A somewhat misleading title colors a nice little GSS preview from Nate Silver. The title follows with the depressing angst of people who think religion is going to be obliterated in the US some day, even within the next 20 years. Not sure if this was Silvers intent, but it can sound that way.
Confidence in organized religion also fell significantly under Bushs watch, although most of the decline came between 2000 and 2002, when the rating dropped from 29 percent to 19 percent. Im not sure whether that was the result of the Catholic priest scandals, some odd kind of ricochet from 9/11, or something else, but the scores have yet to really recover.
The scores have not been good since the 1970s and have declined along with mainline attendance. Its not a recent thing or a recent trend. From the assassination of JFK to Watergate, all trust in institutions of all kinds has been suspect. This seems to be reflected in the higher trust of the military now than it was from the effects of that same period which caused a great level of distrust in the military.
However, this does not mean that Americans are somehow now less religious or that they are "losing faith in faith." That Americans do not trust institutions with everything they require to be faithful or spiritual is documented again by several sources in the sociology of religion and by the top scholars in the field. During this time, what is clear is that increased mistrust in the institutions of faith has not been correlated or accurately predictive of a decline in religious faith.
People have lost more faith in people than in God or any other object of religious observance. Religion is more inward, subjectively derived, and affective among people and this contributes to the lack of trust in religious institutions which are critiqued among other human institutions.
One speculation about the high level of trust in he military: they are the one institution that has the duty of protecting our affluence against foreign invaders. We will trust them before politicians that talk about them. There is no other organization that does what they do and in a globalized situation that is increasingly volatile, it is hard not to trust them – even when your fingers are crossed.
But without running correlations on the many other variables in the GSS, we cannot make predictions. But on this paltry bit alone, Silver sounds misleading if you are thinking that the issue is that Americans have less religious faith than before.
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