Are Americans Especially Distrustful Of Religion?
(ANALYSIS) A few years ago I was talking to an editor of a major newspaper who had to make some tough decisions about what topics his reporters would cover and what stories would make the front page. He noted, like almost everyone in the media business does, that clicks and traffic matter now more than ever.
For those who haven’t been paying attention to the economics of journalism — let’s just say that the future is pretty bleak. Which means that there’s an incentive among editors to focus on stories that they know will get some traction.
He was fully aware that stories with scandal, violence and corruption get a lot more clicks than a feel good story about a family reuniting with their long lost pet. He mentioned a term to me that I have been thinking about a lot — “negativity bias.” It’s the idea that negative stories draw more eyeballs than positive ones.
In the journal Nature last year a research team published an article with a simple title, “Negativity Drives Online News Consumption.” The upshot was simple, “For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%.”
One very real implication of this is that trust in American institutions has eroded significantly over the last several decades. The General Social Survey has asked respondents how much confidence they have in over a dozen institutions — things like major companies, the federal government, and the scientific community.
But given the name of this newsletter, I bet you can guess which institution I want to focus on today: organized religion.
Respondents were given three options: They had a great deal of confidence in organized religion, only some confidence or hardly any confidence. Here’s how those percentages have shifted over the last five decades.
The most popular response option from the very beginning has been the middle one — only some trust in organized religion. It was about 48% of the sample in 1972, but that share has slowly crept up in the intervening decades. In the late 2000s, it was at an all-time high of 55%. But it’s receded just a bit from there and it currently sits right around 50%.
However, the share of folks who said that they had a great deal of trust in organized religion has really taken a dive. Between 1972 and 1990, that share dropped from about 38% to just about 25%. It stayed at that level for about 15 years, then began to slide again.
In the most recent data, about 15% of folks expressed a great deal of confidence in religion, while the share who had hardly any trust has risen from 15% in 1972 to 35% today. It’s fair to say that the average American is significantly more skeptical of religion today than a person from 50 years ago.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, please visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.