For most people, talking about your religious faith, or why you don’t have a religious faith, can be difficult in any context, but particularly in places where people might not believe the same things you believe. People tend to just avoid it, or get out of it as quickly as possible. As Religious Education teachers, we know how difficult it can be sometimes for our pupils to have honest conversations about what they think, particularly when they’re put on the spot in front of others. How do you start a conversation about what you believe in a way that doesn’t make other people uncomfortable, and that encourages others to open up about what they believe as well?

For the last couple of years, I’ve been working on a project to look specifically at how people talk about their faith in superdiverse contexts, as a part of an AHRC-funded project called ‘Language and Religion in the Superdiverse City.’ (www.superdivercity.com; @superdivercity) I did over 50 site visits and had conversations with leaders and community members about religious identity. I then had interviews with about 25 participants to ask them to tell me about how they understand their own religious identity, who they see as part of their religious community and what institutions support that community, and how they see themselves and their own religious community in this superdiverse city.

The main takeaways from the research were:

• The first was that people’s identities are very much tied to the stories that they tell about themselves. Rather than talking about their religious identity as a list of beliefs that made them who they were, people quite often talked about how their families and community and their own experiences and how those things were important for them in terms of understanding their own religious beliefs.
• Second, in talking about how different communities work together, particularly people of different faiths, recognising shared values was a common theme in good relationships. Even if people didn’t believe exactly the same thing about a sacred text or about the same God, it was quite often the case that people talked about what they had in common with those of different faiths and that those commonalities allowed them to work together.
• Lastly, it was clear that hard conversations were a lot easier when people didn’t think about the other person only in terms of their religious category, but worked to understand how they came to believe the things that they believed. When people were able to listen to and understand the experiences of others, it was much easier to talk about differences.

On the basis of this research, I produced an infographic using some of the findings from the project. The idea was to make a model for talking about beliefs that you can use in a classroom to help pupils talk about their faith. You can download the infographic here and use it freely with attribution and without modification for not-for-profit purposes.

• The first step of the model is to relax. For many people talking about what they believe and about what other people believe can be quite a stressful thing. It’s important at the beginning of a conversation to recognise that you don’t need to be an expert about your beliefs and that everybody has their own experiences and those experiences are valid.
• The second step is to tell your story. What you think and believe comes from your own experience and you don’t have to be afraid of talking about yourself. In fact, when you talk about your beliefs as coming from your own experiences, it’s much easier for people to relate to you and what you believe.
• Third, you need to be curious about those around you. In the same way that your story is unique the stories of others and their beliefs are also unique. When we can see people around us as having their own unique stories and backgrounds and experiences we can begin to treat them less like categories and more like people like us.
• Fourth, we need to look for shared values and common ground. It’s OK to disagree. But in the disagreement it’s also important to recognise the places where you and those around you value the same things and want the same things for your own community.
• And then of course it’s OK to change your mind. Listening to what other people say about themselves and about their communities will often open doors for new ways of thinking about other beliefs and other people in your world. We need to be open to those changes.

If you’d like to know more about the project, please do visit the website! You can also have a read of a research paper I published based on this project which is available to download here.

Good luck facilitating conversations with your students, pupils, family, and friends! Please be in contact if you have any feedback or questions or would like to discuss more about the model or the project.