IT HAS been illuminating to research an essay on trust while also watching this year’s series of The Traitors (News, TV, 10 January). It is a game designed to confuse the instincts of the contestants, blurring their judgement and leaving them flailing between trust and distrust.
It is also an intense distillation of real life, reflecting a world of rapidly collapsing trust, in which reality is sometimes hard to discern. Artificial intelligence, scam phone calls, photographic filters, bot accounts, and deep fakes are all examples of technological fiction that make it ever harder to know what — or whom — to trust.
In her book Who Can You Trust? (Penguin, 2018), Rachel Botsman describes trust as a “confident relationship with the unknown”. In the New Testament, the Greek word that is best understood as trust is pistis, a word also used to refer to belief and faith.
At its heart, then, trust is the risky choice to believe in something that you cannot know for certain. This is the very business of the Church, which ought to be an expert in inspiring and modelling trustworthiness; but it has been afflicted, like other public institutions, with a crisis of trust, particularly in recent years. This is not just a result of much publicised breaches of trust, but is also symptomatic of a wider societal trend.
Botsman attributes this decline in institutional trust to digital technologies, which have altered the flow of information. Whereas people once relied on institutions for the distribution of information, this is now dispersed via social media and online platforms.
This is both a gift and a curse. Digital networks enable people to organise themselves collectively, raise awareness of injustice, and publicly scrutinise the powerful. This freedom of information has also created a trust vacuum, however, in which there are few safeguards to guarantee the veracity of what we are exposed to online. Wherever there is a vacuum, untrustworthy actors inevitably step in to fill it.
Institutions such as the Church should no longer take it for granted that they will be taken on trust as being the primary source of authority. I wonder whether this was why the part played by social media was so criticised after last year’s Trust and Trustworthiness in the Church of England Preliminary Report (News, 28 June 2024). Social media don’t just share information: they democratise power, making it a potential threat to those who wish to maintain the primacy of the institution.
THE rise of AI is further muddying the waters. If the dissemination of information on social media has made it harder for us to know where to place our trust, a world in which information is filtered through an AI agent makes it even harder. On an episode of the Radio 4 programme Sideways this month, Botsman called this the auto-sapient age of trust, one characterised by zero boundaries between humans and digital technology.
In certain instances, AI is considered so authoritative that it has been developed to analyse detailed X-ray examinations, processing and sorting information to a flawless degree of accuracy, something that a human being could never guarantee. The auto-sapient age has the potential to save lives; so why does this promise of perfection leave me coldly pessimistic? Perhaps because, rather than increase levels of trust, it makes it a redundant value altogether. Inhuman perfection creates a known outcome. When you have absolute certainty, you have no need to trust.
Like all humans, I want and need to be able to trust. It is a key component that enables us to create connections. In God I place my trust, obviously, but perhaps asking who we should trust is the wrong question. How do we trust, might be a better one.
To help me to make informed choices about where to place my trust, I like to analyse the available data. I read online reviews for restaurants that I want to visit; I ask a local Facebook group for recommendations for tradespeople; or I fact-check a dubious viral post by referring to multiple other sources to test its authenticity. In short, my best resource for developing trust in a digital world is still other humans. While online connection can feel ephemeral, it still has value.
Trust between human beings can be a costly endeavour. The Church might be a faceless institution, but it is also a community of people who are learning how to be in relationships with one another.
It is this clash of values, and the Church’s inability thus far to square the circle of institution versus relationship, which might be fostering distrust. As anyone who has found themselves on the sharp end of an institution and its processes will know, it is a dehumanising experience. When it is the Church — in which we might expect to be loved and cared for as bearers of God’s image — doing it, it is catastrophic. Trust may never be repaired in such circumstances. This is something that must be accepted, with a heavy, contrite heart.
THE Church is asked to live out the promise of Jesus: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13.35). I am reminded that, amid the rise of suspicion and the fall of trust, parish priests are still admitted to people’s homes on trust, and given the privilege of caring for them during some of their most vulnerable and precious moments.
The local church is still entrusted to be part of the fabric of people’s lives, and is counted on to respond to need, wherever it finds it. The parish is present, predictable, and largely unchanged. In rapidly shifting times that never stop moving, people are able to come to church to be welcomed and be still. In an artificial and increasingly inhuman world, incarnate human relationships are still precious.
I was heartened to find that when the Revd Lisa Coupland revealed that she was a priest to the other contestants on The Traitors, they were immediately convinced of her honesty. She was trusted because the contestants associated being religious with having integrity, although their reasoning seemed vague, and they didn’t appear to have a clear understanding of what “ordained priest” meant.
This makes me think that the real crisis is not that the wider world does not trust the Church: it is that the world is not really thinking much about us at all.
Jayne Manfredi is an Anglican deacon, writer, and radio broadcaster. offtherailsbyjayne.substack.com
Read her latest TV column here.