War Causes Religiosity: Gravestone Evidence From the Vietnam Draft Lottery

Wladislaw Mill, Tobias Ebert, Jana B. Berkessel, Thorsteinn Jonsson, Sune Lehmann and Jochen E. Gebauer

CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany

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.

Keywords: War; Religion; Vietnam Draft Lottery; Grave (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N30 N40 P00 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54
Date: 2024-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-his and nep-sea
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Working Paper: War Causes Religiosity: Gravestone Evidence from the Vietnam Draft Lottery (2024)
Working Paper: War Causes Religiosity: Gravestone Evidence from the Vietnam Draft Lottery (2024)
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