Abstract: The relation between religious faith and trust is one of the important topics in sociology of religion. Its discussion can be approached on two planes: religious faith as an independent variable in studying the degrees of trust with different religious affiliations and/or religious faith as a dependent variable in terms of its degrees and acceptance. Religious studies in China and most studies in other countries mainly focus on the former, and a few western studies, if with the latter approach, are primarily testing Chaves’ new secularization theory in an empirical way. Moreover, trust of nonreligious organizations or institutions, a common research topic in general sociology, is not taken into account in such studies. This paper argues that, as a western thesis, the secularization theory refers to the phenomenon that religion is losing its authority in all aspects of social life. In contrast, religion in China is experiencing fast growth. This paper explores people’s attitudes towards religion on its rapid rise from the quite ideal angle of their trust of the religious organizations, with due consideration to the culturebased patterns in organization trust studies in general sociology. Using the data from 2011 Residents’ Legal Consciousness and Action in Shanghai, the author performed the multinomial logistic regression to analyze people’s trust of the religious organizations as a function of religious affiliation, demographic factors, socioeconomic status (SES), social trust and trust in other institutions. It was found that, compared with the trust of other organizations, Shanghai people trusted the religious organizations at a lower level but their trust degree in this regard had risen as compared with earlier data in similar social surveys. Religious affiliation, social trust, organizational participation and trust in the secular institutions had the strongest relations with the trust of religious organizations; the next were SES and social participation; but sex, age, education, or political status were independent of it. To be specific, related to religious affiliation, religious believers had higher trust in religious organizations than nonbelievers; members of an institutional religion had higher trust in religious organizations than nonmember believers; and believers of the traditional Chinese institutional religion showed stronger trust in religious organizations than those with Abraham religion. In regards to SES, the levels of the trust in religious organizations, from highest to lowest, corresponded to the levels of SES in the order of upper and upper middle class, middle class, and lower class. In addition, trust in religious organizations was positively correlated with social trust and trust of other organizations in secular social and public sectors.
Keywords： trust of religious organization |  religious affiliation |  faith and religion |  culturebased pattern | social structure
 

Key words: social structure, trust of religious organization ,  , religious affiliation ,  , faith and religion ,  , culturebased pattern