A new study suggests that a drop in church attendance among white, middle-aged Americans without college degrees may be partly responsible for the rise in so-called “deaths of despair”—deaths caused by suicide, drug overdose, or alcohol-related liver disease.
Researchers found that in U.S. states where people stopped going to church the most between 1985 and 2000, there were also the biggest increases in these types of deaths.
This finding challenges the idea that the opioid crisis alone is to blame. In fact, the study shows that the rise in deaths began before opioids like OxyContin became widely available in the late 1990s.
The study was led by Tamar Oostrom at The Ohio State University, with help from researchers at Wellesley College and the University of Notre Dame.
Their findings were published in the Journal of the European Economic Association.
The team looked at data from the General Social Survey, which tracks how often people attend religious services, and combined it with death records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
They noticed that church attendance started to drop in the 1980s and 1990s, especially among white adults aged 25 to 54 who didn’t have a college degree. This same group has seen the steepest rise in deaths of despair over the years.
To further support their findings, the researchers studied “blue laws”—rules that used to prevent stores and other businesses from opening on Sundays so people could go to church. When these laws were repealed in states like Texas, Minnesota, and South Carolina in 1985, Sunday became a regular day for shopping and errands, making it easier for people to skip church.
The researchers found that church attendance fell by 5 to 10 percentage points in these states after the laws were repealed. Years later, those same states had higher rates of deaths of despair.
The researchers also looked at trends in deaths before and after the opioid crisis. They found that the death rate among middle-aged white Americans was going down until the early 1990s. Then, it stopped improving, and soon after, it started rising. This happened around the same time that church attendance dropped and blue laws were rolled back.
Why would fewer people going to church lead to more deaths? The study’s authors believe that religious participation may offer more than just social connection.
It may give people a sense of meaning, identity, and belonging. Even though belief in religion didn’t decline much during this time, the act of going to church and being part of a religious community did—and that’s what seemed to matter.
The researchers did not find the same kind of decline in other types of social activities during this time, such as clubs or volunteering, which suggests that religion offered something unique that those activities couldn’t replace.
This leads to a difficult question: can anything else fill the role that religion once played in people’s lives? So far, the evidence says no. Even non-religious community activities haven’t shown the same protective effect against despair and death.
Oostrom pointed out that modern life, especially with the rise of social media, may be pulling people even further away from real-world communities. Today, fewer people are religious, and nothing has fully taken the place of what religion used to provide.
In the end, this study offers a powerful message: the loss of shared spaces like churches might have had deeper effects on people’s health and happiness than we thought. Rebuilding community—whether religious or secular—might be key to improving lives and reducing despair.
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The study is published in Journal of the European Economic Association.
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