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War Causes Religiosity: Gravestone Evidence from the Vietnam Draft Lottery

Author

Listed:
  • Mill, Wladislaw
  • Ebert, Tobias
  • Berkessel, Jana
  • Jonsson, Thorsteinn
  • Lehmann, Sune
  • Gebauer, Jochen

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

  • Mill, Wladislaw & Ebert, Tobias & Berkessel, Jana & Jonsson, Thorsteinn & Lehmann, Sune & Gebauer, Jochen, 2024. "War Causes Religiosity: Gravestone Evidence from the Vietnam Draft Lottery," SocArXiv 9se4r, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:9se4r
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/9se4r
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    More about this item

    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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