The following is excerpted from an online article posted by Barna
New research from Barna asked U.S. adults how much they trust specific institutions, leaders and organizations, from family members to Christian churches and pastors. Comparing the results with a similar survey Barna fielded in 2024, the data reveals a clear, consistent pattern: trust runs local, and it runs small.
That pattern surfaces amid what’s become an ongoing trust recession in America—not a single bad year, but a sustained decline. Gallup’s latest measure, released in July 2026, puts average confidence in 14 core U.S. institutions at just 27 percent, one point above 2023’s record-low mark. Barna’s data shows Christian churches and other expressions of Christian life haven’t escaped that broader distrust.
Christians rank third on the trust index, up one point since 2024 (from 60 out of 100 to 61 in 2026).
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
Small churches (61, up from 59) score higher than Christian churches (57, up from 55), but 24 points higher than megachurches (36, down one point since 2024, but still deeply distrusted).
Copeland points to proximity as the common thread. “Trust is local, and it’s small,” he said. “Our ability to know something informs our trust.” Size and fame, in other words, tend to work against trust rather than for it, whether the entity in question is a business, a government, or a church.
People who express higher trust in institutions also report stronger emotional and relational health. Among those with high trust:
- 90 percent say “someone believes in me”
- 89 percent feel “deeply cared for by those around me”
- 88 percent are “satisfied with my life choices”
By contrast, those with low institutional trust are roughly 20 percentage points more likely to feel negative emotions such as loneliness, stress, or isolation.