On Disagreement: Assuming Good Faith

My childhood didn’t have many examples of healthy, open conflict. When conflict did surface, it came with drama. Raised voices. Hurt feelings. The sense that something had gone wrong and might not be repaired.

What I did not see was disagreement handled calmly.

So I grew up associating disagreement with failure. Moral failure. Relational failure. If people disagreed, someone must be wrong in a deeper way. Someone must be at fault.

It took years to learn that disagreement is not a moral failing.

The Presumption of Good Faith

Jesuit formation helped clarify that, though not always directly. One of the quieter assumptions in Ignatian spirituality is what’s often called the Presupposition. Ignatius of Loyola writes that we ought to be “more ready to put a good interpretation on another’s statement than to condemn it.”

In practice, that means assuming sincerity before malice. Thought before corruption. Humanity before threat.

That assumption alone changes the shape of disagreement. If the person across from me is acting in good faith, then disagreement becomes something other than an attack. It becomes an encounter.

A Person Is Not a Position

Jesuits also talk about cura personalis, care for the whole person. A person is not a position. Not a single argument. Not a conclusion reached at one moment in time.

People are shaped by experience, education, fear, hope, and habit. To disagree with an idea without collapsing the person into it is not avoidance. It is respect.

Dialogue Without Winners

Jesuit education leans hard into dialogue, but not the performative kind. Dialogue as encounter rather than contest. The point is not to win, but to understand. Not to flatten difference, but to stay in relationship while difference remains.

That requires patience. It requires listening longer than is comfortable. It requires resisting the urge to treat disagreement as a proxy for character judgment.

Historically, Jesuit spaces have made room for argument. Real argument. Ideas tested, challenged, refined. Not to punish error, but to move closer to truth. Civil discourse in that tradition is not politeness for its own sake. It is discipline. A refusal to let disagreement devolve into humiliation or domination.

What We Seem to Be Losing

What I see now, often, is the opposite. Opinions are treated as moral disclosures. Disagreement is interpreted as hostility. To challenge an idea is to indict a person.

The result is not better thinking, but thinner conversation and quieter rooms.

Ignatian spirituality offers a different posture. Start where the other person is. Listen with humility. Expect goodness even when conclusions differ. None of that requires agreement. All of it requires restraint.

Still on the Learning Path

Disagreement does not require drama.

It does not require rupture.

It does not require resolution.

It requires only the willingness to believe that another person can think differently and still be worthy of regard.

I had to learn that as an adult.

I am still learning it.