Editor’s Note: The following first appeared in the April-June 2026 issue of Good Faith Magazine. That issue explored interfaith conversation and partnerships. Good Faith Magazine is a free resource for all Good Faith Advocates.
It is no secret that we live in divided times. Social media algorithms are designed to reinforce our biases, keep us angry, and foster distrust of our neighbors. Cable news is even worse. Panelists vie for the title of loudest, most passionate defenders of their beliefs. There isn’t even an assumption on the part of viewers and consumers of content that listening will be involved in whatever passes for “dialogue.”
There are, however, grassroots and organizational efforts to change this. One such initiative in recent years has been the work of public deliberation, which moves beyond the practices of debate and dialogue toward a more conversational yet action-oriented process.
Public deliberation isn’t about getting a group of people with differing opinions in a room to try to win each other over with the strength of their arguments. Rather, it brings people together to consider how personal values play into public decisions. It begins by asking people to agree on how a problem is to be framed and then locate their shared values before asking them to state their opinion on a solution. Public deliberation forums have become popular on college campuses and in “democracy conversations” around the country.
There are different ways to operate these forums, but a key element across them is that participants identify their values before proposing solutions. For example, a conversation that focuses on the rising cost of healthcare in the country may propose three broad approaches: reducing the threat of financial ruin, restraining out-of-control costs, and providing healthcare coverage as a fundamental human right.
Each approach would come with its own solutions. But before anyone can propose a solution, they must first identify and rank the values they hold most dear as they approach the conversation. These values can include freedom of choice, market competition, equity, equality, fairness, and the government’s duty to serve its people.
What often occurs in public deliberation is that participants learn their differences of opinion aren’t on proposed solutions, or even the values they bring into deciding which solution they believe is best. Instead, they discover that they share similar values with people they disagree with; they just express them differently.
For example, one person may value a government’s duty to serve its people, but it may be third or fourth on their list, behind, say, market competition. For others, the responsibility of government is at the top of their list.
The goal of public deliberation is to practice decision-making on very complicated social challenges. The result, often, is that conversation partners discover that people who disagree with them aren’t unintelligent, uncaring, or evil. They simply have a different set of values — and a different ordering of those values.
Religious Virtues
The public deliberation approach to civic engagement can be incredibly relevant to interfaith dialogue and understanding. Having a dialogue about what someone values can be a more hospitable way of beginning a conversation than asking what they believe. But from an interfaith perspective, understanding isn’t restricted to conversation. We can “do the work” of understanding through study.
Last year, Good Faith Partnership, along with the University of Birmingham and the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, released a study titled Virtues of Faith. (Good Faith Partnership is a UK-based organization devoted to multi-sectoral and multi-faith collaboration and is not affiliated with Good Faith Media.) The study examined results of a 2023 survey that asked participants from various faith and nonreligious traditions to rank a list of 24 virtues. There was also an option to list their own virtue.
Participants included Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, and those who identified as humanist or non-religious. The results can be extremely useful in understanding differences between faith groups.
For Christians, charity — defined as the act of giving money or goods to people in times of need — was the top virtue, chosen by 39.7% of respondents. That is followed closely by honesty (35.1%), devotion (34.5%), civility (34.1%), citizenship (33.3%), and community awareness (33.3%).
Among the groups surveyed, including humanist/non-religious participants, honesty is the only virtue that appears in the top six of all of them. Devotion ranks among the top six across all faith groups, but not among those who identify as humanist or non-religious.
Although values and virtues differ in definition, the study of virtues across various belief systems can be instructive for interfaith dialogue. How? Regardless of who you are in conversation with, it seems you could never go wrong bringing the idea of honesty to the table. And if you are speaking about religion with anyone who practices a religion, asking questions about their devotional practices can open doors of understanding.
Analyzing the Good Faith Partnership study can also provide helpful tools for thinking through how dominant religious groups in a society prioritize their values and virtues differently from minority groups. For example, the virtue of civility doesn’t appear in the top six of any of the survey’s subgroups except for Christians. Yet in every group of religious minorities, except for Hindus, the virtue of justice appears in their top six.
Does this mean that Christians don’t care about justice or that religious minorities don’t care about civility? Of course not. Justice ranks seventh among Christians, and civility ranks highly among all other groups, just not in their top six. But it might say something about how our relative dominance or non-dominance in a society determines the relative importance we place on certain values and virtues.
Two statistically significant findings from the survey are notable. One is that, for Christians, the virtue of charity is dominant over all the others. There is more than a four-point gap between it and honesty on the list of top virtues. The other concerns the virtue of humility, which ranks number two on the list for Sikhs but is nowhere in the top six for any other subgroup.
How might all this help us gain a deeper understanding of various faith groups? For one, it gives us a sense of our common ground, which can help reduce the perception that the person sitting across from us is an “other.” Second, it asks us to measure what our religious texts and traditions ask of us against the virtues and values we actually embrace.
Mostly, though, it invites us to practice curiosity as we seek to better understand and love our neighbors.
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Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.