People Don’t Trust Organized Religion Anymore, Reports Church Currently on Its Third Letterhead

In light of a recent poll revealing that only 36 percent of Americans have “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in organized religion, the Church of God, a Worldwide Association, has decided the public needs a lecture. 

From them. 

About trust.

One would hope that institutions claiming to represent Jesus Christ would be among the most respectable bodies on earth. One would also hope that a fellowship whose corporate history looks like a custody battle would develop a sense of timing. Hope, as Gallup keeps reminding us, is not data.

Until 1985, church and organized religion topped Gallup’s confidence survey. Then people started counting the bodies, the bank accounts, and the press releases. The original article is not wrong about the usual suspects: televangelists, cover-ups, leaders who preach holiness and practice something with a better expense account. It is only incomplete. It leaves out the quieter specialty of certain Churches of God: discovering, every decade or so, that last year’s “faithful remnant” has become this year’s problem.

After Herbert W. Armstrong died, the Worldwide Church of God changed its doctrines. Men who had spent years telling members this was God’s government on earth suddenly discovered it was an apostasy. In 1995 they formed the United Church of God so the truth could be preserved without all that unfortunate new Protestantism. Fifteen years later, a large group of those same men discovered that UCG’s leadership, governance, and “direction” were also intolerable. On December 23, 2010, they incorporated again. New name. Same certainty. Fresh stationery.

That wasn't a sex scandal. It is something drier and, in its way, more instructive: a talent for leaving, then explaining that this departure was the spiritual one. The first exit was doctrine. The second was “fundamental disagreements” and the “conduct and direction of its leadership.” In plain English: the brethren were still the brethren until the vote went the wrong way.

The article quotes Jesus on hypocrites — “whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones.” A bold choice. The tomb keeps getting a new coat of paint and a new acronym. WCG. UCG. COGWA. The bones travel well.

It then performs the expected piety pivot. Don’t just blame “organized religion.” Examine yourself. Is your life organized according to God’s Word? If Gallup could survey God, would He have confidence that you represent Him?

Wonderful questions. They would sting more if they were not being asked by an editor who helped run one version of the church, then helped launch the sequel when the first sequel disappointed. Clyde Kilough was not a bystander in this genealogy. He was management. The survey God might conduct is not only of private prayer lives. It might include how often the same men have told the same people that this organization is the one that finally got government right.

What the piece wants, it says, is not a human-led revival of churches but a Christ-led transformation of each individual. A moving conclusion. It would be more moving if the people delivering it had not already demonstrated that “the body of Christ” can be reincorporated whenever the council meeting goes badly.

Americans lack confidence in organized religion for many reasons, some of them ugly and some of them earned. A church that split from a church that split from a church, then published an essay about everyone else’s credibility problem, is not a mystery of the age. It is the punchline arriving late, in a suit, with a scripture.

If Gallup ever adds a category for “organizations that lecture the public on trust after leaving their last organization,” the numbers will not surprise anyone who has kept the old directories.

Only then, we are told, can true Christianity take its rightful place of spiritual leadership in the world.

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In light of a recent poll revealing that only 36 percent of Americans have “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in organized religion, it’s time for something different. 

 

One would hope that institutions claiming to represent Jesus Christ would be among the most respectable bodies on earth. Yet a 2025 Gallup Poll revealed that only 36 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in church or organized religion. This continues a 50-year slide, with no signs the downhill trend will reverse. 

 

I suspect similar trends exist elsewhere, particularly in the Western, Judeo-Christian world. 

 

An embarrassing lack of confidence 

 

Until 1985 the church and organized religion rated highest among the institutions in Gallup’s annual “Confidence in Institutions” survey. But since then, it has slipped to sixth place, behind small business, the military, science, the police and higher education. 

 

Actually, the entire survey should dishearten Americans. What does it say about a nation when the large majority of its citizens lack faith in the institutions that guide and govern them? The presidency, banks, public school system, Supreme Court, criminal justice system, big business and television news fare even worse, and Congress ranks last with only 10 percent! 

 

But those institutions are different from religion—none of them claim to represent God. Why are the religious institutions suffering this embarrassing loss of respectability? 

 

One major reason is the string of horrific sins and scandals—from televangelists’ sexual escapades to priests’ molestation of children to the corruption of church cover-ups—that have devastated people’s trust, support, belief and faith. Religious leaders are supposed to help us rise above—not descend into—the worst weaknesses of human nature! 

 

Jesus’ harsh words for hypocrites 

 

There’s nothing new under the sun, though. Jesus aimed His harshest words at the religious leaders who acted very pious but were, as He called them, hypocrites, “whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones” (Matthew 23:27). Their religious practices were highly organized, but their spiritual lives were chaotic. 

 

And long before Jesus’ time, God’s prophets repeatedly emphasized that while each person was culpable for the sins destroying Israel, much of the blame lay at the doorstep of the religious leaders. The Bible abounds with warnings about the damage done, including loss of credibility, when church leaders do not live up to the standards they preach. 

 

If Gallup could survey God 

 

It’s easy then—and not entirely undeserved—to blame church leaders or “organized religion,” as some like to label it. But whether we are leaders, followers or outside observers, we have to take care not to look only at others. God also commands each of us to dig deeply within to examine our own hearts. 

 

So here’s a twist on “organized religion” in the form of questions we need to ask ourselves and honestly answer: 

 

1. Is my—or my church’s—belief system truly organized according to God’s Word?

2. Is my personal life and behavior truly organized according to God’s Word?

Or ask it this way: If Gallup could survey God, would He say He has a great deal of confidence that I truly represent Him and His way of life?

What we really need is not a human-led revival of churches, but a Christ-led character transformation of each individual. One where we will be, as Paul described in Romans 12:2, “transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

Only then can true Christianity begin to take its rightful place of spiritual leadership in the world.

Clyde Kilough

Editor