Hi, this is well written and I found the drop offs in hi-trust in religion by age cohort to be interesting, thanks for compiling the data. But the institutions you're referring to at the end aren’t the ones that built America; they’re relatively new constructs, mostly centralized and consolidated within the past fifty years. Many of the key institutions that did build America, such as genuinely decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties, robust state and city governments with real power, and a scientific ecosystem that was diffuse, experimental, and independent before World War II, among others, either no longer exist or have been transformed beyond recognition. What you’re observing isn’t just a generic loss of faith in “institutions” but a recognition that what replaced the old structures is fundamentally different in nature, worse in performance, and corrupt to its core. The centralized exclusionary membership parties that masquerade as political representation today were never part of the original design; the current form of "science" as a bureaucratic and industrialized apparatus really only took shape in the late 1970s, and state and city governments have been rendered largely ineffectual, unable to act as real counterweights to the national center. The growing distrust isn’t a rejection of institutions in general, it’s a rejection of the new centralized order, which has proven itself corrupt, unaccountable, and incapable of producing the broad-based prosperity and participatory governance that once existed. The real tragedy is that most people don’t realize just how much was lost in the process.
Religion becoming less trusted than other institutions strikes me as support for Aaron Renn's Negative World thesis.
Though I can't help but notice that among evangelicals, trust seems to be flat-to-positive since 1990 or so. The "Great Deal" line is flattish while the "Some" line has increased mostly at the expense of "Hardly Any".
There is Congress, which we despise, and there is my Congressman who we re-elect. There are greedy doctors, and there is my doctor who looks out for me. There are shady journalists and there is Fox or MSNBC which maintains my echo chamber. I suspect that for people affiliated with a religion, they rank their higher. For defectors for cause, whether Nones or DeChurched, the harm they experienced is generalized to all religions.
One thing that Ryan might be able to do from the GSS, though a bit labor intensive, would be to reconstruct the graphs not by their religion but by how often the people attend worship. People who go each week would be more satisfied than people who hardly ever go. There is belonging, which requires little trust, believing where faithful and cynics mingle, and behavior where what you really think is consistently expressed.
I'll be honest that when I hear the phrase "organized religion", my first instinct isn't to think of my own church -- a midsized community nondenominational church -- towards which my feelings are positive, but instead I think of the Mainlines in which I grew up (towards which my feelings are generally negative) and Roman Catholicism (towards which my feelings are mixed and complicated). I wonder to what degree this is generational.
And as for attendance, I think the percentage of non-attenders has increased within each of these groups, which is surely putting downward pressure on the within-group numbers.
Religions aren't entitled to respect or trust. People have figured out that religions are no different than anything else, where respect and trust must be earned, not simply demanded. And religons simply haven't earned it.
The GSS data reflecting long-term loss of confidence (or trust) in religion generally tracks the 50-year decline of the Episcopal Church and several other mainlines, a continuous decline so severe, that statistically, they will cease being functioning national denominations in a couple of decades or so. I've found no data that sheds bright light on why this decline is taking place, while the nondenominationals grow like weeds.
There's a truckload of opinion and speculation about it, but no reliable data. Hopefully, Ryan can find some reliable data that establishes specific causes of such a calamity in the making.
Just the thought of losing the mainlines is dreadful for the future of our country. There are bound to be specific reasons for the problem, but it can't be fixed until the cause is known in clear and uncertain terms
I think there are a lot of reasons for the decline of the mainlines, but the biggest one that's generally underdiscussed is that IIRC the 1970s were roughly when marrying outside your denomination started gaining more social acceptance -- and mainline churches were more often than not the losers when newly-married couples sat down and said "so what church do we go to, anyway?" I think that's explained at least a bit by both evangelicals and non-Protestant religions (Catholics + non-Christian faiths) having considerably more cultural investment in their religion (if not attachment to the actual religion in the case of Catholics.)
My grandparents were Methodists and all three of their daughters were. Of their five grandchildren, though, I'm the only one who still is even though all of us were raised in the church -- three cousins drifted off into nondenominational-land and my brother is UU.
An interesting point, Thomas, that I had not thought about. My personal experience, however, was the opposite. I left the Baptist Church where my grandfather was a pastor and joined my wife's Episcopal Church to raise my children with a consistent biblical teaching and faith in God. That was more than 60 years ago and I've stuck with it. But it's been a tough slog. I like my local Episcopal church, but the national leadership has sorely tried my patience, especially the last two decades with its determination to force "normalization" of LGBTQ persons upon the lay congregations. Gay ordinations of priests and bishops, promotion of them to positions of leadership through DEI, Social Justice, etc. Plus pushing a whole laundry-list of progressive cultural/political issues that most people do not support as indicated by the recent election. The result of this activism has been skism, division, defection and loss of half the church's national membership since the start of this century. The decline appears to be irreversible. Unfortunately, other mainline denominations, including your Methodists, have followed a similar course. In my view, the problem lies with weak and incompetent leadership accross the board. I see no other reasons for the failure of these valuable institutions in our country.
I think it depends on how you define and apply the word "trust." Do I trust the leadership of my church to make good decisions in the best interests of the majority of the members? Certainly not.
Do I trust the leadership to make decisions that I agree with and support? Absolutely not.
Do I trust my pastor and the "executive board" of my church that I attend regularly to make good decisions? Yes, but with a watchful eye.
Why is the answer to my first two questions a "no trust?" Because secular politics over the past 60 years has become such a dominant force in governance of my (mainline) denomination it looks more like a political party than a mission-driven House of God.
from a statistical analysis, the nuances of vocabulary probably have little impact. The question in the GSS has been the same for fifty years, the number of respondents is very large, Ryan's graphs go longitudinally, and vocabulary is pretty constant over that interval.
This is great, but not really surprising for me. Years ago I did my graduate thesis on Burning Man festival where I applied the "homeless minds" thesis to it, the idea being with a loss of trust in various institutions, the attendees were creating new forms of community and spirituality where they could find a home and trust. I do have questions about the general nature of the lack of trust in organized religion among religious people. Has any work been done to see whether their confidence remains in their tradition but has dipped in others in the culture, and if so, what traditions do they tend to be less trustful of? In other words, among religious people, how does their lack of trust breakdown on the specifics?
Hi, this is well written and I found the drop offs in hi-trust in religion by age cohort to be interesting, thanks for compiling the data. But the institutions you're referring to at the end aren’t the ones that built America; they’re relatively new constructs, mostly centralized and consolidated within the past fifty years. Many of the key institutions that did build America, such as genuinely decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties, robust state and city governments with real power, and a scientific ecosystem that was diffuse, experimental, and independent before World War II, among others, either no longer exist or have been transformed beyond recognition. What you’re observing isn’t just a generic loss of faith in “institutions” but a recognition that what replaced the old structures is fundamentally different in nature, worse in performance, and corrupt to its core. The centralized exclusionary membership parties that masquerade as political representation today were never part of the original design; the current form of "science" as a bureaucratic and industrialized apparatus really only took shape in the late 1970s, and state and city governments have been rendered largely ineffectual, unable to act as real counterweights to the national center. The growing distrust isn’t a rejection of institutions in general, it’s a rejection of the new centralized order, which has proven itself corrupt, unaccountable, and incapable of producing the broad-based prosperity and participatory governance that once existed. The real tragedy is that most people don’t realize just how much was lost in the process.
Religion becoming less trusted than other institutions strikes me as support for Aaron Renn's Negative World thesis.
Though I can't help but notice that among evangelicals, trust seems to be flat-to-positive since 1990 or so. The "Great Deal" line is flattish while the "Some" line has increased mostly at the expense of "Hardly Any".
There is Congress, which we despise, and there is my Congressman who we re-elect. There are greedy doctors, and there is my doctor who looks out for me. There are shady journalists and there is Fox or MSNBC which maintains my echo chamber. I suspect that for people affiliated with a religion, they rank their higher. For defectors for cause, whether Nones or DeChurched, the harm they experienced is generalized to all religions.
One thing that Ryan might be able to do from the GSS, though a bit labor intensive, would be to reconstruct the graphs not by their religion but by how often the people attend worship. People who go each week would be more satisfied than people who hardly ever go. There is belonging, which requires little trust, believing where faithful and cynics mingle, and behavior where what you really think is consistently expressed.
Yes, I think this is valid.
I'll be honest that when I hear the phrase "organized religion", my first instinct isn't to think of my own church -- a midsized community nondenominational church -- towards which my feelings are positive, but instead I think of the Mainlines in which I grew up (towards which my feelings are generally negative) and Roman Catholicism (towards which my feelings are mixed and complicated). I wonder to what degree this is generational.
And as for attendance, I think the percentage of non-attenders has increased within each of these groups, which is surely putting downward pressure on the within-group numbers.
Religions aren't entitled to respect or trust. People have figured out that religions are no different than anything else, where respect and trust must be earned, not simply demanded. And religons simply haven't earned it.
BTW, thanks for accepting comments from readers who are not paid subscribers. I wish more Substack authors followed that policy.
The GSS data reflecting long-term loss of confidence (or trust) in religion generally tracks the 50-year decline of the Episcopal Church and several other mainlines, a continuous decline so severe, that statistically, they will cease being functioning national denominations in a couple of decades or so. I've found no data that sheds bright light on why this decline is taking place, while the nondenominationals grow like weeds.
There's a truckload of opinion and speculation about it, but no reliable data. Hopefully, Ryan can find some reliable data that establishes specific causes of such a calamity in the making.
Just the thought of losing the mainlines is dreadful for the future of our country. There are bound to be specific reasons for the problem, but it can't be fixed until the cause is known in clear and uncertain terms
I think there are a lot of reasons for the decline of the mainlines, but the biggest one that's generally underdiscussed is that IIRC the 1970s were roughly when marrying outside your denomination started gaining more social acceptance -- and mainline churches were more often than not the losers when newly-married couples sat down and said "so what church do we go to, anyway?" I think that's explained at least a bit by both evangelicals and non-Protestant religions (Catholics + non-Christian faiths) having considerably more cultural investment in their religion (if not attachment to the actual religion in the case of Catholics.)
My grandparents were Methodists and all three of their daughters were. Of their five grandchildren, though, I'm the only one who still is even though all of us were raised in the church -- three cousins drifted off into nondenominational-land and my brother is UU.
An interesting point, Thomas, that I had not thought about. My personal experience, however, was the opposite. I left the Baptist Church where my grandfather was a pastor and joined my wife's Episcopal Church to raise my children with a consistent biblical teaching and faith in God. That was more than 60 years ago and I've stuck with it. But it's been a tough slog. I like my local Episcopal church, but the national leadership has sorely tried my patience, especially the last two decades with its determination to force "normalization" of LGBTQ persons upon the lay congregations. Gay ordinations of priests and bishops, promotion of them to positions of leadership through DEI, Social Justice, etc. Plus pushing a whole laundry-list of progressive cultural/political issues that most people do not support as indicated by the recent election. The result of this activism has been skism, division, defection and loss of half the church's national membership since the start of this century. The decline appears to be irreversible. Unfortunately, other mainline denominations, including your Methodists, have followed a similar course. In my view, the problem lies with weak and incompetent leadership accross the board. I see no other reasons for the failure of these valuable institutions in our country.
I think it depends on how you define and apply the word "trust." Do I trust the leadership of my church to make good decisions in the best interests of the majority of the members? Certainly not.
Do I trust the leadership to make decisions that I agree with and support? Absolutely not.
Do I trust my pastor and the "executive board" of my church that I attend regularly to make good decisions? Yes, but with a watchful eye.
Why is the answer to my first two questions a "no trust?" Because secular politics over the past 60 years has become such a dominant force in governance of my (mainline) denomination it looks more like a political party than a mission-driven House of God.
from a statistical analysis, the nuances of vocabulary probably have little impact. The question in the GSS has been the same for fifty years, the number of respondents is very large, Ryan's graphs go longitudinally, and vocabulary is pretty constant over that interval.
This is great, but not really surprising for me. Years ago I did my graduate thesis on Burning Man festival where I applied the "homeless minds" thesis to it, the idea being with a loss of trust in various institutions, the attendees were creating new forms of community and spirituality where they could find a home and trust. I do have questions about the general nature of the lack of trust in organized religion among religious people. Has any work been done to see whether their confidence remains in their tradition but has dipped in others in the culture, and if so, what traditions do they tend to be less trustful of? In other words, among religious people, how does their lack of trust breakdown on the specifics?