Key Takeaways

1. A Pew Research Center survey of 25 nations found 53% of Americans see their fellow citizens as morally bad — the highest of any country surveyed.

2. Moral disconnection isn’t random. The data tracks directly to the breakdown of family structure and the erosion of marriage.

3. Fox News cited Communio founder J.P. De Gance to explain why — and his answer pointed to the local church as the primary solution.

4. When families are healthy, communities build trust. When marriages are strong, moral formation happens naturally — in the home, in the pew, in the neighborhood.

5. Churches that invest in marriage and family ministry are doing more than building programs. They’re rebuilding the social and moral fabric of their communities.

The Research: A Survey That Put a Number on What Everyone Is Feeling

Researchers at the Pew Research Center surveyed adults across 25 countries and asked a deceptively simple question: Do you see your fellow citizens as morally bad?

In America, the answer was striking. Fifty-three percent of Americans said yes — higher than any other nation surveyed. When Fox News covered the story this week, it quickly became one of the most widely shared articles on the platform. The headline hit a nerve because it put a number to something millions of people have already been sensing: something is wrong with the way we see each other.

The question the story raised wasn’t just “what happened” — it was “who can fix it.”

The Core Finding: When Families Break, Trust Breaks With Them

The Pew data doesn’t just reveal a problem. It points to a cause.

Fox News asked J.P. De Gance, founder of Communio, to explain the finding. His answer was unambiguous: families are where we learn to trust and to love. When family structures break down — when marriages weaken, when children grow up without the stability of a two-parent home, when households lose their shared identity — moral formation breaks down with them.

This connection between family health and civic trust is one of the most consistently replicated findings in social science. Children raised in stable, committed households are significantly more likely to develop the prosocial behaviors — empathy, trust, and lasting commitment — that hold communities together. When those families fracture at scale, the cultural consequences become measurable.

That’s what 53% looks like. It’s not a spiritual crisis imported from nowhere. It’s the downstream effect of decades of family breakdown — and it’s playing out in every zip code in America.

The Counterintuitive Angle: The Solution Isn’t National. It’s Local.

Here’s what most coverage of this story misses.

The instinct when facing a moral crisis is to look upstream for a moral solution — better education, stronger civic institutions, more public discourse. And while none of those are wrong, the research points to a different root cause entirely.

Moral formation doesn’t primarily happen in classrooms or civic forums. It happens in families. Specifically, in the daily, demanding work of marriage and parenting — where trust is practiced, where conflict is navigated, where commitment is modeled over and over, year after year.

Which means the most powerful moral renewal strategy in America isn’t a national conversation. It’s a local one. It’s a pastor who invests in the marriages of his congregation. It’s a church that becomes the place where families are built and strengthened before they break.

The solution to a national crisis lives at the neighborhood level. And the local church is uniquely positioned to lead it.

What This Means for Your Church

At Communio, we’ve spent years studying the relationship between marriage health, family flourishing, and the vitality of local churches — and the Pew data fits squarely within what our nationwide research consistently shows.

When churches make relationship ministry a strategic priority — not a side program, but a core part of how they serve their congregation — something measurable happens. Marriages stabilize. Families strengthen. And the church becomes a trusted anchor in its community, the place people turn when life gets hard.

Think about the families in your congregation right now. The couples navigating financial pressure and communication breakdown. The young parents exhausted and isolated. The newly married couples who haven’t yet built the patterns they’ll need for the decades ahead. These families don’t just need a sermon about marriage. They need a church that shows up with tools, resources, and community.

That’s the work Communio partners with churches to do. Through data-informed relationship ministry, churches can become what the research says communities desperately need: a place where marriages are invested in before they break, and where the next generation grows up with the moral formation that only strong families can provide.

For churches, this moment points to a clear opportunity. The cultural need is visible. The data is on your side. And your church is already the most capable institution in your community to answer it.

Take the Next Step

Communio works with pastors across the country to design and implement marriage and family ministry that’s rooted in research, built for real congregations, and proven to produce results.

► Read the full Fox News article → foxnews.com/media/new-poll-finds-americans-likely-see-each-other-morally-bad-expert-says-strong-families-can-help

► Explore Communio’s nationwide research on faith, marriage, and family → communio.org/research

► Book a free 15-minute consultation with our team → https://communio.org/learnmore/

Credit: This post draws on reporting by Fox News and research from the Pew Research Center’s global survey on moral perceptions. Read the original Fox News article here.