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War Causes Religiosity: Gravestone Evidence From the Vietnam Draft Lottery

Author

Listed:
  • Wladislaw Mill

  • Tobias Ebert
  • Jana B. Berkessel
  • Thorsteinn Jonsson
  • Sune Lehmann
  • Jochen E. Gebauer

Abstract

Does war make people more religious? Answers to this classic question are dominated by the lack of causality. We exploit the Vietnam Draft Lottery -- a natural experiment that drafted male U.S. citizens into military service during the Vietnam War -- to conclusively show that war increases religiosity. We measure religiosity via religious imagery on web-scraped photographs of hundreds of thousands of gravestones of deceased U.S. Americans using a tailor-made convolutional neural network. Our analysis provides compelling and robust evidence that war indeed increases religiosity: people who were randomly drafted into war are at least 20% more likely to have religious gravestones. This effect sets in almost immediately, persists even after 50 years, and generalizes across space and societal strata.

Suggested Citation

  • Wladislaw Mill & Tobias Ebert & Jana B. Berkessel & Thorsteinn Jonsson & Sune Lehmann & Jochen E. Gebauer, 2024. "War Causes Religiosity: Gravestone Evidence From the Vietnam Draft Lottery," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2024_614, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2024_614
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    JEL classification:

    • Z12 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Religion
    • N30 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - General, International, or Comparative
    • N40 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - General, International, or Comparative
    • P00 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - General - - - General

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