They both married their high school sweethearts, and both have four children. Both are governors, and both are Gen Xers. Both are recovering lawyers who are people of faith — one a Jew, the other a Mormon.
The main difference between Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox is the letter designation following their name — a “D” for Shapiro and an “R” for Cox.
With NBC News’ Savannah Guthrie serving as moderator, the two governors recently spoke as part of Washington National Cathedral’s Better Way Initiative in a program called “Toward a Better Politics.” Listen to their conversation here.
On the day in September that political activist Charlie Kirk was killed on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem, Cox spoke to Utahns and to the nation. “When that very dark day happened in my state, the first call I got was from this guy, Gov. Shapiro,” Cox said. “He gave me some advice that changed what I was going to say when I stepped in front of that camera for the first time. He told me to speak with moral clarity and to speak from the heart.”
“I don’t care what color his politics are,” Cox said of his friend and fellow governor. “In that moment, we were two Americans who were deeply saddened and struggling. I’m grateful there’s somebody I can trust.”
Shapiro went back to a day in April 2025; the day he and his family had just concluded their Passover Seder. After the family had retired to the living quarters of the governor’s residence, an arsonist broke in and fired Molotov cocktails throughout the home. Wielding a metal hammer, Cody Balmer, who’s serving a sentence of 25–50 years for his crimes, testified that he’d planned to use the hammer to kill Shapiro, the governor said.
“I never looked to myself to being any sort of expert on political violence or frankly needing to engage in a national conversation about political violence until I saw Spencer Cox in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk handle that matter in the way he did,” Shapiro said. “It was at that moment I thought, I need to have this conversation and it needs to be with Spencer — not just because I respect the heck out of him as a governor … but because I think this is a necessary conversation that has to happen in our country if we’re going to get out of this, and this is the man I want to have this conversation with, given the strength of his leadership in a really dark moment in his state.”
The April 2025 event left Shapiro feeling “extraordinarily guilty as a dad, that doing this job that I love and so believe in put my kids’ lives at risk, put my wife’s life at risk. That’s a hard thing to work through.”
“But as a family we also understand that you can’t allow that violence to force you off stage and to force you out of doing the work that is so unbelievably important right now … at a time when the nation really needs us to come together and drown out those voices of hate, drown out that violence and instead focus on our common humanity.”
While leading the National Governors Association, Cox launched Disagree Better, an effort to help depolarize the nation. Cox pointed to the work of Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kleinfeld “has studied political violence across cultures and over time,” Cox said. “She was the one who got me the most interested and the most nervous. She said we’re passing all the checkpoints toward ultimately failed states and things like civil war.” Those are terms Cox said he hates to use, “but if we don’t make a course correction, that’s where this leads.”
“We have to fight for our ability to engage,” Cox said. “We have to put our stake in the ground and say, ‘We’re going to have events like this and others where we can disagree and disagree passionately and try to convince others to believe what we believe in, because that’s what it means to be an American.’”
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)
Let us join in prayer for:
Roger Spalding, Prospect Research Analyst, Funds Development Operations, Administrative Services Group
Let us pray:
Creator God, teach us to see our neighbors with compassion and tenderness and to receive them into our homes and churches. Teach us also to be instruments of your peace, today and always. Amen.
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