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The four-bar graph of the CBS\/YouGov poll results, which made the rounds on social media this week, was undoubtedly crafted to go viral, and go viral it did<\/a>.<\/p>\n The chart showed that Republican primary voters who plan to back former president Donald Trump in 2024 find him to be the most trustworthy\u2014ahead of conservative media figures, religious leaders, and even their own families and friends. Fully seven in ten said they feel that what Trump tells them is true, but only four in ten felt religious leaders merit the same trust.<\/p>\n Zoom in on white evangelicals who support Trump, and the numbers are even more dramatic. These figures weren\u2019t included in the main CBS report, but Kabir Khanna, deputy director of elections and data analytics at CBS, posted them on his own account<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here, the percent who trust religious leaders moved up a bit, to 50 percent. But the percent trusting Trump moved up by a larger margin to 81 percent, the same number as the widely cited (if not wholly accurate<\/a>) count of white evangelical votes for Trump in 2016.<\/p>\n This is not great poll data, as I\u2019ll explain in a moment. And as journalist Josh Barro observed<\/a>, there\u2019s \u201ca bit of drawing the bullseyes around the gunshots here\u2014the finding is that people who trust Trump trust Trump.\u201d But there is<\/em> some substance in this graph. It\u2019s another chapter in the story of an American crisis of church authority, and that\u2019s a tale which predates Donald Trump and will require our attention long after he leaves the political scene.<\/p>\n There are several problems with the data, and if you miss these details, it\u2019s easy to overstate what this survey<\/a> revealed. One problem is the phrasing: Who, exactly, is a \u201creligious leader\u201d?<\/p>\n Is it your pastor? The pope? A local rabbi or imam? A social media influencer with vaguely spiritual vibes? The survey doesn\u2019t say, which leaves it to respondents to decide and answer accordingly. You can see the issue: Trump is a single person with a huge record of public statements, but \u201creligious leaders\u201d contains multitudes. If I were asked this question, I have no idea how I\u2019d reply.<\/p>\n Two other problems worth mentioning are sample size and the definition of a \u201cwhite evangelical.\u201d We don\u2019t know how many 2024 Trump voters or white evangelicals were polled, because those demographic breakdowns aren\u2019t included<\/a> in the main survey report<\/a>. We do know, however, that the samples were fairly small, because the margin of error in the viral graphic is bigger (7.2 percent\u2014very high for a national poll) than the survey\u2019s overall margin of error (a more typical 3 percent). The margin for white evangelicals is probably around 7 percent too.<\/p>\n We also don\u2019t know who counted as a \u201cwhite evangelical\u201d here. Often that\u2019s measured via self-identification, but as CT\u2019s Kate Shellnutt has reported<\/a>, drawing on data from Pew Research Center, the term \u201cevangelical\u201d increasingly functions as a political label rather than a religious one. This means some Americans\u2014including self-proclaimed evangelicals\u2014who say they trust Trump more than religious leaders may have no meaningful relationships with religious leaders at all. They may not have a pastor to trust.<\/p>\n Yet even if they do, discounting pastoral authority is nothing new. And even allowing for a high margin of error, the gap between trust in Trump and trust in religious leaders is large enough that I think this survey gives us a glimpse of something real, if only through a glass, darkly.<\/p>\n The fact remains that there\u2019s a crisis of authority in the American church which did not begin with Trump and would not be fixed by his absence. As I\u2019ve shared at CT before<\/a>, I\u2019ve repeatedly heard from pastors who feel they are losing the ability to speak into their congregants\u2019 lives\u2014that they\u2019re in competition with the increasingly pervasive influence of social media, political pundits, and cable news.<\/p>\n These anecdotes aren\u2019t outliers. As dechurching continues<\/a> apace, nearly half a century of Gallup polling<\/a> shows that Americans\u2019 rating of the \u201chonesty and ethical standards of clergy\u201d has been in long decline. Church authorities, as CT has reported<\/a>, are rated \u201cbelow multiple medical professions, teachers, and police.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, there are good reasons trust in clergy has largely declined, and distrust of the whole profession doesn\u2019t always entail<\/a> distrust of one\u2019s own pastor. Scandals of abuse, corruption, and authoritarian behavior figure prominently in instances where trust in church leaders is lost. Sometimes we\u2019re right to question or outright reject authority that is wrongly claimed or unjustly used. Sometimes distrust is earned and deserved<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yet, with all due qualifications, sometimes it isn\u2019t. Sometimes authority is not misused but disregarded for illegitimate reasons.<\/p>\n Sometimes, even when our leaders \u201chave a clear conscience and desire to live honorably in every way,\u201d we fail to have \u201cconfidence in [them] and submit to their authority.\u201d Sometimes they rightly \u201ckeep watch over [us] as those who must give an account,\u201d but we do not make their work \u201ca joy\u201d (Heb. 13:17\u201318). Sometimes our pastors tell us we need to repent or adopt a new spiritual discipline or reconsider our theology, and our answers amount<\/a> to a shrug.<\/p>\n At times, God gives church leaders authority for building us up (2 Cor. 10:8), but we build with straw (1 Cor. 3:12). Or maybe we don\u2019t feel much like building at all. Perhaps we \u201clisten to the word but [do] not do what it says,\u201d \u201clike someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like\u201d (James 1:23\u201324).<\/p>\n I\u2019ve done this myself, many times\u2014nodded along to the sermon only to forget it, shamefully, by lunch time. Equally, in my own teaching roles at church, I\u2019ve been frustrated to realize fellow congregants are doing the same thing to me, enthusing about how much they appreciate my insights and seeming to adopt precisely none of them. I suspect every pastor and lay leader has experienced the same.<\/p>\n Some of this is just the nature of the church, a community of people struggling to conform to the image of Jesus (Rom. 8:29). But some of it is our apathy and unwillingness to submit to legitimate authority when its dictates don\u2019t align with our own desires. Some of it is our (perhaps subconscious) resistance to the New Testament\u2019s consistent command that when a pastor\u2014who knows us, loves us, and is calling us \u201cto live in the grace of Christ\u201d (Gal. 1:6, 4:11\u201320)\u2014gives us instruction, we are to heed it.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know how to change that, frankly. I don\u2019t know, in a culture as doggedly individualistic as ours, if this trajectory can<\/em> be changed. But I do know it\u2019s a much larger and more durable matter than the level of public trust in Donald Trump.<\/p>\n Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today<\/span>.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n