Is Distrust Driving the Rise in Non-Denominationalism?

I always tell people I’m not biased against groups like Hindus, lesbians, or vegans. I’m just biased toward big numbers, because it’s easier to do analysis when the sample size is in the thousands - not the dozens. And that’s certainly the case with non-denominationals. The best estimate of their size is the Religion Census, which pegs them at about 21 million.

How big is that? Well, if you add the current membership of the next three largest denominations together (the Southern Baptist Convention, the United Methodist Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America), you get about 21 million. I’m almost certain that the estimate of non-denominationals is an undercount, too. Because in the GSS, about 14% of respondents identify as non-denominational. That’s, conservatively speaking, 45 million folks.

So, in my humble opinion, academics should be devoting significant time and energy trying to figure out why this is happening. I have a theory. Non-denominationalism is predicated on the collapse of institutional trust. Americans, for myriad reasons, do not trust major institutions. Banks, unions, big business, media and government are all viewed with deep skepticism. Nameless and faceless CEOs and bureaucrats are wasting your money and taking your freedom.

In religion, there’s a simple solution to this. Kill the denominations. Voila. No more unaccountable head office that wastes your money on projects to spruce up the national headquarters. In a non-denominational church, all the people who decide where the money goes are sitting right next to you in the pew. That’s a whole lot more accountability.

So, how much do non-denominational Christians trust organized religion? Not much and they never have.

The three response options to this question are: a great deal, only some, or hardly any. The most popular choice among non-denominationals has always been “only some.” In fact, most non-denominationals have always chosen that option. In the latest data, about 60% of non-denoms say they have “only some” trust in organized religion. It’s pretty telling that a non-denominational respondent is just as likely to say that they have hardly any trust or a great deal of trust - both are around 20% of respondents. So, I think there’s evidence here that non-denoms have never really been too keen on the idea of organized religion.

But, of course, that finding must be situated in a larger context. If all Christians have become less trusting of organized religion, then the non-denominationals are just following macro-level trends. I can test that. I looked at the next two largest denominations in the GSS - the Southern Baptist Convention and the United Methodist Church - and tracked their level of trust in organized religion over the last several decades. Then compared that to non-denominationals.

In the 1980s, the non-denominationals were absolute outliers. About 30% of them had hardly any trust in organized religion - that was ten points higher than the SBC or the UMC. Just 18% of them had a great deal of trust - that was fifteen points lower than the Southern Baptists. If you want to see the difference between Southern Baptists and non-denominationals, there’s a huge one: NDs were a lot less institutional.

That gap also persists through the 1990s, too. Non-denominationals are much less trusting of organized religion than United Methodists or Southern Baptists. But then something interesting happened. The gap between non-denoms and everyone else began to narrow. By the 2010s, the gaps between Southern Baptists and NDs had nearly disappeared. While 21% of non-denoms had a great deal of trust, it was only 26% of the SBC and UMC sample. And that basic pattern persists into data collected in 2021 and 2022. From this angle it looks like non-denominationals were the true pioneers of religious distrust. They were out in front in the 1980s and 1990s, then everyone else began to catch up.

But does this spill over into distrust of other institutions in American life? To understand that, I created a mean trust score - it’s the average share of each sample that had “a great deal of trust” for a dozen American institutions.

You can clearly see that in the 1980s that non-denominationals had the least trust and the Southern Baptists were quite a bit higher - six points to be exact. But then, something fascinating happened: while trust among all three denominations dropped, it was much more pronounced among the SBC - declining six points in just a decade. Now the overall level of institutional trust across all three denominations was about the same. That same pattern persisted throughout the 2000s and the 2010s.

I think you can make the claim that United Methodists tend to have a higher level of trust than their evangelical cousins in the last several decades, though. That’s most apparent in the data from the 2020s, when 26% of the UMC had a great deal of trust compared to 17-18% of Southern Baptists and non-denominationals. But, again, I think we see this same trend: non-denominationals were distrusting earlier on than others. Then, the rest of Protestantism closed the gap.

But let’s compare trust in organized religion with trust in all other institutions among these three denominations now.

For Southern Baptists, they have always trusted organized religion more than they have trusted other institutions like the scientific community or Congress. But, trust in both has declined over time, dropping about ten points between the 1980s and the 2020s. The story for United Methodist is different. Their trust in other institutions has stayed fairly robust over time. But, trust in organized religion was very high in the 1990s and has taken a real nosedive - going from 34% down to 20%. Now, United Methodists trust organized religion less than Southern Baptists. That’s pretty staggering.

The non-denominationals have a trajectory that is hard to summarize succinctly. They had very low trust in organized religion in the 1980s and 1990s, then that jumped up significantly in the 2000s, only to quickly decline again. By the 2020s, it was down to the 1990s levels. I find it fascinating how the two trust lines for the non-denoms have tracked each other nearly perfectly in the last three decades of data. They are just as distrustful of religion as they are of everything else. That’s not true of Southern Baptists.

But there’s another dimension to trust that I haven’t really touched on yet - interpersonal trust. It’s the idea that the average person walking down the street is not thinking of ways to steal your purse or bash you over the head. The GSS asks, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?”

Okay, here is where things get really interesting to me and a pretty compelling story starts to emerge. The United Methodists have the highest level of interpersonal trust. That’s not surprising given that they have a high level of education and a good income. Both factors are strongly correlated with interpersonal trust. So, let’s set them aside for a minute.

Look at the divergence between Southern Baptists and non-denominationals. SBC folks have always been significantly less trusting of others than non-denominationals. In the 1980s, just 33% of Southern Baptists said other people could be trusted compared to 48% of non-denominationals. The gap was a dozen points in the 1990s, but then narrowed. In the 2000s it was 3 points but then jumped back up to 7 points. (And, I don’t really know if I would put a ton of confidence in the 2020 numbers, the sample size of SBC is pretty small.)

So, the data tells this really nuanced story about trust among evangelicals.

Southern Baptists have consistently had higher levels of trust in organized religion compared to non-denominationals. That was moreseo the case in the 1980s and 1990s, but the gap is still there. Which tracks, right? The SBC is a huge denomination - it’s the definition of organized religion in the Protestant world. And if you are part of something like that, you better trust it a little bit.

But, then, non-denominationals have consistently had higher levels of interpersonal trust. They are deeply skeptical of institutions, they are not so wary of other people. Which also makes intuitive sense, really. Their church is not organized around a hierarchy or bureaucracy. It’s a very personal way to do church. And you need to be able to trust other people to get things done when there’s no head office to swoop in and investigate malfeasance.

I really like answering the “what is happening” questions. They are pretty easy to sort. Just make a pretty graph and write some words. The “why is this happening” questions are a bit harder to parse. I think I have a thread here that’s worth pulling on some more. The rise in non-denominationalism is due, at least in part, to the decline of institutional trust. And, I see no reason to believe that cynicism about every institution in American life is going to abate at any time in the future. So, as the kids say, “the line goes up.”

Code for this post can be found here.