Objectively God’s punishment – Newspaper Kommersant No. 8 (7453) of 01/18/2023

The version about the cultural reasons for the increase in mortality in the United States due to the use of opiates, alcohol and their consequences finds formal confirmation. Three American economists in January 2022 showed the existence of strong correlations between the decline in the prevalence of religious practices in the United States and the increase in “mortality from despair.” The point, scientists state, is apparently not even in the idea of ​​God as such, but in a change in the organization of society, which massively refuses to participate in religious rituals, regardless of personal faith.

The notion that the “epidemic” of opiate use in the United States since the 1980s, widely studied by sociologists, economists and anthropologists, is caused by cultural rather than economic reasons is trivial – and the thesis about the connection between “social corruption” and religiosity usually marks right-wing polemical opinions, often presented as scientific research. In this regard, the preprint of the article “Opiates to the masses? Mortality from Despair and the Decline of American Religiosity” by Tyler Gill of Wellesley College, Tamar Ostrom of Ohio University, and Daniel Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame is interesting for its formal approach to the problem: Big data economists have explored the hypothesis of a relationship between a decline in interest in religion among whites low-income population in the United States and the growth of “mortality from despair.”

Gil, Ostrom, and Hungerman have found a compelling (but not necessarily causal) correlation between these phenomena in the US since the late 20th century—but it looks odd. There are a number of points that allow us to carefully reject the version that suggests itself in the “right-wing picture of the world” for the United States about the direct connection between “moral sins” and “godlessness” and suggest rather sociological reasons for their correlation. Gil and colleagues demonstrate that, in general, the decline in the religiosity of the population in individual states of the United States preceded the “opiate epidemic”, and did not coincide with it and was not its consequence. In addition, the correlation is strangely gender-neutral: the death-causing “vice of despair” affects both sexes, but only in middle age and only among low-income whites—and not directly related to living in rural or urban areas.

The most interesting thing about Gil, Ostrom, and Hungerman’s work is, in fact, that religious beliefs, apparently, have nothing to do with it. According to opinion polls, the correlation of the “fall” with the personal beliefs of the respondents is relatively weak – in contrast to the correlation with their formal participation in religious rituals (regardless of what the respondents say about faith). The fall of formal religiosity, the authors state, precedes the “opiate epidemic” with a certain lag, regardless of whether people believe or not: it is the formal performance of rituals that is important, including blue laws (“puritan laws”, the legacy of Protestant communities that restrict informally, and in in some cases and local laws for the operation of entertainment venues on Sundays, etc.). As suggested by Gil and his colleagues, the revealed correlations, apparently, should be interpreted as the influence of the collapse of the “social fabric” of old communities (due to the transformation of age-old patterns of behavior in the bulk of society) on individual social groups. As a result of their specific susceptibility to the “fall”, a new, more libertarian and free subculture arises in them, which further develops, according to the observations of Gil, Ostrom and Hungerman, already according to its own laws: the correlation with the prevalence of worship after the initial “shock of the decline in religiosity” weakens. In some states, the initiator of the “fall”, apparently, was the recognition of “puritan laws” as unconstitutional in the 1960s-1970s, but the process became stable in the 1990s.

The complexity of the connection between Sunday worship and the popularity of OxyContin in the United States shows how extraordinary the cultural interaction of phenomena explained in the “popular science” and “religious” pictures of the world with simple schemes can be. A credible study of such connections, however, highlights the weakness of the claims of political “social engineering” to control social movements: yes, sometimes it’s the bars that open on Sundays – but not because the clergy don’t like it, and the fight against opiate abuse by opening new temples is pointless.

Dmitry Butrin