A new Gallup poll released this week confirms what many of us have felt in our bones for years: Americans no longer trust the institutions that once held our society together. And as a Christian who believes truth matters more than comfortable illusions, I don’t think this collapse happened by chance. I believe we are watching the fruit of a deliberate strategy — one that a Soviet defector warned us about decades ago.
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Poll numbers tell a sobering story of divided trust
Gallup’s poll, conducted in the first half of June across 14 private and public institutions, found that most Americans’ confidence is sitting at or near record lows dating back to 1993.
Consider what we’re trusting less and less:
- The medical system has tied its lowest rating ever, at just 28%.
- Newspapers sit at a dismal 17%, and public schools at 27% — both a single point above their historic lows.
- The military, long a pillar of national pride, has fallen to 61%, one point above its own record low.
- The police, organized religion, the Supreme Court, and Congress are all within two points of all-time lows — 45, 33, 27, and a staggering 9%, respectively.
- Big business, the criminal justice system, and television news are each sitting at just 17, 17, and 14%.
- The presidency fares somewhat better at 27%, still four points above its all-time low.
Gallup’s own explanation is that Americans no longer share a “broad faith” in civic and government institutions, and instead filter trust entirely through partisan lines. Republicans trust the military, police, the presidency, the Supreme Court, and big business at more than double the rate of Democrats. Democrats trust higher education, newspapers, and television news at more than double the rate of Republicans. The gap in the presidency alone is 18-fold.
Four stages to a nation’s collapse — from the inside
I’ve given talks on this very subject because I believe what we’re watching is not random social drift. It bears the unmistakable signature of a Marxist strategy shared by a man named Yuri Bezmenov.
Bezmenov was a Soviet journalist and KGB agent who defected to the West in 1970. In a now-famous 1983 lecture, he explained that the Soviet approach to defeating a nation was never primarily about missiles or spies. Espionage, he said, made up only a small fraction of the KGB’s actual work. The real weapon was ideological subversion: a patient, deliberate process of reshaping a society’s mind so it would dismantle itself from within. He laid out four stages.
1. Demoralization (15–20 years). Through education, media, and culture, a population is taught to doubt its own history, its moral foundations, its God, and its national identity. Bezmenov was blunt about how this stage ends: a demoralized person becomes unable to process the truth even when it’s placed directly in front of them. Facts stop mattering. That should sound familiar to anyone who has tried to have a reasoned conversation across the political aisle in the last several years.
2. Destabilization (2–5 years). Once the moral and spiritual foundation is eroded, the next phase targets the pillars that hold a functioning society together — the economy, law enforcement, national defense, and foreign relations. The goal is dysfunction: institutions that can no longer be relied upon to do their basic jobs.
3. Crisis (weeks to months). A rapid-onset shock — political, social, or economic — that the population, already demoralized and destabilized, is unprepared to weather. Crisis creates fear, and fear creates an opening.
4. Normalization. A “new normal” is introduced in the aftermath of a crisis, one that looks like stability on the surface but that has permanently reshaped what the population accepts, tolerates, and no longer questions. The subversion becomes the new baseline, and most people never realize how far the ground has shifted beneath them.
Look again at the Gallup numbers through that lens. Trust in the medical system, the media, public schools, the courts, and Congress isn’t dropping in isolation — it’s dropping everywhere, all at once, on both sides of nearly every institution we once shared in common. That is not the natural result of a few bad news cycles. That is what a nation looks like after decades of sustained demoralization — a nation that has been taught, patiently and systematically, to distrust truth itself, to distrust its own foundations, and increasingly, to distrust one another.
Why would anyone want this?
This is the question I get most often when I give this talk at conferences around the nation: why would anyone deliberately want Americans to distrust their own doctors, schools, courts, and churches? What’s the payoff?
The answer becomes clear once you understand what America actually is. This nation was founded on biblical principles — the belief that human beings have God-given rights, that law flows from a moral order higher than the state, that liberty of conscience matters because every person is made in the image of God. That foundation didn’t just shape our own laws and culture; it made America the single greatest launching pad for the Gospel and for Judeo-Christian values the world has ever seen. Missionaries, Bibles, humanitarian aid, and biblical ideas of human dignity and freedom have gone out from this country to every continent for over two centuries. A nation like that is not incidental to Marxist ideology — it is the primary obstacle to it.
Marxism, at its root, is a materialist worldview. It denies that there is a God who defines right and wrong, and it insists that all human institutions — family, church, private property, law — are just tools of “oppression” that must be dismantled before a “just” society can be built. That means Marxism cannot simply out-argue Christianity or out-vote it. It must first convince a population that the foundations of our nation that they’ve trusted — their faith, their family structure, their schools, their justice system, their national story — are themselves corrupt, oppressive, and unworthy of loyalty. Only after people stop trusting those foundations will they be willing to let them be replaced. In fact, just this week, Democratic Socialists who are gaining a foothold in the Democrat party announced that they seek to disintegrate the U.S. Senate — one of our founding institutions of government. Right on cue.
This is exactly why the target of ideological subversion was never really “the government.” It was trust in God — trust in God-ordained family, trust in godly identity, trust in country, trust in truth as something knowable at all. Here’s why that’s so strategically brilliant, and so dangerous:
- A people who distrust their institutions will let them be replaced. You cannot convince Americans to abandon a constitution, a church, or a family structure they still believe in and trust. But if you can first convince them that the courts are corrupt, the church is hypocritical, traditional families are irrelevant, patriotism is bigotry, and the country’s founding was shameful rather than providential, then people will not just tolerate radical change — they’ll demand it.
- A demoralized people stop defending what’s good because they no longer believe anything is objectively good. Once truth becomes “your truth” and “my truth,” and morality becomes a matter of power rather than a reflection of God’s character, there’s no longer a fixed standard to defend. That’s not a byproduct of Marxist ideology — that’s the entire goal. Relativism clears the field for whoever holds power to define “truth” next.
- A nation ashamed of its own founding will not resist being remade. If Americans can be taught to see their history only through a lens of guilt and oppression rather than also seeing genuine, God-given progress, gratitude for that founding disappears. And a people with no gratitude for what they’ve inherited will not fight to preserve it.
- A divided, distrustful population cannot organize a unified defense. Bezmenov himself noted that a demoralized society becomes unable to agree on basic facts, which is precisely what the Gallup numbers show us: two populations trusting almost entirely different institutions, unable to even agree on what’s true, let alone what’s worth saving.
This is why the tearing down of trust doesn’t require a single shot fired, a single tank in the street, or a single law passed by force. It only requires patience. Demoralize a generation slowly enough, and the population will do the work of dismantling its own foundations voluntarily, believing the whole time that they are the ones enacting justice and progress. That is the genius, and the horror, of ideological subversion: the target society becomes the instrument of its own undoing.
A biblical lens on what’s happening
None of this is actually new, even if the tools — mass media, universities, entertainment, now social media — have modernized. Scripture warns us plainly that this kind of spiritual and societal erosion is a pattern as old as the Garden itself: a lie whispered patiently, question by question, until people no longer trust what God has already told them is good. “The wisdom of this world is folly with God” (1 Corinthians 3:19), and Scripture tells us to test everything and hold fast to what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21) rather than being carried about by every wind of doctrine (Ephesians 4:14). A demoralized, subverted mind is exactly the target Paul describes when he warns of people who are “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7).
This is precisely why institutions rooted in eternal truth rather than shifting cultural consensus matter so much right now. When the medical system, the government, the courts, and the press are all cracking under the weight of distrust, believers are not called to despair — we are called to be the stable foundation that remains when everything else is shaking. “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2) is not just a private spiritual instruction; it is a civic one.
A demoralized people cannot be renewed by more information or more institutions — they can only be renewed by truth, and ultimately by the one who is truth (John 14:6).
Why this matters for us now
I don’t share this to spread fear or cynicism — that would only serve the very process Bezmenov described. I share it because recognizing the strategy is the first step toward resisting it. A demoralized people cannot be reasoned back into trust by statistics alone. They need a return to truth, to moral clarity, and — from where I sit — a return to God as the foundation beneath every institution we’ve built.
If we understand that this erosion of trust has been purposely decades in the making, and that it follows the predictable, destructive work of the enemy, we can respond with prayer and action instead of despair.
(This article was originally published at The Christian Post. Photo Credit: Pla2na/Getty Images)
