And the finding holds. That’s really interesting. I want to point out a couple things, though. The first is that trust really took a dive in the 1990s. It dropped about eight percentage points in that decade from the prior one. That’s a good little breadcrumb for future analysis. It’s also important to note that the upward slope of the line really slowed down in the 1990s data, too. It’s not quite flat, but close to no result. In 2000, the line did become clearly positive again, though. But that’s likely because the low attenders were a lot less trusting.

But that line for the 2010s decade is just pointing downward, no doubt about it. Religious attendance used to clearly drive up interpersonal trust, by about 5% from the bottom of the attendance spectrum to the top. Now, overall trust seems to decline just a bit (2-3 percentage points).

Obviously, the question is why the relationship has flipped. I don’t know if I have an easy answer to that one, but let me hypothesize for a bit. I think this has a lot to do with the work on social capital, specifically the discussion of bridging and bonding. There’s a great discussion of those concepts here.

Simply stated, church used to be a great way to interact with folks who were different than you. They voted for a different candidate, came from a different economic background — folks with doctorates sitting next to folks with a high school diploma. That offers a tremendous amount of opportunities to learn about other people, build bridges, generate social capital and all kinds of good things.

Now, houses of worship have become monocultures. That’s exactly the point I make here.

Churches, synagogues and mosques are full of educated, middle class folks who did everything “right.” They got married and had kids and lived a classic American life. There isn’t a whole lot of mixing anymore on a Sunday morning. Most White churches now are overwhelmingly Republican. There’s no chance to get to know a liberal when you are a conservative. Now, we are stuck in our enclaves of worship and peer out with suspicion on people who are different than us.

So, interpersonal trust is dropping because we are not seeing real life experiences of “other people” being good, generous citizens. Instead, we just see them being portrayed in the media as being immoral, evil and looking to take advantage of anyone who is different than them. It’s a sad state of affairs, not just for American religion but also American democracy.

This piece was originally published in Ryan Burge’s “Graphs About Religion” Substack.