Public trust in pastors
Unfortunate news for the clergy. According to Gallup, public trust in them continues to decline. Does it matter to the religious communities the clergy serve, though?
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I think either the writer doesn't understand the meaning of "rebounded", or has a typo in the statistics.
But "rebounded" and the context of "coinciding with a wave of public support following the September 11th attacks" make it sound like support increased.
Maybe the writer means that there was a decline after 1985, and then in 2001 it went back up to 64%, which was higher than during the decline, but it doesn't say what the numbers were in that 16 year period. Badly written, either way.
After a series of scandals in which religious institutions and individual clergy of multiple denominations were found to be complicit in massive cover-ups of sexual abuse by fellow clergy, public trust in clergy has for some reason declined sharply.
Yes, let us talk about why declining public trust in the clergy might matter for the clergy or "the faithful" in a way that is somehow divorced from the most likely reason the general public now finds clergy to be less trustworthy than in the past.
But interesting that it's gone even further down since the mid-2000s, when media attention to clerical abuse scandals was at about the same level as now. I guess it might be that we've got way more people who were born into a world where "sexual abuser" was already a default assumption about clerics, whereas twenty years ago, even with the media reportage, the perception of clergy was more a hybrid of the older positive assumptions and the then-newer negative ones.
There have been other scandals more recently though, even if they received less coverage it was at the level that most people would have heard of those stories.
Where pastors are concerned, I think it's good for people to both recognise that, yes, they have been trained and probably understand the nuances of Bible teaching than folk in the pews but that, on the other hand, their words are not necessarily Gospel truth which must be unquestionably swallowed by the faithful.
I suspect fewer and fewer people know any Christians, so they probably go off their reaction to some public figure.
We are just weird.
When I owned and ran my own company way back in the aughts, I would generally speaking run, not walk, in the other direction the moment someone I was proposing to do business with announced, or displayed anywhere on their masthead, that they were "good Christians".
And this was while I was a card carrying Baptist.
To this day I still view askance people who wear the label on their sleeve like that.
You don't have to be told I'm a Christian, you'll find out when you find out how I behave towards you in business and elsewhere.
AFF
At one time a pastoral leader would have been the most educated person in the flock other than maybe a medical professional. But as lay people became more educated in their own avocation, the academic chops of the pastor is not as valued as much.
To the point pastors are trained in the nuances of the Gospel: many Evangelical pastors in America have no real theological training. And those that do have a particular slant that would not be endorsed in mainline churches.
Did I suggest this be discussed in a way that is somehow divorced from the most likely reason(s)? You do yourself a disservice, methinks. I only ask whether or not it matters, particularly to the religious (but not the clergy themselves).
I think that's not true yet. I think most people know at least one or two Christians, even if just as former classmates or work colleagues. In the same way as most people know at least a couple of vegans.
There are figures for this, at least in the UK, and this was only very narrowly true as of 2022 - when only 53% of people said they knew at least one Christian:
https://talkingjesus.org/research
Given the scope of the decline since their previous report, it's possible that it's no longer true.
Meanwhile, I would be interested to see exactly how Gallup’s question was worded. I’m willing to bet “clergy” was intended to be interpreted broadly to include Christian clergy as well as rabbis, imams and any other spiritual leader.
And when people do find out - what do they think of us?
Rather infuriatingly their more detailed record of responses doesn't contain information about additional clarifications/info they may have given their respondees:
https://news.gallup.com/file/poll/655199/20250113HonestyEthics.pdf
In the most simplistic case they asked the questions as they appear and people just 'filled in the gaps' based on their existing understanding of the term.
Gallup wasn't just surveying trust in clergy; the survey asked people to rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in core professions (link goes to the Gallup site itself). Nurses and grade school teachers get the highest ratings, followed by military officers, pharmacists, and doctors. Lobbyists, Congress, and TV reporters are at the bottom. Clergy and judges still are rated as more ethical than not, but those professions have fallen the most. Gallup attributes the fall in our view of clergy to the overall decline in American religiosity and the Catholic Church's sex scandals (I don't think the public is going to forget about these or forgive them), and the recent fall in our view of judges to the overturning of Roe v Wade (for some of us) and the court cases against Donald Trump (for others of us). I would think overturning Roe v Wade would also contribute to non-Christians' poor view of Christian clergy, given that conservative Christians were instrumental in that.
Two comments: a) the poll defines "Christian" quite narrowly, such that only 6% "count" as "practising Christians". b) given that as AFF says many Christians do not advertise the fact, perhaps some of that 47% know a Christian without realising it. (Admittedly that would make it difficult for them to form a view of Christians).
There is a difference between "knowing a Christian" and "knowing that you know a Christian". I know quite a lot of people, but I only know about the religious faith (or otherwise) of a modest subset of those.
In the context of "But what about trust in us personally, as Christians?" the latter is the relevant consideration.
One time, I remember someone said to me "I can't believe you're a Baptist" and I didn't know if it was a compliment or an insult. In response to that peculiarly Southern passive agressive backhand, I just said "Why thank you. I give it my very best effort."
AFF
Sorry I don't really understand what this means
Though my survey is for the UK, so perhaps there's a pond difference?
What are your thoughts? You haven't said.
I was thinking about this from @Gwai while trundling around the grocery store:
In the churches I attended and the one I worked for, there were always people who didn't trust the pastor. There are people who pick their place of worship based on its leader, and if they lose trust in the leader, they may leave. There are others whose loyalty is more to the church itself, and they may wait out leaders they don't trust, not willing to cede the church to them -- but there are fewer and fewer of these folks, I think. Both groups of people may circumvent a leader they don't trust, trying to mitigate what they see as damage being caused, or where the governance structure makes it possible they may force the leader out or make that person miserable enough to leave.
The survey discussion attributes lower trust in clergy to lower religiosity and to church scandals, but it seems to me that lowered overall trust in clergy would feed back into lower interest in attending worship services. People quit a place because they lose trust in the leader or a new leader they don't trust comes in, and they don't necessarily find a new place. And I think it means there are more laypeople in churches on the look-out for bad behavior in their clergy, and there is less willingness to trust clergy leadership. There used to be a much stronger "Father knows best" kind of attitude among laypeople, and I don't see laypeople taking that attitude much anymore.
I am an accredited chaplain with the Disaster Recovery Chaplaincy Network. We get deployed by government request in natural (e.g. floods) and human (e.g. bus/coach crashes) disasters. Some of us are ministers, some, like me, have been trained as chaplains and are not clergy.
My experience is that we are trusted by the evacuation/recovery centre staff and the public, with little suspicion to overcome.
Has anyone found out how to separate pastoral trust from all of the others? It wouldn't surprise me if preachers fared worse than the rest, but I don't see a lot of trust going around these days.