Americans’ trust in the honesty and ethical standards of pastors continues to decline, but it remains far higher than that of professions at the bottom of the list, including Congress and telemarketers.
That’s according to a new Gallup survey, which found that a record-low 27 percent of U.S. adults rate the honesty and ethics of clergy as high or very high, while 48 percent rate them as average and 18 percent as low or very low.
The nation’s trust in pastors has fallen sharply over the past decade. In 2015, 45 percent of Americans rated the honesty and ethics of clergy as high or very high. That figure dropped to 37 percent in 2018 and 32 percent in 2023.
Nurses are the most trusted profession, with 75 percent of Americans ranking them high or very high, followed by military veterans (67 percent), medical doctors (57 percent), and pharmacists (53 percent). High school teachers, at 50 percent, are the only other profession to clear that threshold.
Clergy rank ninth out of 21 professions in trust.
“Nurses have outpaced all other professions since being added to the list in 1999, with the exception of one year, 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when firefighters made their lone appearance,” Gallup’s Megan Brenan wrote in an online analysis.
Prior to 1999, Gallup said, pharmacists and clergy members often were the highest-rated professions. That began to change in the early 2000s, when widespread revelations of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church eroded public trust.
But clergy are not alone in seeing public confidence decline. Pharmacists, high school teachers, and police officers also fell to record lows in public trust in the latest Gallup survey. In fact, Gallup’s long-term tracking shows the average positive rating across 11 core professions has dropped to 29 percent, its lowest ever, after staying near 40 percent in the early 2000s and around 35 percent through most of the 2010s.
Last modified: January 31, 2026
