Terry Kyllo Releases The Society We Deserve on Rebuilding Trust Across Divides

​Terry Kyllo, executive director of Paths to Understanding and an NCDD member, has published The Society We Deserve: Rebuilding Trust, Belonging, and Our Life Together, distilling ten years of bridge-building practice into a single argument about American division. Kyllo contends that the country's crisis is not a failure of shared values but a failure of relationship between groups, each of which privately holds the same moral commitments while wrongly assuming the others have abandoned them, a dynamic he attributes to distance and algorithmic amplification rather than genuine disagreement. Drawing on more than ninety public gatherings and the Potluck Project toolkit now used by over 250 communities, the book offers a field-tested playbook centered on shared meals, shared service, and public celebration as the practical starting points for rebuilding trust between groups. His work offers NCDD's network a grounded, replicable model for how communities move from mutual suspicion to functioning civic life, reinforcing the field's core conviction that dialogue and deliberation begin with belonging.

---

---

Terry Kyllo, an NCDD member and executive director of Paths to Understanding, has released The Society We Deserve: Rebuilding Trust, Belonging, and Our Life Together, a book distilling a decade of bridge-building work into a single, practical argument. Kyllo, a Lutheran pastor for more than three decades who has spent the last ten years working across lines of faith, politics, class, and culture, opens with a reframe of the country's current anxiety: widespread unease about polarization and disconnection is not evidence that shared life has failed, but evidence that people still recognize how much they need one another. The book's central claim is that nearly every group in America privately holds the same basic moral agreements, including fairness, honesty, and a willingness to see others as human, but each group has come to believe the others have abandoned those commitments.

Kyllo attributes this mutual distrust not to a genuine erosion of values but to what he calls a dehumanization dynamic, in which attention-driven media, algorithms, and political incentives amplify the worst behavior of any given group while distance prevents that caricature from ever being tested against real experience. The book argues this dynamic has one structural weakness: it depends on groups staying apart, which makes any shared table a direct challenge to it. That argument is grounded in a decade of practice, including more than ninety public gatherings with Muslim neighbors, the Potluck Project toolkit now in use by over 250 communities and organizations, and the Let's Go Together initiative in Washington's Skagit Valley. The book closes with a practical playbook for starting this work locally, built around shared meals, shared service, and public celebration between groups, requiring no special credentials to begin.

For NCDD's network, Kyllo's book offers a tested, replicable model that reinforces a principle central to the field's work: that trust between groups is invited through shared experience rather than demanded through argument, and that belonging is a precondition for productive dialogue rather than an outcome of it. His emphasis on starting with concrete, low-barrier practices like potlucks and shared service gives practitioners a way to translate bridge-building theory into action within their own communities, congregations, or organizations. Readers can order the book, download the free discussion guide, or explore the Potluck Project toolkit at https://pathstounderstanding.org/the-society-we-deserve/.