I met a friend last week for the first time in several months and we ended our conversation talking about trust. Our church has had some difficult years unrelated to The Great Hysteria, and a number of families have left and many new ones have joined. I pointed out that trust was collapsing in all kinds of institutions, but my friend made the point that Christians should trust their leaders, and while I agreed, I realized I had missed some important things.

I won’t give away many details here, but our church has had a near total change in visible leadership over the last several years and has had some controversial things occur which were promptly resolved but should never have been allowed to happen in the first place. I think trust was high before any of this took place, and the fact people left after it all happened was not surprising to me at the time because the trust had been so eroded.

If you demand trust, you’ll never get it. Trust is something earned, and even if you do everything right, you might still not get it. It’s not something someone can manufacture; it naturally results over time. To ask for trust is to fail to have it.

Civilizations are built on trust, and the collapse of civilizations often occurs concurrently to the collapse of trust in the institutions they have. The citizens of the western Roman Empire had to trust in their local leaders because the bureaucracy had utterly failed them.

America’s institutions are collapsing from lack of trust. While most Americans – nearly all I would guess – trusted the CDC and FDA back in 2019, skepticism in both is astronomical now in 2022. Americans deeply distrust the election process, with over half of Americans believing that 2020 was decided in part by Democrat cheating. All the gaslighting in the world hasn’t changed that. Distrust in the election process is just another way of saying Americans distrust their own government.

Trust in media organizations is plummeting. When news companies peddle lies like the Russian-collusion story – a story manufactured by Hillary Clinton’s campaign – and when they continue the dull drone of “January 6th” and “insurrection” – normal people become numb to anything they say. When big tech companies censor any opinion outside their narrowly approved window, especially when that opinion is just starting to resonate, it destroys trust. Aside from the propagandists, most people on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter crassly nod to this sort of thing and understand their own time will probably come.

Trust in denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention has been crumbling for years as Woke cultists in thrall to hell occupy leadership positions at seminaries and the denomination itself. Marx may be a stupid god, but he’s jealous, and his followers love him.

None of those effects should be surprising given the causes. Trust is a fragile thing; easily lost but hard to replace. Those who’ve done so much damage to it will never get it back. That leaves room for better, more reliable people to trust. To those people, should they want to be trusted ten years from now, they need to start working every day now to get it. Along the way, they might even become trustworthy.