We live in a low-trust age in the West, and this applies across the board, regardless of age, sex or creed. But what is notable is that Gen Z – those aged 18 to 29 – are the least trusting of all, with some polling putting their levels of trust in the single digits. This should worry all of us, as trust is one of the foundational virtues of our social and political life. Without trust, there can be no genuine communal living nor pursuit of a common good.
It is not exactly a surprise that trust has eroded in most institutions, but, as statistician Ryan Berge shows, interpersonal trust is also extremely low. So what might be able to arrest this sharp decline in trust? Berge’s analysis proves useful again in this regard, as he finds there is an obvious correlation between religion and higher levels of trust.
This applies roughly across all generations, but is especially obvious for Gen Z. When it comes to religion, among Gen Z who do not go to church at all, nine out of 10 (88 per cent) say that you cannot be too careful in dealing with people, compared with 50 per cent of regular church attenders, meaning weekly or more. Some 29 per cent of regular church attenders believe people can be trusted, while the other 21 per cent are unsure.
Berge notes some of the reasons churchgoing is likely to be linked to trust, namely socialisation and the fact that voluntarily participating in religion implies you already have higher levels of trust.
I think there is something more going on here. The link exists even though there have been scandals aplenty associated with religious institutions, of a kind very likely to harm rather than foster trust. The fact that churches still inspire trust among their members is because of something inscribed into the nature of religious life.
Before I get to this, let me say I find it hard to blame Gen Z for being low trust. As the late, great philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre noted in his seminal work After Virtue, because the Enlightenment thinkers rejected the notion of teleology, we were left with a very strange conceptual framework. In it, we had the language of objective moral norms, but without the belief in an end towards which these norms were directed.
Unsurprisingly, moral declarations soon came to take on the appearance of covert and arbitrary attempts by one person to force his or her will on that of another. Who can be trusted in such an environment?
It is against this backdrop that the collapse in trust should be understood. The manifestations of untrustworthy politicians, “fake news” media and so on are symptoms of it, not a cause. Each cannot deliver on its promise, which is to work in the best interests of man, because no one agrees what man’s best interests are.
Instead, what we have are increasingly fragmented populations, united by sectional interests linked to gender, racial, ethnic and sexual identities. In other words, the kind of clannishness you would expect from a low-trust society.
Considering things from a materialist’s perspective, what cause for hope is there in a world so obviously imperfect, marred by man’s capacity not only to cause but also to enjoy the suffering of others?
It is no surprise that some of the best artists around are wonderful chroniclers of the effects of Original Sin, though they may not even be aware of the concept. For instance, if you try to watch any film from South Korea, the home of arthouse cinema today, you will quickly be struck by how unhappy the characters are; how they try to steal moments of bliss from an otherwise unpleasant world; and, most significantly, how their relationships are marred by lies, deceit and distrust.
But even while our culture is increasingly marked by division and distrust, we still have the institutions of that distant age in which we knew what man is and what he is for: churches. These are institutions that retain the power to stir those who participate to a level of idealism necessary to building trust. This idealism is a precondition for trust because it is a virtue inextricably linked to hope and faith.
Trust is not just a social virtue, existing in a horizontal plane between different men and women. It is more fundamentally vertical, dependent on our faith in God’s love and on our hope for the ultimate outworking of His plan.
The social goods that result from this framework are effective, as is evidenced even among the highly sceptical Generation Z. But if we want to turn around their plummeting levels of trust, we must recognise that it is not fundamentally a social or political project.
It will need a movement that can stir up idealism, restoring trust by demonstrating not that man is perfect and society perfectible, but that despite our frailties there is a good at work in the world in which we can place our faith and through whom we can make an appeal grounded in truth and not in the will to power.
In other words, tackling this crisis requires demonstrating that God is active in the world. What better way to see that than by joining a community united in the presence of God – in other words, by going to church?
