The Courage to Trust

Jim Checkley

July 8, 2012

According to polls, “trust” is at an all time low within our country. Government, lawyers, the media, politicians, and others are setting all time low marks for trust. They say that when trust is broken in a relationship, it is very difficult to repair and it is usually time to move on. But how do you move on from yourself? Moreover, trust is not just an external phenomenon; it is in fact important to our own inner well being, and somewhat like forgiveness, often says more about us than about them. Checkley first attended the Church in 1977 and has been conducting services since 1987. He looks forward to taking the pulpit for the 28th time.

Sermon: The Courage to Trust

Author’s note: I have revised this from the talk given at the Church. The big change is to the discussion of meetings by avatar, which were prompted by a post-service discussion with an IBM employee. The vast majority of the rest are the usual changes to go from an oral presentation to a written document, including details and back-up not included in the sermon as delivered.

There is an old joke that goes: What’s the opposite of progress? The answer? Congress.

Congress has been the butt of jokes for years, but last October, trust in Congress to do the right thing fell to an all-time low. Only 9 percent of respondents to a New York Times poll said they “approved” of how Congress was conducting its business. And, American’s trust in their government overall reached a new low – even below Watergate levels – with just 10 percent of those polled believing government will do what is right “all” or “most of the time.”

This isn’t much of a surprise is it? What may be somewhat more surprising is the fact that Congress and the government have plenty of company. According to the polls, the trust Americans have in just about everything is at an all-time low.

In late June of this year, a Gallup poll showed that trust in the public education system had fallen again, with only 29 percent of respondents having “a great deal of confidence” in education. This is down from 58 percent in 1958, when Gallup first began conducting the poll. Banks have been hit hard, down 24 percentage points since 2002 to where only 22 percent of respondents in a 2011 Gallup poll said they had confidence in the banking system. And of some interest to us today, trust in organized religious institutions, despite the United States being one of the most religious countries on the planet, is also at an all-time low. Even trust in the future is at an all-time low, with a majority of Americans believing for the first time in recorded history that the next generation will not be as well off as they are.

To give you some more flavor of how pervasive lack of trust is in America, let me provide you just a few more numbers. These percentages represent the people who in a 2010 Harris Poll said they had a high level of confidence in the institution in question: TV news at 17 percent, major corporations at 15 percent, the press at 13 percent, law firms at 13 percent, and Wall Street dead last at 8 percent.

And by all-time low, I really mean it. Here’s some interesting context for these numbers: according to the Associated Press, 34 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, which is higher than any of the numbers I quoted above. This means that more Americans think that their homes could be haunted than believe that they will get a fair shake at their banks, that major corporations will do the right thing, or that the press tells the truth.

So are there any institutions that are doing well? A couple. In the referenced 2010 Harris Poll, people gave only two institutions ratings at or over 50 percent in terms of having great confidence that they would do the right thing. What were they? The military at 59 percent and small business at exactly 50 percent. The next highest was colleges and universities at only 35 percent. And among the professions, we still trust health workers like doctors and nurses, although the numbers have fallen, while firefighters, teachers, and pharmacists round out the top four.

There’s one point of special interest to me given my background in science. And that is the fact that trust in science is also at an all-time low. That is, the number of conservatives who say they have a “great deal” of trust in science has fallen to 35 percent, down 28 points from the mid-1970s, according to a recent academic paper by Gordon Gauchet published in the American Sociological Review. According to the paper, the trust that “moderates” and “liberals” have in science has remained steady since the 70s, while that of conservatives has plummeted.

Bear with me, because I want to talk about this just a little bit. What’s disturbing about this is that we are not talking about uneducated conservatives. Nope. We are talking about educated conservatives, those with college degrees and graduate degrees. According to Gauchet, conservatives with college degrees decreased in trust faster over the time period studied than those with only a high school diploma. He finds this result profound because, “it implies that conservative discontent with science was not attributed to the uneducated, but to rising distrust among educated conservatives.”

But this fact is itself quite disturbing to me because it implies that this lack of trust is political and ideological and has little to do with science itself having been shown to be untrustworthy, even considering the politicization of global climate change. Gauchet says: “It kind of began with the loss of Barry Goldwater and the construction of Fox News and all these [conservative] think tanks. The perception among conservatives is that they’re at a disadvantage, a minority. It’s not surprising that the conservative subculture would challenge what’s viewed as the dominant knowledge production groups in society-science and the media.”

I would suggest to you that this polarization between the right and the left has in fact impacted every single aspect of America and the people’s trust in government, institutions, communities, and even themselves. Take, for example, the recent Supreme Court decision on health care. You would think that of all the institutions of government, the Supreme Court would be viewed as providing an objective decision based on law. But as the prognostication over health care and other important cases has shown, that is not the case. We see the Court as ideologically split and when Chief Justice Roberts upheld the health care law under the tax and spend authority, conservatives felt betrayed and liberals were stunned. The way Fox News reported it, you’d think that Roberts had just sold the country down the river-and I suppose that’s how conservatives felt. But that’s not how it’s supposed to be. We are so used to an ideological, if not cynical, view of the Court that we can’t remember well the days when there was at least an outwardly expressed belief that the Court would do what was right under the Constitution.

Now, I’m sure that a lot of this isn’t news to you. You live it every day just as I do. So you may be thinking, “Yes, Jim, things are bad. We know that. People can’t be trusted, institutions can’t be trusted, government can’t be trusted, seems like nothing can be trusted. What’s a person supposed to do?” My answer to you today is as simple as it is difficult: Trust anyway. That’s the lesson I want to bring to you today. Yes, it’s bad out there and we have been betrayed at every level, but it is important, imperative even, that we regain our sense of trust.

I know. Sometimes it is silly to trust. That’s one of the lessons of the Scorpion and the Frog. Sometimes it is silly, dangerous, and foolish to trust. And I get that and I’m not suggesting that we act foolishly. There is, however, a big difference in having an attitude of trust and being a dimwit and trusting when trust is a silly thing to do.

You know, the thing about the Scorpion and the Frog is that the lesson is that scorpions, and by extension, people, cannot help themselves, even if it means their death. Scorpions sting. And people, well, people betray our trust. We have plenty of examples of that right? Think of all the politicians who ruined their careers having affairs. I’m not going to name them, you know who they are. In fact, history is riddled with men and women who just couldn’t help themselves and in the process hurt others and ultimately ruined themselves and their careers.

But from a religious point of view, the story of the Scorpion and the Frog goes even further. Catholics and Fundamentalists believe in the doctrine of Original Sin. Original Sin says that all humans are born sinners, corrupted, as it were, by the sin of Adam and Eve, and from the moment of birth until death are nothing but sin machines. I found a wonderful expression of this belief online, where a fundamentalist minister claimed: “Have you ever heard about busy people who ‘hit the ground running’? In the delivery room we hit the obstetrician’s catcher’s mitt sinning. We’re born as sinners.”

But we don’t believe this, do we, we Unitarian Universalists? Do we believe that people are born sinners, corrupted by Original Sin? I don’t think so. We may be a creedless church, but we do have the Seven Principles, and I don’t think that believing that all people hit the obstetrician’s catcher’s mitt sinning is consistent with them. In fact, such a belief is wholly inconsistent with the very first principle: that we avow the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This seems to put us on the opposite end from the Catholics and the Fundamentalists, who believe that all babies are born corrupted. Not much inherent worth and dignity there.

Even so, we UUs are not naive and recognize that people will betray trust, behave badly, and even commit atrocious acts. But our first principle, our opening position, is to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Said another way, we begin with an attitude of trust, and go from there. This reminds me that I want to say a few words about the saying that I put on the cover of the order of service: “In God we trust, all others pay cash.” You’ve heard it before, right? In Islam there is a similar saying: “Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel.” I kind of like that one. Even had it made into a t-shirt back in the 70s. And the sentiment expressed by these sayings reminds me of Ronald Regan famously saying about a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union: “Trust, but verify.”

These sayings all make sense to us on a gut level. But, are they really talking about trusting? Where is the trust if you are going to verify anyway? Might as well just say: “We’ll agree, but only if we can verify because we don’t trust you.” And I don’t know about you, but I don’t think God is going to be ordering coffee and donuts any time soon, so the expression really reduces to: “Pay up now, because we actually don’t trust you to pay later.” And finally, I can’t claim to know much about camels, but I suspect that they, like horses, don’t stay put unless they are hitched to a rail. So the expression should be, “Tie up your camel, because if it runs away, it’s your fault, not Allah’s, who doesn’t seem to care what happens to anybody’s camel.”

Now, I’m making light of this, but there is a very profound question here. That question is: can we trust, I mean truly trust, in a world where we know the only things we can trust 100 percent of the time are death, taxes, and, at least since 1908, the Chicago Cubs not winning the World Series? I’ve made a little joke here, but this is actually a very profound question because in an uncertain world, it turns out that trust is essential for all human relationships to work well and for us to be happy. And I’d say that makes trust pretty important. I want to be very clear what I am talking about. There are two kinds of trust that I am talking about. First, there is the common, ordinary trust, which I will call transactional or relational trust. This is where you say, “I’ll be back at seven tonight to pick you up” and lo and behold, there you are at seven that evening. This kind of trust is founded on reciprocity, fairness, and mutual respect and affection. John Gottman, perhaps the most famous marriage counselor in this country, says that we trust in this sense when we believe that the person we trust has our best interest at heart, or, said another way, has our backs and will act accordingly. This then, is the ordinary trust in human relations, and it extends to trusting that institutions, from this church to the government to the banks to the media, all have our backs and will do right by us.

This kind of transactional or relational trust is precious and hard to come by. It’s what we Americans lack in relation to our institutions and leaders, but it also seems to be increasingly lacking in personal relationships. I may be out there on this, but here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: people don’t seem to be getting together to do things like they used to. Everybody wants to do his or her own thing and has a personal music player, personal smart phone, and even when they hang out together, they are alone with their music and their social media. Am I the only one bothered by the proliferation of screens and people’s obsession with them? Is it really the case that having 500 friends on Facebook means you have 500 friends? I believe you can’t know if somebody is truly your friend until he or she has inconvenienced himself or herself for you. Are all those Facebook friends ready to inconvenience themselves for you? And how would you know?

And here’s something for you in the hanging out and getting to know people department. Did you know that IBM at one time conducted meetings by avatar and that in 2009 that company rolled out a service called Virtual Collaboration for Lotus Sametime, where users set up and use virtual meeting spaces? It’s true. People who attend the meeting manipulate a two dimensional version of themselves on the screen and shake hands, sit around a table, and talk to each other through the cartoon image. I saw a report on PBS that said that IBM found that when people meet this way, their affinity for each other goes up and they are more cooperative and get more done. In fact, in commenting on the release of Virtual Collaboration, the Information Officer at Northcentral Technical College in Wisconsin was quoted as saying: “College students love to learn and meet in virtual worlds.” So I guess in the not too distant future many of us will be saying, “I may not trust John, since I never met him, but I really like his avatar.” Welcome to the brave new (virtual) world.

And transactional or relational trust, of course, is a two way street. This kind of trust is a reciprocal phenomenon that requires that we ourselves be trustworthy. And how do we become trustworthy? For starters, be honest. Keep your word. Researchers say that by doing the little things right and well, we create an aura of trust.

Keep confidences. Share personal information. If we divulge something of ourselves, we appear to be more trustworthy than when we hold things close to the vest. Of course, discretion is important here-don’t want to scare anybody off.

Do things that are in the best interest of the other person. That is the very definition of trust. Spend time together. In this era of texting and Facebook, nothing beats actually being together, except at IBM, I suppose. Finally, be real. Apologize when you make a mistake. We are all human and will all make mistakes. How we handle our mistakes is important. For example, studies show that doctors who apologize to their patients when they goof up are far less likely to be sued. And remember, most people want to trust. We just have to give them good reasons.

But there is a second kind of trust I want to talk about that is not reciprocal or transactional. This kind of trust is more of a spiritual or innate attitude about life and the world. It’s the trust that comes from an inner strength that provides us with confidence that however the world turns out this day, we will deal with it and be OK. You could call it faith, but I like to think of it more as a trust-a trust that the world is a knowable, understandable place, that I am an integral part of it, just like our UU principles declare, and that each one of us has the ability to create a quality environment for ourselves and others. It’s the ability to approach life with a trusting attitude, one that, like our first principle, allows us to view the world, our institutions, and each other with an opening position of trust that we can change the things we can control and have the wherewithal and ability to deal with those we cannot. I’m not saying it’s easy. But I am saying it is important.

But before I talk about that, I want to suggest that things are not as bad as we may imagine. With our 24/7 cable news outlets trying their best to outdo each other, every single bad thing that happens is burned into our consciousness with laser-like power. You’ve heard the expression, “no news is good news?” Well, I think the media act on the presumption that “good news is no news.” And why not? We seem to be drawn to tragedy, heartache, and loss like the proverbial moth to the flame. So in thinking about having and maintaining an attitude of trust, it is important to consider the media blitz of negative news and take it with a grain of salt.

Having an attitude of trust is important because trust is an essential element of life. Study after study tells us that without trust things break down, whether it’s at a cosmic level, a government level, an institutional level, or a personal level. Here’s your bumper sticker moment: Trust is the lubricant of human interactions. Trust helps us navigate the world in a way that minimizes stress, fear, and worry. When trust is absent, we are under stress, we become first vigilant and then hypervigilant about betrayal, real and imagined, we build walls both figurative and actual, we require confirmation of everything, verification of everything. It gets difficult to do business. It gets difficult to coordinate activities that require cooperation and planning and execution over an extended period of time. Sometimes it gets to be impossible to get anything done. Sounds like Congress, right?

And when we get to that point, when trust is truly ruined, psychologists will tell us that some relationships just can’t be saved. It’s sort of like trying to unburn a burnt pie. It can’t be done. Just have to throw it away and start over. I confess I feel like this with respect to our politics: that it’s broken beyond repair. And there are some studies that would support this conclusion. But then again, what choice do we have but to go forward and try to reconcile enough to at least get along?

Trust is also important because there is powerful evidence that having a trusting attitude leads to happiness. I quoted at the beginning of the service from the book The Geography of Bliss, in which the author explains the connection he found between trust and happiness. That connection is, in a nutshell, that the people who had the most trusting attitude about the world, institutions, and each other, were the happiest people. This makes sense to me given how negative life can be if we have little or no trust in it or ourselves. This also is consistent with studies about happiness in Europe. We Americans might think that the people who live along the Mediterranean would have the greatest overall level of happiness. But this isn’t the case. It turns out that the Danes, the Norwegians, the Swiss, and the Swedes, were the happiest, despite living mostly in the cold and the dark. And not coincidentally, these people also had the strongest attitude of trust.

One more example: a Canadian researcher who looked at the connection between trust at the office and happiness found that just moving up one point on a 10-point scale of trust in the management of the business has the life satisfaction equivalence of something like a one-third increase in income. A little bit of trust equaled a lot of money. Trust and happiness. They go together.

Finally, having a trusting attitude is good for our souls. By this I mean that having a trusting attitude inures to our spiritual benefit much more than it matters to those who we trust. In this respect, I see bringing a trusting attitude to life and its components, be they institutions or people, a little like I see forgiveness. When we forgive, we really need to do it for ourselves, not the other person. Forgiveness takes a load off of our hearts and souls, and lets us be free of the negativity and stress and anger and pain that go with carrying a grudge and being hateful and unforgiving. The act of trusting works in much the same manner. Trusting, even if the face of betrayal, allows us to heal, gets rid of the stress and negativity, and provides a positive psychological environment. Trusting allows us to view the world through lightly tinted rose colored glasses, as it were, and provides a faith in the unfolding of events and our lives that lets us approach life with a better attitude and a better opportunity for happiness.

Again I will emphasize that I am not saying we should act foolishly or naively-far from it. We need to be sensible and take precautions and enter into our transactional and relational trusts deliberately and with eyes wide open. But the courage to trust from a spiritual or innate point of view is more of a perspective, a way we choose to look at the world as we live our lives. For you see, courage is not about ignoring reality or denying anxiety. It is instead the will to act in spite of reality and anxiety.

The courage to trust is choosing to empower yourself and your choices rather than sinking into cynicism and negativity. And here is my last tidbit of the day for you: psychologists tell us that the marriages and friendships and relationships that last the longest and are the happiest are those where the participants view each other through lightly tinted rose colored glasses. As it is with love and friendship, so I suggest it is with life in all its myriad aspects.

Let me conclude by saying this: There are reasons why trust is at an all-time low in virtually every aspect of life we can think of. It would be easy to decide not to trust and instead protect oneself with emotional, psychological, and real walls. But if we want to make things better, both for ourselves and others, then don’t we have to take the first step and even in the face of betrayal, cultivate an attitude of trust? Somebody has to make the first move, and if we want others to trust us, shouldn’t we develop and project an attitude of trust ourselves? That will take courage and will mean being strong inside. It will also mean having the faith and confidence that come what may, be it betrayal or hardship or natural disaster, we can deal with it. And amazingly enough, all evidence says that if we can do this, the payoff for each of us will be a happier more satisfying life.

And trust me, I can live with that.

Presented July 8, 2012 First UU Church Austin, Texas Revised for Print

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