of Utah and the right-wing media personality Glenn Beck—it took place on a Sunday, which Latter-day Saints traditionally set apart for worship, service, and rest, not political events. (Perhaps to address this dissonance, the post-rally Latter-day Saints for Trump Zoom call was advertised as a “virtual fireside,” a reference to evening religious meetings held by Mormons.)

The latest hitch in Trump’s Mormon outreach came yesterday, when the Deseret News reported that Doug Quezada, a founding co-chair of Latter-day Saints for Trump, is being sued for fraud over an alleged scheme involving a cannabis company. (Quezada told the paper the lawsuit was a “shakedown” and denied wrongdoing; in July, a judge denied a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.) Such allegations may be somewhat commonplace in the Republican nominee’s orbit, but the words cannabis company and fraud will not reassure Trump-skeptical Mormons.

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not respond to my request for an interview about the rollout of Latter-day Saints for Trump. But Rob Taber, the national director of Latter-day Saints for Harris-Walz, a grassroots group that works closely with the Democratic campaign, was happy to talk. Taber told me he’s been surprised by the “sheer incompetence” of Trump’s efforts, and chalked up the missteps to a lack of practice. “They’re used to being able to count on the LDS vote to be the door-knockers and the foot soldiers of the Republican Party,” Taber told me. “Actually having to engage in persuasion is a little bit new to them.”  

For most Mormon voters, these political faux pas won’t be deal-breakers on their own. But the Trump campaign’s clumsiness is revealing. Taber has a point: There’s a reason professional Republicans are so bad at pandering to Latter-day Saints—before Trump came along, they never had to. In the modern political era, a typical GOP presidential nominee would receive the support of 70 to 80 percent of LDS voters in the United States. In 2016, Trump—with his “locker-room talk” and fondness for adultery, his rank xenophobia and religious illiteracy—barely managed to pull half of the national Mormon vote, and won deep-red Utah with a meager plurality. (Evan McMullin, a Mormon independent candidate, drew more than 20 percent of the vote.)

For most of 2016, Trump’s campaign seemed to take the Mormon vote for granted—even as Democrats saw an opening. That August, Hillary Clinton wrote an op-ed for the Deseret News touting her record of support for religious minorities around the world as secretary of state, and contrasting it with Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, which the Church had condemned. Intent on showing that she’d done her homework, Clinton even cited several historical LDS leaders by name. When Trump responded with his own Deseret News op-ed a few days later, it comprised a hodgepodge of generic GOP talking points, plus a tin-eared pledge to protect pastors who endorse political candidates from the pulpit (a practice that, though common in evangelicalism, is forbidden in LDS services).

Four years later, Trump and his allies seemed more attuned to their Mormon problem. The campaign repeatedly dispatched Donald Trump Jr. to Utah, and enlisted the help of Mormon surrogates. But they still struggled to connect. The most famous blunder came late in the 2020 campaign, when Lee gave a speech in Arizona ham-fistedly comparing Trump to a character from the Book of Mormon.

[Read: Why mormons don’t like Trump]

“To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni,” Lee said, pointing to Trump. “He seeks not power, but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news, but he seeks the well-being and the peace of the American people.”

Many Mormons, including some Trump supporters, found the comparison blasphemous. Captain Moroni is a beloved scriptural figure, the personification of bravery and selflessness, and seeing him invoked at a MAGA rally was jarring. Lee quickly walked back the comments, but the incident illustrated just how uncomfortable many Mormons are with their newfound status as a voter bloc to be fought over. To court them effectively in a presidential campaign requires both a strong grasp of LDS culture and a certain amount of delicacy.

Rob Taber told me that this is where Mormon Democrats like him have an edge. People with left-of-center views in the Church spend their lives learning how to lay out their view gently and persuasively, he said: “You just get used to explaining things.”

There’s little doubt that most LDS voters will support Trump this year. Conservative attitudes on abortion and other cultural issues guarantee a certain degree of partisan loyalty. But younger Latter-day Saints, who came of age in the Trump era, are significantly less conservative than previous generations. And in the past eight years, some anti-Trump Mormons have gotten more comfortable voting for Democrats instead of third-party protest candidates.

The margins could matter. In a survey conducted shortly before the 2020 election, Quin Monson, a pollster and political-science professor at Brigham Young University, found that Joe Biden doubled Clinton’s share of the Mormon vote in Arizona—a state with a large Mormon population that Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes. For the Harris campaign, holding on to those voters this year could be the difference between losing Arizona and cracking open a celebratory beverage on Election Night. I know a website where they might be able to get some koozies on sale.

If you’re interested in modern beauty standards, the social value of femininity, and the fetishization of mothers in American culture, Hulu’s recent reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a rich, chaotic product. I watched the entire series in a couple of days, gasping and Googling, shriveling inwardly every time I caught a glimpse of my haggard self in the mirror compared with these lustrous, bronzed, cosmetically enhanced women. The stars of the show are young wives and mothers in Utah who have become notable in a corner of the internet called MomTok; their online side hustles include performing 20-second group dances and lip-syncing to clips from old movies, the financial success of which has helped them eclipse their husbands as earners. As an encapsulation of 21st-century womanhood, it’s almost too on the nose: a discordant jumble of feminist ideals, branded domesticity, and lip filler.

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a logical end point for lifestyle-focused reality television, which has never quite been able to decide whether women should be gyrating on a pole or devoutly raising a dozen towheaded children. This show bravely asks: Why not both? “We’re all moms; we’re all Mormons. I guess you could say a lot of us in MomTok look similar … We’re just going off based [on] what’s trending,” Mayci (28, two kids) explains in the first episode. The camera cuts to the women filming a video. “Mayci, I need you to twerk your ass off, as hard as you can,” Jen (24, two kids) shrieks. Jessi (31, two kids) comments on the volume of Jen’s cleavage, amplified by her breastfeeding garments. Each woman has waist-length, barrel-curled hair and teeth as white as Mentos; most wear jeans and a tight Lycra top. No children are in sight. What we’re watching isn’t the kind of dreamy domesticity that traditional momfluencers post on Instagram. It’s something more interesting: the conflation of “motherhood” as an identity with desirability, fertility, and sexual power.

[Read: The redemption of the bad mother]

America loves mothers more than women, an inclination the 2024 election has demonstrated in abundance. Mothers are given license to do things that other women often aren’t, like getting angry or even seeking political power, as long as it’s understood that whatever they’re doing is on someone else’s behalf. In a commencement address to a conservative Catholic college earlier this year, the Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker even advised the female graduates in his audience to forgo careers altogether and focus on supporting their husbands as homemakers. The women of MomTok, while pushing back against some of the strictures of the Mormon Church, are living out this advice to a curiously literal degree. They’re financially supporting their husbands as homemakers, thanks to social media. “Who is currently, like, the breadwinner at home?” Demi (30, one child) asks at one point. “I think all of us?” Mayci replies. This looks like progress—women making money, at home, with the flexibility to set their own schedule and pick their own projects. But underlying this portrait is a darker reality: The only women who get to succeed at this kind of “work” are the ones who look the part.

The women of MomTok aren’t tradwives, the smock-wearing, Aga stove–warmed, calf-snuggling performance artists who fascinate and perplex us on social media. The Secret Lives mothers flirt and assert their independence and critique the men who try to control them. Some got married as teenagers after unplanned pregnancies; several are divorced. (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a statement ahead of the show’s release noting that “a number of recent productions depict lifestyles and practices blatantly inconsistent with the teachings of the church,” seemingly in reference to a widely publicized scandal involving one cast member that’s the least interesting part of the series.) Late in the season, Demi plans a girls’ trip to Las Vegas that includes VIP tickets to Chippendales, which prompts an alarming conflict between the more traditional Jen and her husband, Zac, whom she’s supported through college and is about to fund through medical school. Zac, despite having been given $2,500 by his wife to gamble on the trip, is furious that she’d agree—even as a joke—to see a male dance show. He threatens to take their kids and divorce her. “This type of behavior is exactly what MomTok is trying to break in our LDS faith,” Demi tells the camera. “We’re not doing this anymore.”

But even as they reject what they see as the suffocating confines of one institution for women, they’re bolstering another. The pursuit of a certain kind of highly maintained beauty for all eight women on the show seems to dominate everything else. In one episode, while getting Botox injections, several of the women gossip, semi-scandalized, about the fact that Jessi drank alcohol from a flask at Zac’s graduation party; the irony that they’re in that moment high on laughing gas administered to ease the pain of the injections seems lost on everyone. In a different episode, Jessi tells her friends that she’s getting a labiaplasty, which she refers to as “a mommy makeover,” because childbirth has changed the shape and appearance of her vulva. Plastic surgery, Mayci explains, is tacitly sanctioned by the LDS Church (though LDS leaders today caution against vanity); Salt Lake City has more plastic surgeons per resident than Los Angeles.

“We wanna make sure that we’re taking care of our bodies, and we’re always told that our body is a temple,” Mayci adds during the Botox episode. “It’s actually surprising that [the Church doesn’t] really care about plastic surgery?” The moment underscores the space for interpretive tension within a faith that discourages toxins while prizing beauty in all its forms as a reflection of morality and a source of happiness. And yet it’s hard not to read this show another way: as evidence of a specific online culture that encourages women to bear children while also requiring them to erase the visible evidence of their pregnancies. The physical toll of giving birth is covered up, made as inconspicuous as the children who have left these same marks. That these mothers be beautiful and desirable in this realm is paramount.

In one sense, this is what reality television has always wanted from women. Those who can exude sexuality from the safety of the domestic sphere have long been able to build lucrative businesses in the process. In 2022, a writer for Bustle counted 52 separate beauty lines launched by stars of the Real Housewives franchise, who leveraged their fame to sell perfumes, wigs, nail polish, “firming lotion,” and false eyelashes. But the Secret Lives stars are notable for how intricately their brands are enmeshed with fertility—not the mundane reality of day-to-day motherhood but the symbolic power of sexual eligibility and maternal authority. On Secret Lives, Mayci is seen launching Baby Mama, a line of “natal supplements” for women. No one on the show seems to question the primacy of beauty. After filming wrapped, Layla (22, two children) revealed in a podcast interview that she’s had six separate cosmetic procedures over four months. “I had kids young, and I love my babies to death, but they screwed up my body, and I wanted to feel hot again,” she said. Her co-star Demi added, “That’s just the Utah way!”

[Read: How did healing ourselves get so exhausting?]

Women who don’t accept—or can’t meet—these terms are, tellingly, less visible on the show, and thus less able to leverage their new fame. Mikayla (24, three children), a doe-eyed, strikingly beautiful woman who struggles with a chronic illness that causes skin flare-ups gets sidelined; she has no primary storylines of her own, and much less screen time than the others. This gravitation toward more visibly perfected stars stems perhaps from the aspirational ideal that momfluencers represent, as Sara Petersen writes in her 2023 book, Momfluenced. “As mothers, our everyday lives are full of gritty motherhood rawness, of children refusing to wear snow pants in blizzards, or the strain of holding back tears and curses upon stepping on another fucking Lego.” She adds, “Why would we want to spend our spare time consuming someone else’s rawness when we’re sick and tired of our own?”

The women of MomTok are enthralling because they symbolize the possibility of a mother’s desirability and influence—and of a broader sisterhood. They are, with the exception of the one stock villain, Whitney (31, two children), impossibly likable, funny and scrappy and unserious. They constantly invoke their sliver of the internet as a pillar of friendship and prosperity—as in “I really want this MomTok group to survive,” and “We need to get back to what MomTok was before all this happened.” Taylor (30, three children) says that the group built its following in the hope of changing people’s attitudes about Mormon women—and making space for them to be bolder and more outspoken than the norm. But all of the women on the show seem to have wholly absorbed the idea that to be heard as mothers in America, you first have to be seen, in high-definition, expensively augmented perfection.

In her 1991 book, The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf noted that the proliferation of sexualized images of women in music videos and television and magazines toward the end of the 20th century represented “a collective reactionary hallucination willed into being by both men and women stunned and disoriented by the rapidity with which gender relations have been transformed: a bulwark of reassurance against the flood of change.” The same dynamics have since been amplified a thousandfold on TikTok, where you have precisely one second to hook someone who’s idly scrolling. The politics of visibility are more loaded than ever. Beauty, as Wolf wrote decades ago, has fully taken over “the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer can manage.” The lifelong project of self-maintenance used to be, for women, a distraction from recognizing the things we really need. Now it’s the most valid and laudable form of labor.

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There may be, quite simply, no place in America less Jewish than Brigham Young University’s football stadium on Yom Kippur. In a typical year, few of the roughly 63,000 fans who streamed into LaVell Edwards Stadium in Provo, Utah, for the annual homecoming game would even be aware that Saturday was the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. But this is no typical year: The star quarterback for BYU, Jake Retzlaff, is Jewish. And he has led the team for the flagship Mormon university to an undefeated start that’s confounded prognosticators and propelled the Cougars to a top-15 national ranking.

It is one of those wonderfully strange college-sports stories that serves as a magnet for camera crews. In recent weeks, ESPN and CBS have both turned up on campus to profile Retzlaff, and Fox Sports dispatched a team of 140 to broadcast its game-day studio show from Provo. The stakes for Saturday’s game were high—a win against the University of Arizona Wildcats would not only make the Cougars bowl-eligible, but keep the team’s chances at a Big 12 championship and national-playoff berth alive.

The stakes were also high for me personally. As a dad gradually surrendering to stereotype in my approach to middle age, I had recently embarked on a mission to indoctrinate my young kids in the college-sports fandom of my alma mater. I bought them overpriced royal-blue hats and sweatshirts, and showed them viral videos of the beloved Cougar mascot, Cosmo, doing TikTok dances and jumping through hoops of fire. After deciding I would bring them to Provo last week for their first BYU football game, I spent days teaching them the fight song. By the time we took our seats on Saturday afternoon, the propaganda had done its work—they couldn’t wait to belt out “Rise and shout, the Cougars are out” after each BYU touchdown.

I assured them they’d have many opportunities to sing, but I secretly had my doubts. Arizona’s defense was good; BYU’s first five wins of the season had been weird and a bit fluky. Most important, like any BYU fan, I harbored a vaguely superstitious notion that this was the point of the season—with national hype peaking and people finally taking notice—that our team usually melts down. Chatting with fans before the game, I discovered I wasn’t alone in this anxiety. One fan even wondered aloud if Retzlaff’s decision to play on Yom Kippur, which many religious Jews spend in prayer and fasting, would curse his performance. He was joking, I thought. But then the Cougars’ opening drive ended with Retzlaff missing an open receiver in the end zone on fourth down, and the Wildcats marched down the field to score, and suddenly the specter of divine punishment didn’t seem quite so far-fetched. I found myself wondering if any other nervous BYU fans were Googling How bad is it to play football on the day of atonement?

When I met Retzlaff on campus a couple of days later, I told him about the earnest Mormon’s concern over his compliance with Jewish law, and he laughed. “That’s fandom,” he told me. Retzlaff, who wore sweats and a Star of David necklace, said he never seriously considered skipping the game. He knew some Jews would disagree—Sandy Koufax famously sat out the first game of the World Series in 1965 to observe Yom Kippur. But to Retzlaff, playing on Saturday was a chance to represent his faith on a stage that is not exactly teeming with people like him. Utah has one of the smallest Jewish populations in America, and at BYU, there are only two other Jewish students. That puts Retzlaff in a strange position: He represents one of the university’s smallest minorities and is also one of its most famous students.

Retzlaff, a California native who spent two years as a top junior-college quarterback, told me that his first thought when BYU recruiters showed up was about football, not faith. The school has a comparatively high-profile program with a powerhouse pedigree—the Cougars won the national championship in 1984 and have churned out a string of famous quarterbacks over the years, including Steve Young and Jim McMahon. But he admits that contemplating what his non-football life would look like on a 99 percent Mormon campus gave him pause.

BYU, which strictly prohibits drinking, premarital sex, and a host of other traditional college pastimes, is not an obvious draw for most non-Mormon students. But every year, the school attracts a combination of college athletes who want to play their sport without distraction and students from other orthodox-religious backgrounds who don’t mind spending time on America’s most “stone-cold sober” campus. (Last year, a Muslim basketball player for BYU named Aly Khalifa made headlines for fasting during a March Madness game that fell during Ramadan.)

Retzlaff told me his arrival in Provo was a culture shock. Sundays were brutal: Local businesses closed, the campus shut down, and, with most of his teammates at church, Retzlaff found himself sitting alone in his room, struggling to ward off boredom. The mandatory religious classes, which frequently began with all the students singing a Mormon hymn, could also be disorienting. “Every single person around me has got this thing memorized,” he recalled, “and I have no idea what’s going on.”

Another player in his position might have chosen to downplay his religious differences; Retzlaff decided to lean in. On Instagram, he started referring to himself as the “BYJew,” and encouraged skittish friends and teammates to use the term as well. (Eventually, the Utah County Chabad began selling “BYJew” T-shirts.) To celebrate Sukkot last year, he arranged for a kosher food truck from Salt Lake City to visit campus so he could treat his teammates to shawarma and falafel. He relished the opportunity to educate. “Members of the LDS faith do have a funny fascination with Judaism,” he told me. Some of the questions he got—“Do you guys believe in Jesus?” for example—were rudimentary. (“To me, that’s like, you’ve never met a Jew in your life,” he told me.) But others were more sophisticated, prompting conversations about the overlapping theologies and shared cultural experiences of two religious minorities, one very old, the other relatively new.

The Latter-day Saint rituals weren’t his own, but Retzlaff learned to find comfort and even a kind of divine beauty in them. During the pregame team prayers, when all the other players bow their heads, he looks up and around the locker room at his friends and teammates—trying “to be present in the moment” as he reflects on his own gratitude.

Retzlaff’s experience took on a new dimension after the October 7 attacks on Israel last year. As campuses across America erupted in protests over the war in Gaza, and as many of those protests curdled into virulent anti-Semitism, Retzlaff was struck by how different his classmates seemed from the people in viral video clips hurling epithets at Jewish students. He suspected that the secularism that dominated those other campuses played a part. “I’d love to ask them about their faith,” Retzlaff told me of the protesters. “What are the odds that they’re faithful at all? I’d bet you they’re not.” For all the inconvenience and occasional awkwardness that BYU’s deep religious culture might cause him, Retzlaff believes it’s allowed his fellow students to see his Judaism not as a marker of political identity but as a faith that warrants respect, even reverence.

In fact, Retzlaff told me, as BYU’s quarterback he’s encountered more anti-Mormonism than anti-Semitism. The year before he joined the team, some fans at the University of Oregon greeted the Cougars with chants of “Fuck the Mormons.” The school eventually apologized, but Retzlaff told me he and his teammates have continued to face religious taunts in opposing stadiums. He’s less scandalized by the heckling than by the lack of outrage it seems to engender. “The blatant disrespect for their faith—it’s something to think about. What if there was a Jewish university that had a Jewish football team, and they were saying that in the stands?” Retzlaff asked me. “Like, imagine if that hit the papers. That would be a big deal.” The casual bigotry, and muted response to it, unnerves him. “There’s a lot of people who just don’t like Mormon people, for no reason,” he told me. “That’s what happened to the Jews all throughout history.”

In the arena on Saturday, Retzlaff and his team found their rhythm in the second quarter. After a perfect 20-yard touchdown pass tied the game, the Cougars never looked back. They scored 24 unanswered points, and forced four turnovers. We sang the fight song until our voices went hoarse, and by the time the game ended in a 41–19 blowout, my kids were converted. I had a Jewish quarterback to thank for helping me pass my fandom down to the next generation.

But BYU’s win wasn’t meaningful only to the Latter-day Saints who were watching that day. After the game ended, Retzlaff made his way to the locker room to shower and change, and then took questions at a press conference. Playing like that on Yom Kippur was, he would later tell me, a “spiritual experience.” He was exhausted and emotional. But before he could leave, he got word that someone was waiting for him in the stadium, now mostly empty. A Jewish fan had waited more than an hour to take a picture with the quarterback. After shaking Retzlaff’s hand and thanking him, the man said he was going home to break his fast.

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Cam and Dan Beaudoin’s three-decade-old problem began when they were kids. Dan would follow his big brother around. Cam, who’s about three years older, would distance himself. Dan would get mad; Cam would get mad back. Although their mom assured them that they’d be “best friends” some day, nothing much changed—until about three years ago, when a fight got so bad that the brothers stopped talking to each other completely. Dan left all of their shared group chats and unfriended Cam on LinkedIn.

But the brothers, who didn’t speak for about a year and a half, started to understand the gravity of this separation: They were on track to live the rest of their days apart, silently stewing. Dan reached out to Cam, and he told me they agreed: “We don’t want to be in our 70s and 80s wishing we had a relationship.” So they tried something that most siblings never do: They decided to go to therapy together.

Sibling therapy is a relatively unusual practice, which is perhaps surprising considering how common childhood sibling conflict is. It’s so common, in fact, that many siblings assume that the relationship will work itself out naturally. But sometimes it doesn’t. And the tenor of the bond can affect people for their whole lives, either protecting them through hardship or leaving them vulnerable to it. One study tracked participants for 30 years and found that closeness with a sibling in childhood (but not with a parent) predicted their level of depression by age 50. Another concluded that the warmth a subject felt from their sibling at age 23 predicted lower levels of depressive symptoms in middle adulthood, while the hostility they felt predicted anxiety and depressive symptoms. A sibling relationship “is like a shadow on us,” Geoffrey Greif, a University of Maryland School of Social Work professor and co-author of Adult Sibling Relationships, told me. “It is one that always is there, whether it’s the most wonderful relationship in the world or the most troubled.”

Still, psychologists tend to overlook the influence of siblings. Roughly 80 percent of Americans have at least one, but a 2012 review of literature between 2008 and 2018 found that fewer than 3 percent of close-relationship studies looked at sibling ties. Most of the research focuses on parent-child bonds, spouses, or peers, Shawn Whiteman, a Utah State University researcher who co-authored that paper, told me. And few resources or training materials exist for clinicians who might be interested in sibling work; as a result, few practice it.

But when I spoke with clinicians who do, they told me that sibling relationships seem to be getting more public attention. Erin Runt, a therapist who works with siblings, thinks that despite the recent increase in family members becoming estranged—or perhaps in response to it—a counter-impulse is brewing: a realization that severing a painful connection doesn’t always end in healing. “We have a generation of people who are more and more interested in repairing relationships,” she said. Perhaps they’re just accepting that as hard as they’ve tried, they still haven’t outrun the shadow.

Many people think of parent-child relationships as the most formative ones—the source of attachment styles, daddy issues, tragic flaws. But siblings tend to model how to interact with peers, to share and to compromise (or not), to fight and make up (maybe). They’re the ones who can make a difficult home situation much better or much worse, Runt told me. They form their identities in relation to each other: what the other excels at or struggles with, how others—perhaps, especially, parents—compare them. And siblings compete for resources growing up. “You’re kind of always assessing,” Runt said. “What are they getting versus what I’m getting? How am I treated versus how they’re treated? What version of Mom or Dad or other family members are they getting, versus what I get?”

Karen Gail Lewis, a Washington, D.C., therapist and the author of Sibling Therapy: The Ghosts of Childhood That Haunt Your Clients’ Love and Work, had already been practicing for about 15 years when she started to understand just how much those dynamics might have shaped her clients. A deeply depressed man who began seeing her said that he’d already tried other therapists who hadn’t helped. So she asked him to come in with someone who knew him well. “I assumed he would bring his wife,” she told me. He brought his brother.

Lewis realized that without asking her clients specifically about their siblings, she might have been missing a key to their problems. She believes now that many people feeling stuck in a friendship or romance are to some degree stuck in patterns from early siblinghood—what she calls a “laboratory for learning everything you need to know in your adult relationships.” Runt told me she sees this in her work, too—perhaps one sibling felt they had to take care of the other, for instance, and then in adulthood they’re always trying to solve others’ problems.

[Read: What it’s like to visit an existential therapist]

Discussing siblings in individual therapy can be illuminating, but coming in together might be the only way to mend a rift—whether between pairs or a whole group. (Lewis has worked with a family of 10 siblings.) Sibling therapists told me that many clients go decades before seeking help; busy with their new family, perhaps they ignore pain stemming from the family they grew up with. Then their kids get a little older, and as they get closer to the end of their life, they start to reflect. “I have had siblings who have not talked to each other for five, 10 years,” Lewis told me. “Now they have more energy to be angry.” Other times, some event will force them together, such as a parent getting sick and needing care, or dying and leaving logistics for the siblings to tackle. Perhaps the siblings want their own kids to have a cousin relationship, or one child is getting married and invites an aunt or uncle to the wedding. Sometimes a person just realizes they don’t want to die before reconciling with their sibling.

People often reach this conclusion in midlife. Lewis works largely with clients in their 40s to 60s, though she does see a set of sisters in their 90s. She referred to this as the “hourglass pattern” of a sibling relationship: a lot of contact in the beginning of life, then a period of distance—then a reunification before it’s too late.

The Beaudoin brothers, who are in their 30s, saw going to therapy together as a final effort to rebuild their relationship. “We really only had one shot,” Dan said. Lewis, they told me, essentially served the role of a parent wrangling her squabbling little boys. She wasn’t afraid to jump into their arguments. She would cut off their tangents or call them out on deflecting blame, and then she’d pull them back to important questions about, say, their communication patterns. (Sometimes sessions do get heated, Lewis told me, but other times siblings are so distanced that they’re too polite. “They talk from their head,” she said, in which case she tries to “get that heat out.”) Through that process, Cam and Dan finally started to see the problems with their own interactions—the same issues that had plagued them for so many years. Dan, a talker, would exasperate Cam when he went on for too long; Cam would shut down, and his silence upset Dan. With Lewis, the brothers developed hand signals and code words to quickly show when a conversation is feeling too emotionally intense—and also the language to say “I don’t want to talk about that,” Cam told me.

[Read: The great cousin decline]

Sibling therapy isn’t all about hashing out current conflicts, though; it also involves going back in time. Because siblings typically grow up in the same home, they tend to assume they had similar childhoods. But often, that’s not true. “You may have had completely different experiences based on how skilled your parents were at parenting at that point in time, what stressors were involved, what money looked like, and also your birth order,” Runt told me. (Studies suggest there’s no consistent effect of birth order, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t influence dynamics—just that it likely does so in different ways for different families.) Sibling therapists ask questions to see where narratives match and diverge, what Runt calls “comparing notes.” What was your sister’s role? Who was your mom’s favorite? What was it like at the dinner table? That context can explain a lot about a sibling’s behavior.

The goal of this work isn’t necessarily to become best friends. Sometimes it’s to survive family gatherings or to come together to care for a sick parent; other times, it’s about letting go of pain, even if you don’t keep in touch after you leave the therapy room. You could think of sibling therapy, in those cases, as harm reduction. Not all siblings can or should be in each other’s lives. But the ones who manage it get something unique from one another, however fraught their time together is: Even if a sibling didn’t have the same childhood as you, they’re probably likelier than anyone else in the world to understand where you came from. They might be the only one who can tell you, with firsthand knowledge: “Your experience is real,” Runt said. Without that, “we’re the only one who knows that and can validate that for ourselves. And that’s a lonely place to be, right?”

A lot of Americans are in a lonely place, and most of the proposed solutions focus on friendship: cultivating relationships with the people we’ve chosen to hang out with and build our adult lives with, rather than the ones we got stuck with at birth and might see only at Thanksgiving. But Robert Waldinger, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School and the lead author of the study finding that sibling closeness predicted depression at age 50, told me that many siblings know they can count on one another when needed, even if they’re not emotionally close—giving one another what he called “instrumental support.” In a more recent study, he asked middle-aged participants: “Who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared?” They could list as many names as they wanted—and some people didn’t have a single one to write down. But many, he said, listed a sibling.

The siblings I spoke with said that their relationships hadn’t been completely transformed by therapy so much as subtly shifted, enough to delicately start again. Cam and Dan are working on keeping expectations for each other realistic: They don’t need to talk all the time, or agree on all the things that once tore them apart. But they’re moving ahead—not just for themselves, but to show their kids what a healthy sibling relationship can look like. “We have to build that,” Dan said. “We have to be the ones to model it.”

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