Protestantism and Suicide Proneness

Ever since Émile Durkheim indicated the association between Protestantism and suicide in his 1897 classic “Le Suicide,” the relationship has been subject to fierce scientific debate. To distill the causal effect of Protestantism, our analysis of the unique 19th-century Prussian county data that we digitized from archives exploits that part of the regional variation in the diffusion of Protestantism that stems from distance to Luther's city of Wittenberg. Our results suggest that Protestantism indeed led to a substantial increase in suicide rates. Next to the positive aspects of the Reformation, these results indicate a "dark side" of the Reformation.

Durkheim put forward the thesis that the higher Protestant suicide rates were explained by the religious individualism of Protestantism. While Catholics were socially embedded by their unified community, Protestant doctrine promoted independent thinking and meant that Protestants relied less on their religious community but instead sought a more direct connection with God. In an economic theory of denomination-specific suicide, we model both this mechanism and an alternative one: Catholic doctrine emphasized more than the Protestant one that the deadly sin of suicide prevented access to paradise.

Ultimately, however, our additional empirical analyses corroborate Durkheim's sociological rather than the theological explanation. Among other things, historical church attendance statistics indicate that the suicidal tendency of Protestants is more pronounced in areas with low church attendance. The strongest effect is thus more likely to be found in areas with little social integration rather than in areas with high devotion to the Protestant doctrine. In addition, modern suicide data show that while Protestants still have a higher suicide rate than Catholics, it is highest among people without a religious affiliation who are not subject to theological doctrine. Thus, the higher suicide proneness of Protestants appears to have a sociological rather than theological explanation.

Research paper:

Social Cohesion, Religious Beliefs, and the Effect of Protestantism on Suicide (with S.O. Becker). Review of Economics and Statistics 100 (3): 377-391, 2018

Non-technical contributions:

How Luther’s Quest for Education Changed German Economic History: 9+5 Theses on the Effects of the Protestant Reformation (with S.O. Becker). In: J.-P. Carvalho, S. Iyer, J. Rubin (eds.), Advances in the Economics of Religion, International Economic Association Series, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 215-227, 2019

Economics Helps Explain Why Suicide Is More Common among Protestants (with S.O. Becker). Aeon, 14.1.2019

Religion Matters, in Life and Death (with S.O. Becker). VOX, 15.1.2012

Material available only in German

Newspaper article:

Sind Protestanten schlauer? Die Zeit, No. 42, 12.10.2017, p. 76

A contribution about the initial results of our research:

Die Ökonomie des Suizids. Sonntagsökonom in der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung vom 15.1.2012 über unsere Forschung zum Effekt des Protestantismus auf die Suizidneigung