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: Protestant doctrine emphasized less that suicide as a deadly sin prevented access to paradise. Ultimately, additional analyses drawing on historical church attendance statistics and modern suicide data tend to confirm the sociological rather than the theological explanation.

Newspaper article:

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

Here you can learn more about my research on this topic.

The academic paper on the topic is:

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

I provide a non-technical overview in:

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

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

Additional material is available in German.