Knocking on Heaven's Door

Who said economics was a soft science? Its practitioners have been putting formulas for years not only to macroeconomic issues but also to such squishy things as happiness or decision-making under uncertainty. Then came the turn of suicide. But now, more daring still, suicide and religion.

Two brave CESifo researchers, Sascha O. Becker and Ludger Woessmann, took the plunge, so to speak, and in a recent paper developed an economic theory of religion-specific suicide. Suicide is such a thing. Not only staggeringly sad, but also uniquely revealing of an irrevocable preference.

So, how do you go about formalising something as traumatic as suicide? Previous research has already established a relationship between religion, specifically Protestantism and Catholicism, and suicide. As far back as 1897, Émile Durkheim found a positive correlation between Protestantism and suicide incidence, something that became widely accepted in sociological circles.

From an economic standpoint, suicide has been described as a rational, utility-maximising decision. (It does sound a bit rich to posit any utility being maximised through suicide, but the arguments are compelling.) What our authors have done is to go one step farther and explore the confluence of religion and the decision to commit suicide.

To do this, they resorted to a unique micro-regional dataset of 452 counties in 19th-century Prussia, a time when virtually everybody was member of a religious denomination in  a common setting of political governance, institutions, language and basic culture. Usefully for this project, at that time the Prussian statistical office embarked on a detailed survey of suicides, keeping a host of records that have survived to this day.

To rule out a fundamental challenge to identifying the effect of religion on suicide, namely that people with different characteristics may self-select into religious denominations, the researchers exploited the fact that in Prussia Protestantism followed a geographic dispersion pattern, spreading initially concentrically around Luther’s city of Wittenberg. They could then use the distance to Wittenberg as an instrument for Protestantism in Prussia.

They find that Protestantism was a leading explanatory factor for suicide rates in both the early and late 19th centuries, increasing the annual suicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants, which then had a mean of 13, by about 15-20 suicides. Their findings proved very robust to a large set of tests, showing that their results captured a genuine effect of Protestant denomination.

The authors acknowledge Durkheim’s theory that Protestantism encourages independent thought and religious individualism, which decreases integration in the community relative to the unified Catholic community. But they also argue that there are additional differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, stemming from their respective religious doctrine, that have consequences in terms of suicide.

Specifically, they have consequences for the utility or disutility of afterlife. Protestantism tends to stress that man’s salvation is by God’s grace alone and not by any merit of man’s own work, whereas Catholicism allows for God’s judgement to be affected by man’s deeds and sins. As a consequence, committing suicide entails the disutility of forgoing paradise for Catholics but not for Protestants. In this context, suicide is modelled as forward-looking utility-maximising behaviour: in a process of rational decision-making, individuals compare the expected utility from living with that from death. If the latter is greater than the former, committing suicide will maximise utility. This leads to a higher propensity for Protestants to commit suicide relative to Catholics.

A further doctrinal difference is that the confession of sins is a holy sacrament in Catholicism but not in Protestantism. Since a successful suicide is the only sin that cannot be confessed, it places Catholic would-be suicide candidates in a quandary: they cannot use confession to evade the loss of afterlife utility associated with the act of suicide. Presumably, this eventually gives rise to a substitution effect that diverts them from committing suicide towards other forms or behaviour in times of despair.

In terms of the effect of Protestantism on overall well-being, the increase in suicide rates attributable to Protestantism contrasts with the finding of these same two authors in a previous paper, that Protestantism furthers educational and economic development. Thus, conclude the authors, “the effect of Protestantism on well-being seems to be neither uniformly positive nor uniformly negative and may affect the average population differently than the very select subgroup of highly unhappy people.”

Still, their results suggest that religious denomination in the form of Protestantism is a main independent driver of regional differences in suicide rates. So, it appears that religion not only prepares people for the afterlife, but in some cases offers an opening for accessing it earlier. And don’t even get started on suicide bombers.

Sascha O. Becker, Ludger Woessmann: Knocking on Heaven's Door? Protestantism and Suicide, CESifo Working Paper No. 3499

• Other CESifo Working Papers by Sascha O. Becker
• Other CESifo Working Papers by Lusger Woessmann
• Other CESifo Working Papers dealing with 19th-century Prussia
• Other CESifo Working Papers dealing with Protestantism
• Other CESifo Working Papers dealing with Economic History
• CESifo Working Papers published in the past three months