New Barna Research: How Much Do Americans Trust Christian Churches?

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. Even where scores ticked upward since 2024, mist remain modest at best.

The Trust Landscape: Where Faith Fits In

Family members (79, up from 77) and local businesses (65, down from 68) remain the two most trusted groups measured, though even these scores don’t indicate absolute levels of trust. Christians rank third on the trust index, up one point since 2024 (from 60 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).

Christian pastors (55, up from 53 in 2024) are trusted less than Christian churches (57), Christian businesses (56), and Christian nonprofits (56). But Christian pastors score 25 points higher than celebrity pastors (30), who remain the second least-trusted segment on the entire index, just above politicians (26).

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.

What’s New in 2026

Three items are new to the index this year: Christian businesses, artificial intelligence (AI) and AI companies. Christian businesses debut at 56, the same 2026 rate as Christian nonprofits, which gained three points on the index since 2024. Interestingly, charities, as a general category, score four points higher for trust compared to Christian nonprofits.

Christian businesses sit within a cluster of several other longer-tracked Christian categories, including Christian churches, Christian non-profits and Christian pastors, though Christian businesses aren’t distinguished as small or large. It will be worth watching to see if this score holds as more data emerges in future years.

AI and AI companies enter as separate items, and the gap between them fits the pattern running through the rest of the index. Scoring 34 on Barna’s trust index, AI companies, like the federal government (35) and social media companies (35), are large, distant entities that most people can’t see inside. AI itself is different: it’s a tool people are using personally, more and more, every day. Americans may be judging AI companies by the same rules they apply to any large institution, and measuring trust in AI, the tool, based on their own personal knowledge and interactions with it.

Christian non-profit organizations posted the largest two-year gain on the index, rising from 53 to 56, followed by family members, charities, small churches, Christian churches and Christian pastors, all of which saw two-point gains since 2024. Trust in politicians dropped from 28 to 26, and they remain the least trusted sector on the index.

Why Trust Matters—For Faith and Flourishing

For pastors and Christian leaders, trust isn’t just a perception problem. Barna’s 2024 data show it’s tied to people’s overall well-being, for leaders and the people they lead alike.

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.

As Copeland notes, “Trust isn’t something we just have or do—it’s how we show up in the world. Giving people a reason to trust is giving them a chance to embrace more positive life outcomes.”

What Leaders Can Do to Build (or Rebuild) Trust

So how can church and ministry leaders respond? The research points to three clear actions:

1. Keep it local. Prioritize neighborhood engagement, personal relationships, and tangible community impact. The data consistently show that local works best.
2. Focus on being known for integrity, more than visibility. Trust is built less by what leaders say and more by how they’re known—their character, consistency and care. A church’s reputation grows not by being the loudest voice, but by being the most authentic one. Prioritize how your church is known, not just that it is known.
3. Turn small into an advantage. A small congregation lets leaders know people by name and by life circumstance, not just by attendance count, an intimacy that larger churches often work hard to recreate. That kind of access is exactly what people are hungry for. Don’t apologize for being small; build on it.

The Ministry Takeaway

Trust isn’t fixed. It moves, as people take in new information, have new experiences, and revise what they think they know. Trust has never mattered more for Christian churches, leaders and Christians than it does today, and being trusted now is no guarantee of being trusted tomorrow.

It’s tempting to think trust only rises or falls in response to dramatic moments—a scandal breaking in the news, a very public failure. But most of the movement happens in smaller ways: how a leader responds to a hard conversation, whether a church shows up for its neighbors, whether people feel known when they walk in the door. Trust is shaped by countless ordinary perceptions and experiences, not just the ones that make headlines.

That’s the encouraging part of this research: pastors and church leaders aren’t only at the mercy of the next headline. 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.

This article is part of the State of the Church initiative, produced by Barna in partnership with Gloo.