How America’s Populist Revolt Against ‘Elites’ Affects Churches
(ANALYSIS) The commotion surrounding the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term is intense enough to rouse thoughts of other presidential first years in 1933 and 1861 — fortunately, without economic collapse or civil war.
As the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, a widespread populist rebellion against the well-educated and well-paid “elite” that has ruled culture provides the framework for actions that would have been inconceivable not long ago.
Religious elites, too, face resistance and a weakened ability to overcome such disillusionment across society, and also within their own ranks, due to secularization and the increase of Americans lacking any religious affinity. A religious form of populism leaves leaders with less ability to restore confidence, exacerbated by persistent and ruinous scandals of clergy as sexual predators.
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For context on populism, consider Gallup Inc.’s latest report on how Americans rate the “honesty and ethical standards” of 23 occupational groups, issued the week before Trump’s inauguration. Numbers are the bleakest in the half-century since such surveys began following President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal. Gallup’s July report on citizens’ confidence in 18 key American institutions is equally dispiriting.
Occupations with “high” or “very high” moral assessment now fall below 30% with such crucial groups as judges, bankers, state and local office-holders, and business executives, with a dismal 8% for members of Congress. Esteem for 11 “core” professions has fallen by an average 10% just since 2000.
With institutions, majorities express “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence only in small business, the military, and science. A mere 30% or less were that confident in (by descending order) the U.S. presidency, banks, big labor, public schools, the Supreme Court, large tech companies, newspapers and TV news, the criminal justice system, big business and Congress (the lowest, at 10%).
Regarding the longer term, a Pew Research collation this month from six polling firms shows Americans who feel the federal government does the right thing most of the time have slumped from the 73% in the Eisenhower era to 30% or less.
Analysts say trust in the establishment has been eroded by such things as Watergate, Vietnam, the Iraq invasion, the Iran hostage crisis, the Afghanistan withdrawal, the 2008 “great recession” and other economic upheavals, inflation and housing prices, wealth inequality, political polarization, urban crime, uncontrolled immigration, government shutdowns, divorce and youth alienation, drug abuse, corrosive social media, divisive sexuality debates, and wealthy celebrities hobnobbing with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
This cultural situation helps explain the support for unprecedented Trump 2.0 verbal attacks and practical actions against well-credentialed people and institutions that have traditionally constituted the American establishment, as the two parties dispute whether this is necessary housecleaning or dangerous disruption.
The typical symbol is the multi-pronged campaign by the President (himself an Ivy Leaguer at Penn) against Harvard, the nation’s oldest university with its $56.9 billion endowment and professors and alumni who’ve exercised outsize influence over American education, government, law, and business. Other top-tier universities, also under siege, compete for the annual $60 billion in federal research grants.
Media accounts document other rhetorical targets, pressures, dismissals and resignations that affect “white shoe” law firms, federal judges including 15% of those in immigration courts, law enforcement veterans at the FBI and elsewhere, two dozen or more top-rank Pentagon generals and admirals, Justice Department departures possibly in the thousands that include experts who try Supreme Court cases, and a 25% shrinkage in the ultra-selective ranks of Foreign Service officers. Not to mention museum directors, arts administrators and panelists, Rosie O’Donnell and Jimmy Kimmel.
The long-term impact is most dramatic with highly credentialed scientific researchers and medical experts, many of whom have been hit by those university cutbacks. Elite specialists are among the losses of 3,000 staffers at the National Institutes of Health, another 3,000 at the Centers for Disease Control, and an estimated one-third of the National Science Foundation staff.
Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel laments that Trump-led Republicans are “pandering to anti-business populism” and “trashing” corporation executives who create wealth. That follows Trump’s long-running lawsuits and verbal attacks against prominent media companies and journalists.
That effort has now expanded to not only public TV and radio but also journalism by the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio Marti, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Efforts against liberal media are predictable, but President Donald Trump also filed a $10 billion suit against Fox News chief Rupert Murdoch over his Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the Epstein scandal and Fox News is among the media newly barred from the Pentagon.
Here again, the context is seen in Gallup’s finding that only 17% of Americans give high approval ratings to newspaper reporters, putting them below nursing home operators and auto mechanics, while TV reporters at 13% are rated lower than workers at advertising agencies and car dealerships. In the generation after World War II, the news media were among America’s most respected institutions.
With religion, too, leaders and institutions are challenged by popular alienation. Gallup reports that just since the turn of the 21st Century, the average of Americans giving high ethical ratings to the clergy has plummeted from 56% to a current 30%, the worst decline for any vocational group. Only 36% express “a great deal” or “quite a lot of confidence” in organized religion.
This writer, who in 2025 marks 60 years covering the religion beat, sees potential for a growing populist revolt against religious leadership in society and within faith communities. With Christianity, which remains the culturally dominant religion, a diminished leadership elite has far less control than in the era personified by Francis Spellman and other cardinals, evangelist Billy Graham and allied “parachurch” innovators.
Evangelical Protestants gradually outpaced the declining Mainline in influence, but are today politically splintered. Dynamism has shifted to independent congregations whose pastors often have near-total influence with their flocks but little beyond.
The Religion Census reports that as of 2020, there are 44,319 such non-denominational congregations (compared with 19,405 Catholic parishes) whose cumulative membership of 21 million is by far the largest segment of 21st-century U.S. Protestantism. These independent ranks include the most ardent Christian supporters of Trump-style political populism.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He is a recipient of the Religion News Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.