It’s been pointed out before on this blog that irreligiosity kills.
Now, a new paper adds to the mountain of evidence that not just individual belief, but public group worship, is essential to one’s wellbeing.
Hat tip to authors David V. Stewart and Alexander Hellene.
So-called deaths of despair such as from suicide or alcohol abuse have been skyrocketing for middle-aged white Americans.
It’s been blamed on various phenomenon, including opioid abuse. But a new research paper finds a different culprit — declining religious practice.
The working paper, from Tyler Giles of Wellesley College, Daniel Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame, and Tamar Oostrom of The Ohio State University, looked at the relationship between religiosity and mortality from deaths of despair. The paper was circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The authors noted that many measures of religious adherence began to decline in the late 1980s. They find that the large decline in religious practice was driven by the group experiencing the subsequent increases in mortality: white middle-aged Americans without a college degree.
As we’ve covered previously, America suffered its steepest drop in religiosity from 1988 to – you guessed it – 1998.
It’s been a gradual but steady decline since spiritual ground zero.
More and more, I’m inclined to think that the end of the Cold War served as the catalyst for a mass apostasy.
We clung to Jesus while the threat of nuclear Armageddon hung over our heads and abandoned Him the second we thought the danger had passed.
Turns out the apostate’s only reward is a life without meaning terminating in a loathsome death.
And before anyone mentions it in the comments, I’m aware that the first graph tracks religious affiliation among all 18-35 year-olds, while graph 2 measures mortality rates of 45-64 year-old whites. But the paper confirms that religious practice declined among the latter demographic over the same period.
Besides, contrary to the rebellious younger generation meme, procreation is the #1 way religions propagate. Children do tend to follow their parents’ lead.
States that experienced larger declines in religious participation in the last 15 years of the 20th century saw larger increases in deaths of despair.
The researchers looked at the repeal of blue laws in particular. Blue laws limited commerce, typically on Sunday mornings. “These laws have been shown to be strongly related to religious practice, creating discrete changes in incentives to attend religious services that are plausibly unrelated to other drivers of religiosity,” they said.
The repeal of blue laws had a 5- to 10-percentage-point impact on weekly attendance of religious services, and increased the rate of deaths of despair by 2 deaths per 100,000 people, they found — accounting for a “reasonably large share of the initial rise in the deaths of despair.”
What’s also interesting is that the impact seems to be driven by actual formal religious participation, rather than belief or personal activities like prayer. “These results underscore the importance of cultural institutions such as religious establishments in promoting well-being,” they said.
They further added that they didn’t know of any cultural phenomenon that matches the mortality patterns, which are seen for both men and women, but not in other countries, and in both rural and urban settings, but mostly middle-aged, less-educated white individuals.
When you cross-reference global suicide rates with the importance of religion to people living in those countries, something interesting emerges:
The experiment is over. Godlessness has been tried. And instead of a glittering utopia, it leads to addiction and death.
Atheist political philosophies are more absurd than any major religion. Because no major religious founder promised an end to suffering in this world.
History has demonstrated time and again that the poor will always be with us, and suffering is unavoidable in this life.
But atheism has no way to make sense of that phenomenon. Which is a more damning indictment of atheist worldviews than the problem of evil ever was for theistic ones.
In a universe without God, people are just bags of chemicals acting out behaviors determined by blind physical forces. There’s no room for dignity and no meaning to anything that happens. If you’re in pain, the buck stops at the laws of physics themselves, which you can’t make a moral claim against.
Human beings hunger for justice. If people are just complex heaps of stardust with no agency and no responsibility for their actions, then life itself is absurd. Because the desire for something impossible is intrinsic to human nature.
It doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to see why thinking they live in a senseless world where suffering is predetermined and inexorable, with no one held to account, makes irreligious people suicidal.
The good news is that we live in an intelligible universe created by a supra-rational God who made human beings with rational intellects and free will.
And even though our evil choices make suffering inevitable in this life, we know for a moral certainty that in eternity, the righteous will enjoy unending bliss, and the wicked will receive perfect justice.
To paraphrase a saying attributed to St. Teresa of Calcutta, once we’re in Heaven, even a life of prolonged suffering will seem like one night in a bad hotel.
While to the unjust who thought they got away with their crimes, 20 seconds of their torment will feel like 20 years.
The West needs to recover human dignity and meaning again. If we don’t, we’ll go the way of all past fallen empires.
Bring back the blue laws, blasphemy laws, and state churches.
And learn how to stop feeding the godless Death Cult while having fun in the process.
“Not just individual relief” – I presume you meant “belief”, but we all make typos :p
Corrected
Also, an excellent post that brings home many important truths. I do wonder about the odd outlier of China, however. A couple of possible explanations spring to my mind:
1. China lying about its figures, as is very typical of the PRC
2. Local government obstruction and/or cultural resistance to talking about suicide making it difficult to collect accurate data
3. Strong and still-existent cultural taboos against suicide
4. Cultural expectation of enduring suffering to help your family
5. They haven’t been marinated in despair for as long as we have, and the blow simply hasn’t fully landed yet.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention:
6. The rising number of Christians that our media studiously ignores as hard as they possibly can.
While Chinese communism isn’t what it used to be, it helps to remember that communism itself is a religion. Afghanistan teaches us that, when confronted by a “proper” religion like Islam, a warrior would sooner lay down his life for a workers’ paradise than for a liberal democracy.
Also, I wonder how quickly it would take an atheist shown this information to try and find some “contradiction” in it (“Look, South Africa!”). But that’d be cope – pretty much all of the places with high religiosity and high suicide rates are also suffering from enormous levels of violence, poverty, and crime that can more than adequately explain the suicide rate.
I’m all for state churches as long as they’re Catholic. E”rror non habet ius,” and tolerating error has led to the fragmentation of religiosity and the social fabric in America. If we continue to embrace the protestant notion that we are ultimately subjected only to our conscience our society will only degrade.
Sergeant Slim Jim,
Some accommodations will need to be made for our Orthodox brothers and the observant Jews. I have my sharp opinions about Moslems that I’ve voiced elsewhere. I’m still reflecting how to bring back the Inquisition.