Maury Giles is no stranger to people yelling at him.
Loudly.
On different sides of a ferocious debate.
He finds himself in the middle of exactly that most Friday nights under the bright lights of a fall high school football game, which he’s refereed for the last eight years, including five since moving to Utah.
Every once in a while, when a coach is especially heated, this brawny, football-player-sized man admits to trying out a conflict navigation skill he learned from years of volunteering at Braver Angels, well before Giles was asked to become CEO of the organization this summer.
“Working with Braver Angels has been the honor of my life,” organization co-founder David Blankenhorn said in an early July message introducing Giles as his successor. “I believe this organization we love is ready to go to the next level — and goodness knows our mission is more important than ever.”
Assassinations from Minneapolis to Utah form the immediate context for Giles’ taking the helm at the nation’s leading domestic peacemaking effort between American liberals and conservatives.
“It feels like something has shifted,” Cache Valley mother Elizabeth Anderson told Deseret News following the Charlie Kirk assassination. “We were going along and things felt mostly smooth, but not anymore. It’s like something has ruptured and been revealed, with a sense we’re in for rockier times.”
Anderson speaks for the many now feeling a little unmoored. “We don’t need another litany of statistics to prove that we’re in a civic crisis,” Giles said on Wednesday at the 2025 Annual Conference on Citizenship in D.C., one week after the assassination. “The events of the past week alone demonstrate the collapse of social trust and hatred that’s present in many circles … We’re living the experience of accelerating political violence and the inability to have productive conflict.”
Blending the American family
Most people don’t need to leave their home to know this. That includes the Giles family, who have a blended family of 10 kids with “different ideals,” ranging from age 17 to age 31 and split “five and five as it relates to Trump.”
Giles and his wife, Jody Giles, admit to some interesting family conversations that are not always serene. While Jody Giles tries to keep the peace, Maury Giles usually steps in to encourage attention to both sides in a way that clarifies a broader picture.
Maury Giles talks about these earlier heartaches as a family as teaching him new empathy for how life experiences shape how we all see the world. “I can never look at someone else in the situation they’re going through with anything other than, ‘Hey, can I give you a hug?’”
The hard work to blend their own family over the last 10 years feels like a fitting metaphor for Braver Angels’ continued efforts to bring American citizens back from the brink of a national divorce.
‘Relentless pursuit of solutions’
It was during the pandemic shutdown that Giles first reached out to this organization — spearheading workshops and events at local and state levels, before eventually playing a key role in organizing a Braver Angels caucus in the Utah State Legislature.
Utah state Senator John Johnson participated in that bipartisan DEI legislative workshop facilitated by Braver Angels, and described witnessing Giles’ “steady spirit” guiding the group to explore otherwise “bitter divides through curious conversations.”
Braver Angels’ Mónica Guzmán, who facilitates the Braver Way podcast the Deseret News partnered with last year, calls Giles “warm hearted.”
“He has a ton of heart as a person” — someone “who’s constantly looking for ways to thank volunteers and acknowledge what people are giving,” said Guzmán.
Professionally, Giles spent the last 30 years advising campaigns and consulting with organizations about how to strategically adjust messaging to reach more people. It was a political communications class during his graduate degree in organizational behavior at New Mexico State University where he became fascinated with how Presidential campaigns had found winning success by taking seriously what mattered most to their constituents.
Previous to that, Giles worked as a journalist, reporting for the Las Cruces Sun News. Dee Allsop, who worked with Giles in the mid 90s, describes him as a “big thinker” who stands out for being “curious and creative about exploring different ways of looking at and doing things.”
“There’s nothing too big to try or look at or do,” Allsop said. “He’s kind of relentless in pursuit of solutions and will always get to the bottom of a problem.”
Giles knows there’s a long road ahead in this U.S. peacemaking work, but as a marathon runner (who by his own description, “doesn’t look like a marathon runner”), he’s ready for the long haul. Giles also loves making salsa, pickles and sourdough bread, along with homemade orange juice from bulk fruit he hauls back from Arizona.
Favorite books include Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals” about Abraham Lincoln’s genius way of bringing ideological rivals together in government, and “The Pursuit of Happiness” by Jeffrey Rosen with the National Constitution Center.
“He’s the real deal,” David Blankenhorn said of Giles, describing him as a strong and capable leader, and a political conservative “whose candidacy for Braver Angels CEO was strongly supported by his progressive Braver Angels colleagues.”
More than ‘just be nice’
There’s a perception that bridge-building is merely about asking people to “moderate their passion and views and just be nice to people,” Giles notes.
In this view of peacemaking, bridge-building is weak, he says, indicative of “somehow not standing up for truth and righteousness — not fighting hard enough for the cause.”
A recent essay by Jonathan Stray pressed, “Why build bridges when democracy is burning.” This is something that Giles notes he hears from people on both sides. “Wake up to what’s happening! You can’t be civil in a time like this.”
But for Giles, like other Braver Angels constituents, deeper listening is not only far from a distraction, but also part of the solution to whatever serious problems are facing the country.
“I’m not talking about being nice,” he said. “I’m talking about being courageous.”
That means seeking understanding not simply to compromise, but to find common ground, he says. America progresses, he said, “when people have brought together diverse opinions and integrated them to co-create something new and better.”
“The framers of the Constitution created a system where deliberate, respectful debate is mandatory in this process,” Giles says. “It’s not meant to be a game. It’s meant to be a system where a diverse nation can thrive and allow for human flourishing.”
This goes beyond just deeper understanding, which is something Giles has heard from many Braver Angels participants. While appreciating better empathy and relationships with their political opposite, they also say “well, wait a minute, I want to do more.”
The organization’s 124 local alliances will be working more to encourage “citizen led solutions,“ where active collaboration can be sparked by deeper relationships. Giles envisions these Braver Angels chapters across the nation as becoming ”epicenters of civic renewal."
Don’t pretend we’re all helpless
Giles acknowledges that “gaining civic muscle in a time like this with so much pain and so much hatred is a challenge.” Yet, he emphasizes, “the purpose of this life is for us to apply our agency to choose who we want to become.”
Giles sees Braver Angels as helping people remember this truth about agency in their own lives — rediscovering their own ability to “act rather than react.”
“To many Americans, our system feels distant, out of control, and something that we have nothing to do with,” Giles said in D.C. on Wednesday.
“But that’s absolutely not true. We will not experience change until we take accountability for the reality in front of us,” he said. “And as Americans, more than anywhere else in the world, we have the power to shape the society we desire to live in and that we desire to leave for our children.”
“That’s not just some nice Kumbaya statement. It’s real. It’s true. And it’s worth remembering.”
Listening as a rebellious act
Lofty language aside, Giles focuses on the moments like he experiences on the football field, where someone says something that makes you feel scared or angry. Instead of coming back with a cutting retort, he says “you can courageously, bravely, say ‘tell me more about your life experience that shapes the way you view this issue.’”
“That single statement alone,” Maury says, “turns everything around in so many instances.” But alternatively, it’s tempting for some to say, “Well, we don’t want to have anybody come say something that’s triggering to anybody, because that’s going to create conflict.” To that, Giles answers: “Aren’t we letting go of the individual accountability for our own actions there?”
“It’s ironic to me that a counter cultural move in today’s world is to actually listen — like, that’s counterculture now” — compared to what he remembers growing up.
“But make no mistake what we’re doing today, and everything we are about is about a counter-counter cultural movement,” he underscores. This is a movement that runs against “what the dominant narrative is inviting us to do.”
Giles cites one of the founders of BridgeUSA, Manu Meel, who called for Americans to “outrageously bridge build.”
Giles prefers “courageous citizenship.” While lashing out at each other may feel like an easier path, he says, “in your heart, you know that hatred never delivers at the end, because it has no end.”
A deeper foundation, a higher hope
“We’ve allowed the narrative to be defined by conflict entrepreneurs, people who make money and gain power off of our division,” Giles stated in D.C. on Wednesday.
“The way things are framed currently” Giles elaborates, leaves people feeling like “everything is an existential crisis. That this election, and whoever wins or loses, then the world will change in ways that are not recoverable for me, in my views.”
Especially when everything feels so uncertain, Giles believes there are deeper realities that can ground us. “I’m a man of faith,” he says. “I believe in God. I believe in Jesus Christ.”
“There’s a lot of different faith traditions in this country, and that’s a wonderful thing. It’s the thing that anchors me.”
‘Team America’
As Braver Angels celebrates its 10th anniversary next year, the country will be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In the wake of the shooting, Braver Angels is doing even more with other organizations, encouraging people to turn toward those who hold ideological differences, rather than allowing further estrangement to take hold.
In just September and October, there are 18 different events available for those seeking to learn and grow as a peacemaker — or even just to seek comfort with others who are concerned.
But it’s all needed, Giles says — emphasizing “just how fragile this experiment is. ‘We the people.’ We have got to awaken to the recognition that we actually own this experiment that the framers of the Constitution put together.”
Although each political team is naturally focused on winning, he adds with a return to football, “we have to remember that the team is America: the United States of America … not just the Democrats, not just the Republicans.”
“We have to agree that we’re in the same boat, and that we have a shared national interest.”