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Good morning. In a discussion on this programme yesterday about the troubling reports concerning the CBI, Baroness Morrissey said, ‘Losing trust is so easy to do; regaining it is so difficult.’ Public life today offers a wide spectrum of responses to the loss of trust. On one end we see cancel culture, where some people on social media attempt to obliterate permanently a person who crosses what they perceive as a red line. At the other end we observe what some have called an age of impunity, in which leaders can commit no end of transgressions without ever being called to account. In between there is the ‘ministerial code,’ where a swift resignation has often been followed by a season of penance, after which ‘rehabilitation by reshuffle’ occurs a year or two later. This makes trust sound like a commodity one can cynically trade, as a dealer on the stock market guesses whether shares will go up or down. But trust is more profound than that. Society rests on people keeping their promises, not taking advantage of power differentials, giving others the benefit of the doubt, keeping one another safe. These things only work if they’re treated not just as utilitarian means to a worthwhile end, but as ends in themselves. A person of integrity is one you can trust, even when no one’s looking. The Christian faith is sometimes regarded as a series of arbitrary beliefs about things that don’t matter or can’t be proved. But faith is about something more fundamental than that. Faith is about trust. What matters about faith in the end is not whether you believe a certain thing happened on a certain day: it’s about whether you can trust something beyond your sense-experience, beyond your imagination, beyond this existence. The life of faith is about deepening that sense of trust in the beyond, usually known as God, extending that sense of trust with one another, and strengthening the practices that uphold trust, so that they work even under pressure and even with strangers. Central among those practices are how individuals are held accountable and restored after a breach of trust, and how those damaged by betrayal learn to trust again. Look how ubiquitous the word trust is: a development trust, investment trust, the National Trust – and the notion of a trustee. Trust is the bedrock of society, and faith and trust are different words for the same thing. That thing is, how we learn to depend on things we can’t control. That’s not a niche pursuit for a minority: it’s a daily discovery for everybody.