Suicide and Religion: New Evidence on the Differences Between Protestantism and Catholicism

Abstract

"A faithful Catholic's supreme wish is to depart from this world fortified by the holy sacraments. As suicide would of necessity deprive him of this means of arriving at a blissful eternity, only a non-believing or strayed Catholic could kill himself voluntarily" Halbwachs (1978:187). INTRODUCTIONActs of suicide are not only as ancient as humanity itself but feature prominently in many important pieces of literature, particularly those by Shakespeare. For example, 200 years ago, Goethe's widely read Sorrows of the Young Werther was banned in Italy, Leipzig, Copenhagen, and other European regions out of fear that the hero's suicide would encourage others to imitate his manner of death (Phillips 1974). Immanuel Kant, one of the first to observe the persistence of suicide, saw it as a certain organic character within society (Stark and Bainbridge 1996).Since the middle of the 19th century, research on suicide has advanced substantially, enriched by the pioneering works of Guerry, Etoc-Demazy, Lisle, and Masaryk, and in particular Wagner, Morselli, and Durkheim (for a discussion, see Halbwachs [1930Halbwachs [ ] 1978Stark and Bainbridge 1996). The fact that religion presumes to offer answers about the ultimate meaning of life makes its relevance for understanding suicide readily apparent.We employ an empirical analysis to evaluate the contemporary effect of religion on suicide and suicide acceptability in society. We offer a new perspective on "sociology's own law," which is the proposition that Catholics have a lower suicide rate than Protestants. The first case we analyze is that of Switzerland. The country has been a key area of investigation since the beginning of the empirically-oriented suicide literature because of its cantonal variation in the share of Protestants and Catholics. However, former studies have been purely descriptive. Halbwachs ([1930] (2014) 53(2) factors, including urban or rural lifestyle, the level of industrialization, and the size of the agricultural sector. Switzerland is unique in that it offers the opportunity to control for a large set of factors at the cantonal level, which allows better isolation of the potential influence of religion while also controlling for cultural and institutional differences. Thus, using a recent 21-year panel of subfederal (cantonal) data from Switzerland, we test (controlling for a large set of factors) whether or not the impact of religion on suicides holds in today's secularized society.However, since religious denomination could capture a variety of unobserved and inherited determinants of culture and history (each of which may influence suicide rates) we additionally exploit data from the European Values Study (EVS) to check the robustness of our results with respect to suicide acceptability. If, when controlling for a larger set of factors, there remains a significant difference of accepting suicide between Protestants and Catholics, then we have additional support for the proposition that religion is not a veil hiding some important underlying fac...

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