Americans' trust in institutions, including churches, is at an all-time low. Which pastors do people still trust, and why?
The post In a Trust Recession, What Makes a Pastor Trustworthy? appeared first on Bible Gateway News & Knowledge.
What does trustworthy pastoral leadership actually look like in 2026? Recent research reveals some surprising findings about which American pastors are more likely to be seen as trustworthy.
Americans may be experiencing a crisis of institutional trust, but Barna Group research suggests pastors haven’t become uniformly untrustworthy. Instead, Barna’s research suggests Americans trust pastors they know personally more, while confidence drops sharply for celebrity pastors and larger, more distant Christian institutions. The challenge is especially striking in 2026: Barna also found that one in three U.S. adults say spiritual guidance from artificial intelligence is as trustworthy as advice from a pastor, a figure that rises to 39% among Gen Z and 44% among Millennials.
Barna’s Trust Survey
In July 2024 and February 2026, Barna Group surveyed 2,001 and 2,000 U.S. adults, respectively, about how much they trust 23 different kinds of individuals, institutions, and organizations. “Comparing the [2026] results with a similar survey Barna fielded in 2024, the data reveals a clear, consistent pattern: trust runs local, and it runs small,” the survey results said in a statement.
“When it comes to Christian leaders and institutions, Americans place the most confidence in who they know and what they can experience personally: pastors in small, neighborhood churches. Confidence drops sharply for anything bigger, more distant, or anonymous, including megachurches and celebrity pastors. That pattern surfaced in 2024 when Barna first surveyed U.S. adults, and in 2026 it’s still holding steady for Christian-related scores.”
Barna used the survey results to create what the organization calls its Trust Index, which scales from 0 to 100, with 100 indicating complete trust. The top five in the index were family members (79), local businesses (65), Christians (61), charities (60), and small churches (61). How do megachurches compare? They scored 36 — a 25-point gap.
Which Pastors Are Trustworthy?
Barna’s survey also offered two options for pastors: Christian pastors or celebrity pastors. Christian pastors scored 55, while celebrity pastors ranked 30 on the index, below the trust ranking for the federal government, celebrities of all kinds, and AI companies. Only politicians ranked lower, with an index score of 26.
At a moment when Americans increasingly question whether pastors are trustworthy sources of spiritual guidance, which pastors are earning reputations for trustworthiness?
Consider Morris Chapman, the Southern Baptist executive leader who died in October 2025. He never seemed to lose his local connections despite spending decades in the upper levels of Southern Baptist life, serving as a pastor and eventually as president and CEO of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee.
When Chapman died at age 84, longtime Southern Baptist leader Benjamin Cole remembered him not simply as an accomplished denominational executive but as “a trustworthy ballast” during periods of theological and institutional upheaval. Baptist News Global quotes Cole saying Chapman was a source of “unimpeachable personal integrity and administrative stability” and that the closer Cole got to Chapman, “the more I saw that looked like Jesus.” Another leader, Jeff Iorg, president and CEO of the SBC Executive Committee, remembered Chapman as a friend who encouraged him for many years, including after Iorg became president of the Executive Committee.
Chapman’s legacy was not without controversy, though. Abuse survivors and advocates criticized the SBC’s handling of sexual-abuse allegations during his tenure — one of the key factors cited as contributing to declining trust in religious institutions.
There are living examples. Jose Nater, church planter and pastor of Iglesia Bautista Dios con Nosotros in East Hartford, Connecticut, received the Robert H. Brindle Church Planting Award in 2025 for a decade of church planting in New England. Mae Elise Cannon is an ordained pastor in the Reformed Church in America and serves as executive director of Churches for Middle East Peace. In 2025, the organization received the Frank Wolf International Religious Freedom Award, with the award recognizing its commitment to peace, reconciliation, and religious freedom.
Their stories suggest another dimension of pastoral trust that the survey numbers cannot capture: relationships built over time. Trust is not merely a matter of public reputation; it grows when people experience a pastor’s character firsthand. Jesus’ observation in Luke 16:10 — that “whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much” — offers a useful biblical lens for understanding a pastor’s reputation.
America’s ‘Trust Recession’
Barna Group’s findings come amid a broader decline in confidence in American institutions. Barna said Americans are living through a sustained “trust recession” and pointed to a July 2026 Gallup survey as evidence. Each year since 1993, Gallup has surveyed Americans on their level of confidence in 14 “core institutions” in American society, from banks to the medical system, including the category of “the church/organized religion.”
“Americans’ confidence in U.S. institutions remains historically low. Currently, 27% of Americans express ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in these core institutions, one percentage point above the record-low average in 2023,” Gallup said.
Confidence in the “church/organized religion” category peaked in 1993, when 60% of those surveyed said they had a great deal or a lot of confidence in their churches and religious groups. But 33 years later, in 2026, confidence has fallen to 33%, up slightly since 2023. The U.S. military ranks highest of all 14 groups at 61%, while Congress ranks lowest on the confidence scale at 9.
Gallup’s analysis suggests many reasons for this persistent decline in public confidence in institutions. The Great Recession of 2007-08 and the backlash to COVID-19 policies contributed. Gallup noted that the clergy abuse scandals and the overall decline in religiosity are other likely reasons for the decline in confidence.
Why Trust Matters — and How to Build It
Barna’s 2024 research also explored the relationship between trust and well-being. The study found that people with higher levels of trust were more likely to say that someone believes in them, that they feel deeply cared for by those around them, and that they are satisfied with their life choices.
Barna developed three action steps for religious leaders to take to strengthen or rebuild trust, including:
- Keep it local.
- Focus on being known for integrity, more than visibility.
- Turn small into an advantage.
The survey concludes, “The same qualities behind every high score in this data — small, local, and knowable — are qualities leaders can actively build toward. Trust can be lost quickly. This research suggests it can also be rebuilt, one relationship at a time.”
Trustworthy pastors are people whose private character matches their public ministry. In an age of celebrity pastors, viral sermons, and digitally amplified religious personalities, trust may depend on something decidedly old-fashioned: being known, keeping one’s word, and remaining the same person when nobody is watching.
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The post In a Trust Recession, What Makes a Pastor Trustworthy? appeared first on Bible Gateway News & Knowledge.