Tim Goeglein, vice president of Focus on the Family, traces the crumbling faith in institutions to the rebellion of the 1960s

The continued erosion of trust in American institutions has its roots in the utopian cultural revolution of the 1960s, former George W. Bush aide Tim Goeglein argues in a new book.

Mr. Goeglein, a vice president at the conservative Christian advocacy group Focus on the Family since 2009, offers faith-based ideas for right-wingers to turn that around without placing their faith in flawed structures.

“I am an inveterate optimist and I believe that recovery and renewal are possible, but will never happen along progressive lines,” Mr. Goeglein said in an interview. “It will never be a top-down solution from Hollywood, Wall Street or Silicon Valley. At the most local level, people need to re-engage in our churches and communities where we live.”

Mr. Goeglein, a former deputy to White House strategist Karl Rove, shares his perspective in “Stumbling Toward Utopia: How the 1960s Turned Into a National Nightmare and How We Can Revive the American Dream.”

His chapters show how cultural rebellions in morality, education, entertainment, the tax world, families, organized religion, and public civility taught generations of Americans to ignore the traditional guardrails that protected their parents and grandparents from violent chaos.

The title refers to “Utopia,” a 16th-century satire by British statesman Sir Thomas More that described an ideal society and showed how it could never exist in the real world.

In Mr. Goeglein’s account of today’s political divisions, politicians on both sides of the aisle, shaped by the values ​​of the 1960s, have worked over the decades to turn the U.S. into a utopia.

“Instead, they took a wrecking ball to society and America has never been the same,” he writes in the introduction. “All you have to do is look at today’s culture to see the damage done by the utopians of the 1960s.”

The book comes at a time when public and private sector institutions have declined in popularity in recent decades, with distrust of institutions like the medical industry and the federal government increasing in national surveys during pandemic lockdowns.

The Pew Research Center reported in April that only 22% of Americans trust the federal government to do what is right “almost always/most of the time.” That was down from 24% in April 2021 and 27% in April 2020.

An annual Gallup poll released in July found that an average of 28% of adults expressed confidence in 16 leading institutions, statistically the same as an all-time low of 26% last year. Only 29% of respondents expressed “a lot” or “quite a lot” of trust in public schools, 28% in organized labor, 12% in television news, and 36% in the medical system.

Only small businesses, the military and police received the majority of support in this year’s Gallup poll, which had a margin of error of 4 percentage points. The company has conducted the annual survey since 1993.

“The latest average of 28% marks the third consecutive year that confidence has been below 30%,” Gallup senior editor Megan Brenan wrote in a summary of the findings. “Before 2022, the average trust was between 31% and 43%.”

Organized religion has also taken a hit. According to Gallup, American church membership fell below the majority for the first time in 2021, to 47%. That’s down from 73% in 1937, when the polling board first examined the issue.

Mr. Goeglein, a practicing Lutheran who grew up in Indiana, expressed concern about the trend. Among other roles in the Bush administration, he helped establish the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001.

“In many ways, the radicalism of the 1960s reduced many churches and seminaries to a shell of what they used to be, replacing good theology with progressive politics,” he said during his interview.

Mr. Goeglein, 60, was born during the tumultuous decade and remembered coming of age in its aftermath.

“In the 1960s and 1970s, moral relatism and nihilism were considered standard for children, while education was being reimagined along progressive lines,” he said. “I think this has broadened and contributed to the polarization of our country and deliberately made it more difficult to find harmony in the public square.”

He linked the progressive influences of 20th-century social engineering lawyer John Dewey on public education and Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky on citizen protests to a loss of trust in authority – culminating in recent trends such as Americans’ growing distrust in the higher education system. to ensure freedom of expression on campuses after anti-Israel campus protests last year.

In the book, Mr. Goeglein outlines how the collapse of faith in organized religion parallels a decline in the number of people who believe the U.S. enforces its laws fairly. He says this has contributed to an increase in social isolation and created culture wars that divide people who used to be friends.

According to the most recent data, the U.S. ranked 26th out of 142 countries last year in the World Bank’s measure of countries that uphold the rule of law. It ranks 24th on Transparency International’s list of countries with the least perceived corruption.

By comparison, the US ranked 16th in rule of law and 15th in perceived corruption in 1996.

“The result is a discouraged and divided America,” Mr. Goeglein wrote. “Neighbors are pitted against neighbors, and in many cases, family members are pitted against other family members.”

On the other hand, decades of surveys have shown that most Americans still trust local professionals over national organizations — including their primary care physician over the medical industry, their pastor over religious hierarchies, and their local police over the criminal justice system.

While Mr. Goeglein’s book does not highlight politicians or cultural issues, it points to a renewed commitment to local culture as a way to restore unity to the nation.

In his interview, he urged Americans with conservative and traditional values ​​to run for local school board, write screenplays, get involved in the fine arts and participate everywhere in “the things that make America so special and unique.” .

“I am a Burkean who believes you have to reform to preserve,” he said. Goeglein said, referring to 18th-century conservative English statesman Edmund Burke. “Too often progressivism dominates our institutions, and I think reforming our institutions rather than abandoning them is the way forward.”