The Shrinking of the Neighbor

What's happening

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, released in January from a survey of 33,938 respondents across 28 countries fielded October 25 to November 16, 2025, finds that 70 percent of people globally are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone whose values, facts, problem-solving, or cultural background differ from their own. Edelman frames the year as a shift "from a crisis of grievance to a crisis of insularity."

Only 32 percent globally believe the next generation will be better off, with the steepest drops in India and China at 13 points each. The U.S. now shows the largest income-based trust gap of any country surveyed, at 29 points. The global mass-class gap has more than doubled since 2012.

Edelman is a public relations firm, and its survey is online and self-reported. The trend, however, is consistent with two decades of declining institutional trust data.

What the Text says

A lawyer asks Jesus a procedural question. Who counts as the neighbor I am required to love. Jesus answers with a story.

Luke 10:29-3729But he, desiring to justify himself, asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?"30Jesus answered, "A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead.31By chance a certain priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side.32In the same way a Levite also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side.33But a certain Samaritan, as he traveled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion,34came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.35On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, and gave them to the host, and said to him, 'Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.'36Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers?"37He said, "He who showed mercy on him." Then Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

The Greek word the lawyer uses is plesion, the one nearby. He wants the radius defined. Jesus moves the hero of the story to a Samaritan, the closest analogue in his audience to a tribally and religiously despised outsider. Samaritans and Jews shared a border, a partial scripture, and a long account of mutual contempt. To a first-century Jewish listener, the sentence "a Samaritan came where he was" lands as an insult to the genre. The hero is not supposed to be him.

Jesus then inverts the lawyer's question. He does not say who qualifies as your neighbor. He asks which of the three acted as one. The radius is set by the actor, not the recipient.

The reflection

Insularity is not new. The lawyer in Luke 10 was practicing it out loud, and his instinct to draw a tight circle is older than any survey.

What is new is the infrastructure. A first-century lawyer had to walk past the wounded man to avoid him. A 2026 reader can spend an entire day inside a feed engineered to remove him from view before the encounter ever begins.

Seventy percent is not a measure of how much people dislike the stranger. It is a measure of how rarely they meet one.