Economics helps explain why suicide is more common among Protestants

Author: Sascha O. Becker & Ludger Woessmann / Source: Big Think

Protestantism is good for some people and bad for others. At least that is the conclusion if we are to judge by the stark matters of life, or death, and prosperity. For the majority of the population, Protestantism tends to raise economic prosperity through better education.

But for people who are in a suicidal state of mind, the individualistic qualities of Protestantism can tip the balance towards ending their lives. In fact, the two aspects might be related in a ‘dark-contrasts paradox’: unhappy people can be particularly prone to suicidal behaviour when they live in well-off places and compare their fate to the better-off around them. In life and death, religion clearly matters.

To test the prediction that Protestants have a higher propensity to commit suicide than Catholics, we studied data from 19th-century Prussia. We looked to the 19th century for two reasons. First, it is when the French sociologist Émile Durkheim engaged with the question of suicide in one of the classics of social science and, second, because religion was more pervasive at the time.

This does not mean that belief was uniform and always aligned with Church doctrines, just that virtually everyone adhered to a religious denomination, and that religion pervaded virtually all aspects of human life. Prussia also has the advantage that neither Protestants nor Catholics were small minorities of the population. They lived together in one state with a common setting of government, institutions, jurisdiction, language and basic culture. In several library archives we found – and digitised – data from the Prussian statistical office. For the years 1869-71, local police departments meticulously administered data on suicide from 452 Prussian counties.

In principle, perhaps the biggest challenge for an empirical identification of the effect of Protestantism on suicide is that people with different characteristics might self-select into religious denominations. For example, are people who are depressed more likely to become Protestants? But the self-selecting factor is less of an issue in 19th-century Prussia. There (as in many other places) individual change of denomination was almost unheard of, and religious affiliation derives from choices of local rulers made several centuries earlier. For the social scientist, Prussia presents another advantage. During the Reformation, Protestantism spread in a roughly concentric fashion around Luther’s city of Wittenberg. This pattern can help to link cause and effect between Protestantism and suicide.

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