Thought for the Day, 10 July 2004

The Rev. Joel Edwards

A Question of Trust

The spectacle of the former Enron boss, Kenneth Lay, handcuffed to a court officer was an awkward merger of power and pathos.

So complex is the story of Enron that it’s taken the FBI 18 months to scratch the surface on this case of fraud. But there’s nothing complicated about the damage done.

While Enron was giving assurances to its investors and employees, the books deliberately concealed the loss of some £3.8bn

Just how much he knew about precisely what had taken place in the business he developed from a small company to a corporate giant is still left to be seen. And beyond the facts revealed so far, there was something quite powerful about his plea of innocence. As he put it, “failure does not equate to a crime.”

True enough. For one failing doth not a failure make – however big that failing happens to be.

But what is at stake here is not just the enormity of this human and financial tragedy. It’s that this high profile failing joins other scandals such as Maxwell, Barings and Shell in a highly visible constellation of corporate mistrust.

Enron is not just big news; it’s also a symptom of a society in a crisis of trust.

It’s a part of an emerging pattern in which public life is becoming a synonym for mistrust. Indeed, a recent European Values Survey showed that trust in the old institutions is rapidly ebbing away. Across the EU 54% of people say that they no longer trust big companies.

Sadly people are also losing trust in the Christian Church. And that’s a great pity. For the Christian faith is premised on the idea of a God who can be trusted.

The freedom to trust is woven into the fabric of the creative order and in society’s well-being. Trust is both an attribute of God and a gift of God to his creatures.

As the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann put it, “ The shared social life of free persons is a densely woven fabric of promises and promise-keeping, agreements and dependabilities, and it cannot exist without trust.”

To trust is to be a person.

Kenneth Lay has a lot to answer for. But if we all want to belong to a better world none of us can become armchair judges. And perhaps the best way to stop the rut is to start with your own circumstances, and to take up the challenge of Jesus, who said, “let your yes be yes.”

Faith in a trust-worthy God gives the perfect relationship from which to practise the precarious art of trusting other people. Faith’s eternal perspective and final accountability keeps us on a steady course between legitimate scepticism and suffocating cynicism.