Polls show Americans increasingly distrust science and organized religion, government and media, public education and law enforcement — creating what sounds like the background of a dystopian novel.
As civic institutions lose the authority they once had, scholars appear reluctant to catastrophize the situation.
The Washington Times contacted a number of sociologists, historians, theologians and political scientists, and none would offer an overarching evaluation of recent public surveys and current events. Those who did respond provided nuanced assessments that weighed the positive and negative effects of crumbling traditional bedrocks.
“We just don’t know what the worst possible outlook will be in a few years,” sociologist Deborah Carr, director of the Center of Innovation in Social Science at Boston University, told The Times.
Several surveys have highlighted declines of faith in various institutions:
• The U.S. last year ranked 22nd globally in the World Bank measure of nations upholding the rule of law and 24th in the Transparency International list of countries with the least perceived corruption. In 1996, the U.S. ranked 16th in the rule of law and 15th in perceived corruption.
⦁ The Pew Research Center reported in June 2022 that just 20% of Americans trusted the federal government to “do what is right just about always/most of the time.” That was down from 24% in April 2021 and 27% in April 2020.
⦁ In the most recent General Social Survey, a long-running poll from NORC at the University of Chicago, 39% of adults expressed “a great deal of confidence” in the scientific community last year as COVID-19 vaccine misinformation spread, compared with 48% in 2018 and 2021.
⦁ An annual poll that Gallup released last July found “significant declines” in adults’ confidence in 16 leading institutions to an average low of 27%. The share of respondents expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence dropped from 32% in 2021 to 28% last year for public schools, from 21% to 16% for newspapers and from 51% to 45% for police.
⦁ According to Gallup, U.S. church membership fell below the majority for the first time in 2021, to 47%. That was down from 73% in 1937, when the polling company first measured the issue. Gallup reported late last month that 31% of adults said they attended religious services in the previous week, down 10 percentage points from surveys before 2012.
Elesha Coffman, a cultural historian at Baylor University, said most U.S. institutions date back to the 19th century and have earned little trust from poor people and minorities who never felt represented.
Even conservatives who have traditionally embraced these institutions have fallen away in recent years, she said.
“There’s less of the collective sense of the common good, more of a sense of ‘it’s me or you’ versus ‘us,’” Ms. Coffman said in an interview.
It’s impossible to predict where the decline in institutional trust will lead, she said.
“There will be people lamenting loudly that society is falling apart and insisting that everyone else get on board with their vision of social coherence,” Ms. Coffman said. “And there will be people who see promise — for a wider range of self-expression, for the emergence of new social structures, for reduced influence from institutions experienced as abusive.”
Ms. Carr, the Boston University sociologist, said the declines could weaken the nation’s democracy by creating political deadlock and depressing election turnout.
“The quickest path to undermining democracy is people not voting,” she said.
Although Americans may have merely shifted their trust from some institutions to others, sliding confidence in the government is “very dystopian” if surveys are accurate, said John H. Evans, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego.
“Given that government organizes so much of our advanced society, a decline in trust in government is very bad,” said Mr. Evans, an associate dean of social sciences. “Government is synonymous with civilization, as is apparent from what happens in failed states that become lawless dystopias.”
Robert A. Heineman, a political scientist and a former department chair at Alfred University in New York, said more public school graduates have grown up indifferent to whether government and other institutions survive or collapse.
He attributes that anarchist sentiment to a decadeslong trend away from school teachings that answers can be right or wrong, true or false — such as the idea that gender is “socially defined” rather than tied to biological sex.
“The result is a weakening of government authority and of solidly scientific initiatives,” Mr. Heineman said in an email.
Americans’ trust in institutions started declining in the late 1960s and fell faster with each new generation, scholars said.
Theologians say young people today have grown up with less trust than their parents and grandparents that institutions tell them the truth.
“The elimination of truth results in the extinction of trust,” said radio host Alex McFarland, a former president of Southern Evangelical Seminary and College in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Yet some see the loss of faith in churches, government agencies and media companies through a more positive lens.
“As I look to the future, I am no more or less hopeful than I am about the present,” said James Spencer, an evangelical Christian theologian who serves as president of the D.L. Moody Center in Massachusetts.
“The distrust in institutions will create individual and national crises [that] will disrupt our way of life in a number of ways,” he said. “Within that disruption, people will come to realize that their expectations for what institutions could do were too high. My hope is that they will begin to look beyond those institutions to the God who sustains all things and will make all things new.”
Many faith-minded families have joined smaller communities of “creative minorities” as they pull their children out of government-run schools, said the Rev. Stephen Fields, a Jesuit priest and professor of theology at Georgetown University.
He cited home-schooling, charter schools and classical education as examples of how weakened bedrock institutions could forge unity among like-minded people.
“Given some time, the energy of creative minorities will break through into our fracturing culture with dynamic and healing power for unity and good,” Father Fields said in an email.
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.
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