Virtues of Faith is a Templeton Religion Trust funded project run by the Good Faith Partnership, with the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham as a research partner.
The project began with a Jubilee Centre-funded pilot survey in 2023 exploring how virtues resonate across the United Kingdom’s five largest faith groups (Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism) alongside a Humanist/non-religious comparison cohort. This expanded phase, running October 2024 to October 2026 and generously enabled by the Templeton Religion Trust, adds a substantial qualitative layer of expert interviews, intra- and interfaith focus groups and a larger quantitative survey.
Today, 15 October 2026, we have launched a new report: Virtues of Faith: A Better Conversation, written by Dr Austin Tiffany and Dilwar Hussain.
The report’s central finding runs through everything that follows: virtues make a different kind of conversation possible. Doctrine asks for agreement about ultimate questions – the nature of God, or whether God exists at all – that may never be resolved. A shared vocabulary of virtue does not. Two people who disagree completely about theology can still recognise Devotion, Honesty or Justice in each other, and can talk about what those things demand of a life without first settling what they believe. This is a deliberately modest claim, but it is the report’s most important one: not that Britain’s faith and belief communities agree more than they realise, but that they have more practical ground than the current, often adversarial, public debate about identity and belief would suggest.