They note that many measures of religious adherence began to decline in the late 1980s - and that that large decline in religious practice happens to have been driven by the very same group that is experiencing the subsequent increases in mortality: white middle-aged Americans without a college degree. The paper in question - “Opiates of the Masses? Deaths of Despair and the Decline of American Religion” - was written by Tyler Giles of Wellesley College, Daniel Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame, and Tamar Oostrom of The Ohio State University, and is available on a website of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
But a still relatively new research paper identifies a different potential cause - the concurrent decline in religious practice. This spectacular increase has been blamed on various factors, including opioid abuse. It appears that so-called “deaths of despair” - such as those from suicide or alcohol abuse - have been skyrocketing for middle-aged white Americans. Very plainly, it comes from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™: Some time ago, my friend Tom Pittman passed on a link to me - to an article in MarketWatch entitled “Rise in middle-aged white ‘deaths of despair’ may be fueled by loss of religion, new research paper argues” - that I have been delinquent in sharing.
0 kommentar(er)
