The Borrowed Faith

I sat down to read some news about the news this week and found myself instead thinking about church.

The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report landed earlier this week, and the number everyone is quoting is the gravestone: trust in news has fallen to 37%, the lowest since the Institute began tracking it in 2015; in the United States it is now just 25%.

Add it to the pile of other reported decays in things we once trusted. Confidence in organised religion has fallen from 53% to 32% in two decades (Gallup). Trust in government sits near record lows (Pew Research Center). Barely one in five Americans have any confidence in television news (Gallup).

Read the headlines and the story writes itself. Trust is dying.

I posit that this is the wrong reading, and it is the reading that will cost marketers the most.

Because here is what the gravestone reading misses: the need to trust is not optional. To be human is to deposit your faith in something larger than yourself. It is how we belong, how we locate ourselves in a society, how we stop being merely an individual and become part of something. That need is permanent. It does not switch off because the cathedral emptied. It goes looking for a new home.

I have spent the past year writing about the Great Compression and the five forces remaking our industry, of which platform disintermediation is one. We usually tell that story as a distribution problem: who reaches the customer, who owns the pipe. This week I think it is also a trust problem, the same story told from the other side. As the old vessels empty, the faith they held has to be rehoused. And increasingly, it is being deposited with us. With brands. With companies. With employers. With the strangers in our feeds who feel like friends.

This is the part that should make every marketer sit up.

Before I go further, two confessions of my own.

The first: almost every number in this argument comes from someone with a stake in the answer. The Reuters report's principal sponsor is Google, the company doing more than any other to disintermediate the news it measures. Edelman, whose Trust Barometer I am about to lean on, is a communications firm whose entire model rests on the premise that business must broker trust. The cheeriest data on advertising comes from the advertising industry's own think tank. Read all of it, as I do, with one eyebrow raised.

The second: there is a respectable view that this whole thesis is marketing flattering itself. Serious people in our industry think the idea that anyone "belongs" to a brand is faintly absurd, even a little sinister, and that most brand communities barely exist in any meaningful sense. They have a point. A great deal of what we dress up as devotion is really habit, convenience and decent distribution wearing the costume of faith. Keep that objection in your pocket. We will need it later.

Look at where faith used to live.

Organised religion was the most trusted institution in the Western world within a dozen generations of memory. It topped Gallup's rankings, since there have been such rankings, from 1973 to 1985 (Gallup). Today barely a third of Americans express confidence in it. The share identifying as Christian has fallen from 78% in 2007 to 62% (Pew Research Center), and the religiously unaffiliated now number nearly one in three (Pew Research Center). Government polls near historic lows (Pew Research Center). Trust in the news, as we have seen, has never been lower (Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026).

And before anyone reaches for the comforting story, that the faith is simply transferring from one institution to another, that as the church empties the boardroom fills, the data refuses to cooperate. Confidence is falling almost everywhere at once. Generalised social trust, the basic belief that most people can be trusted, has been sliding for decades and now sits at around a third (Pew Research Center).

So what happens to what is left?

You can see the answer inside the news data itself. Even as trust in "the news" in the abstract has collapsed, the specific, familiar brands people actually read are trusted far more, often by half their audience or more, against a category figure stuck in the thirties (Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026). Trust didn't leave. It got more selective about where it landed.

That is the pattern the wider research keeps finding too. When the world feels less trustworthy, people do not stop trusting altogether. They pull their faith in close. Studies of populations under economic stress show the same move every time: trust in the distant and the abstract falls, while trust in the near and the specific rises (Frontiers in Psychology, 2018). We withdraw the deposit from the institution and hand it to whatever is within arm's reach.

And what is within arm's reach is, increasingly, commerce.

Edelman now finds business is the most trusted institution on earth at 64%, ahead of government and (for the first time) judged more ethical than NGOs (Edelman Trust Barometer 2026). "My employer" scores higher than any of them, at 78% (Edelman Trust Barometer 2026). The substitution is not a metaphor: researchers at Duke have shown that brands and religiosity function as genuine substitutes, both supplying identity, community, self-expression and a sense of worth, such that the more people lean on one, the less they need the other (Duke University). Other work finds that loneliness measurably increases brand love (Cardiff University, 2025). The pew empties; the brand community fills the silence. We read ingredient labels the way our grandparents read scripture: for assurance, for a moral account of what we are bringing into the house.

But notice what should be receiving this retreating faith, and largely isn't. The vessel with the oldest and truest claim to our trust is not a company. It is the people across the kitchen table. Family. Kin. The neighbour. If trust were genuinely coming home, that is where it would go, to the institutions that predate every brand on earth by tens of thousands of years. Some of it does. But a historically unprecedented share is being deposited instead with employers, with brands, and (this is the part I would call sad if it were not so consequential) with creators and influencers: strangers we trust because they feel relatable, even as the same Reuters data shows we know they are less reliable and less impartial than the institutions we are abandoning.

We are handing the kitchen-table trust to the shop and the screen.

Does the brand benefit from all this? Yes. And it may be the most precarious gift in commerce.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Grief Test: whether a brand's disappearance would cause genuine grief, and the uncomfortable truth beneath it: that the meaning of an iconic brand is not owned by the company but lent to it by the people who made it iconic, and can be withdrawn. Scale that up. The faith now flowing to brands is borrowed faith. It arrives without a deed. Loyalty that once lasted decades can now unravel in weeks, the moment a brand mistakes being trusted for being owed.

Much of it never reaches the brand at all. When trust migrates to the relatable individual, the creator banks it and the brand merely rents it, at rising rates, as I argued in Megaphones and Mirrors. The influencer is the one who is trusted. The brand is paying for proximity to someone else's congregation.

And there is the expectation that comes attached. Accept the role the church and the town hall have vacated, and you inherit their job description: provide meaning, take moral positions, hold the community together. Brands that grab at that role discover the bill: the boycotts, the culture-war crossfire, the speed at which a flock becomes a mob. The faith is real. So is the liability.

So what do you do with a faith that was meant for somewhere else and has landed, unearned, with you?

You earn it the only way faith has ever been earned: up close, over time, through repetition. Not the megaphone but the sacrament. The small, reliable, repeated act. I keep returning to the corner store, the one that knew the why and not just the what. That kind of trust was never bought in a media plan. It was accrued, one honest transaction at a time.

Three things to actually do.

Stop confusing reach with trust.

Being seen by millions is distribution; being chosen again by one person is faith, and they are not the same line on the dashboard.

Audit where your trust actually sits.

Is it in your brand, or is it rented from a creator who could walk tomorrow? Build the relationship you own, not the one you let.

Treat every repeated interaction as the real liturgy of your brand.

The product that performs, the service that holds, the promise kept quietly. People do not return to a sermon. They return to the thing that has never let them down.

This is where running a physical brand sharpens the mind. A food brand has to be chosen again every single week. There is no borrowed congregation, no algorithmic distribution that stands in for the moment someone reaches past nine alternatives and picks yours, again. It is one of the last places in an ordinary life where trust is genuinely earned rather than assumed by a weekly, unglamorous communion no platform can fake. That, not the grand gesture, is the model.

Trust didn't die. It went looking for somewhere to land. Finding the cathedral empty, the town hall hollow and the family table set for fewer people than it used to be, it settled on the shop. Not because the shop earned it. Because the shop was open.

Every marketer should be clear-eyed about what that makes us: not the rightful keepers of a society's faith, but its landlords of last resort. You can collect the rent: the data, the loyalty, the borrowed devotion, and ask no questions. Or you can treat what has been deposited with you as something that belongs, by rights, to older and worthier homes, and earn the keeping of it the only way it has ever been earned: up close, over time, one repeated choice at a time.

The faith will be placed somewhere. It always is. The only question we get to answer is whether we deserve to receive it.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 18 June 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.