Fire Insurance for the Afterlife?

How Religion Shapes the Fear of Death

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

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I have to admit — I didn’t get a very good grade in art history class in college. I had to take the course because it was a required part of the curriculum, but I did so grudgingly. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention, and I don’t think I could tell a Monet from a Manet (here’s a quick guide). But I do remember one single concept from those fifteen weeks of material: memento mori. Simply translated — “remember that you must die.”

During the Renaissance, it was a common motif in paintings. There would be a skull in the background or possibly an hourglass. The point was simple: we aren’t on Earth very long, so live intentionally, let go of little worries, and find some type of peace with your own mortality. But have modern Americans come to grips with the idea that they’re going to die someday?

The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) has been publishing a dataset called the Chapman University Survey of American Fears since 2014. The questionnaire has gone into the field nearly every year over the last decade, and one single question caught my eye: How afraid are you of dying? The four response options ranged from “not at all afraid” to “very afraid.” I calculated responses to that question from the surveys fielded in 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2023.

This is a fun question because I had not even the slightest notion of what the responses would look like before I generated a graph. The one thing that immediately jumped out to me is that a significant chunk of Americans don’t fear death at all. That was actually the most popular response option in each of the five surveys I analyzed.

In contrast, the portion of the public that was “very afraid” was really small. In most years, it was below 10% of the sample. The peak year for fear of death was easily 2019. In that dataset, 35% of people said they were “afraid” or “very afraid” of death. It was just 22% in 2017 and 23% in 2015. I don’t really know how to explain this one significant spike in fear, but it faded fairly quickly — in the most recent data, only 26% of respondents chose one of the top two options.

So what factors might lead to a greater fear of death? I think most of us can probably guess that age would be a pretty relevant one. Older folks are, statistically speaking, much closer to the end of their life than the beginning. So, do people in their twilight years fear death more than those in early adulthood?

The data is crystal clear on this point: younger adults are much more fearful of death compared to older people. In 2023, 14% of 18–29-year-olds said they were very afraid of dying, and another 17% said they were afraid of death. Among those who were 65 and older, those two figures were 6% and 10%, respectively. In other words, the youngest adults are about twice as fearful of death as retirees.

What also jumps out to me is that the trends across the time series don’t look the same across these age categories. For instance, track the “not at all afraid” numbers in each age group between 2017 and 2019. For those in the youngest age group, it drops 20 points. It’s down 17 points for the 30–44-year-olds as well. For older respondents, the decline is just 7 and 6 points, respectively. I really don’t have a good intuition for why that was the case.

Okay, readers, it’s time to bring religion into the discussion. The famous preacher Billy Sunday was fond of saying, “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile — but some of you only go to church for fire insurance.” Thus, a testable hypothesis is that religious folks are less likely to fear death compared to the non-religious.

And that hypothesis is confirmed — but not entirely. Look at Protestants: it’s pretty clear they fear dying a lot less than other groups. In 2023, a majority (54%) said they did not fear dying at all. That was twice the rate of Roman Catholics (26%). Meanwhile, those from non-Christian faith traditions fell somewhere in between, with 42% expressing no fear.

What about the non-religious? Over the last couple of surveys, about one-third of them said they have no fear of dying. That’s about ten points higher than Roman Catholics but twenty points lower than Protestants in the sample. Still, I can’t get over this huge gap between Protestants and Catholics. Just 20% of Protestants said they were afraid or very afraid of dying, compared to 39% of Catholics.

But of course, age may be a latent variable here, right? Maybe the sample includes a lot of really old Protestants and really young Catholics. So maybe that difference isn’t about religion — it’s about the age of the respondent. I could easily check that, of course, by pooling the sample together and dividing it into age and religion categories.

Here’s what I can say with some empirical backing — there’s no group less worried about dying than Protestants over the age of 65. In fact, 60% of them said they do not fear death at all, and another 30% said they were only slightly afraid of it. That’s astonishing when comparing that same age category to Catholics. Among that group, only 34% had no fear of death, and 37% were only slightly afraid.

On the other side of the ledger, younger Catholics express quite a bit of fear. Half of 18–29-year-olds say they are afraid or very afraid of dying. That’s easily the highest of any religious tradition I examined in this analysis. But the same general pattern holds across people of faith — older folks are less fearful of death compared to younger adults.

What about the nones? Well, the pattern isn’t as linear. Among 18–29-year-olds, there’s a bit less fear than among those who are 30 to 44 years old. But among the non-religious who are at least 65, about half express no fear of death. That’s fifteen points higher than older Catholics, but eleven points below older Protestants.

While religious tradition is a good entry point into a discussion about religion and death, there are other variables in the analysis that could help illuminate this relationship as well. For instance, what about religious attendance? I divided the sample into low attenders and high attenders. In this exercise, a high attender was defined as someone who goes to church at least once a month.

It’s really noteworthy to me how this variable plays a much bigger role among Protestants than it does among Catholics. For Protestants who go to church on a regular basis, there’s a significantly lower level of expressed fear. Among low attenders, 41% report no fear of death. That figure jumps to 61% among Protestants who attend regularly. Just 4% of high-attending Protestants were very fearful, compared to 12% who didn’t attend as much.

But among Catholics, Mass attendance just didn’t seem to matter that much at all. Among high attenders, the share who were not afraid of death was only six points higher than those who didn’t go as often. The decline in the “very afraid” category was a mere five points. So, Catholics’ fear of death isn’t really predicated on their level of religious devotion. It’s pretty much universally true that Catholics fear death more than Protestants.

I know someone is going to try to theorize why there’s such a large divergence. I’m in no way a theologian, but I do know the Protestant doctrine is clear on salvation — sola gratia, sola fide — grace alone, through faith alone. For Catholics, it’s not so straightforward. Yes, initial justification comes through faith, but that newfound salvation is not guaranteed; it must be coupled with good works.

One of the foundational principles I bring to my work is this: religious belief just doesn’t matter that much when it comes to driving behavior change. This is a point that Sam Perry makes in his recent book Religion for Realists, by the way. Peer pressure drives us to make decisions in ways that belief alone just can’t. But this may be a situation where theology actually does matter.

Protestants don’t fear death nearly as much as Catholics — maybe because they have more assurance of their salvation based on the doctrines of their religious tradition. But one bit of comfort for the younger readers of this newsletter: you may be afraid of death now, but you probably won’t be as the years roll by.

Code for this post can be found here.

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Faith Meets the Future: Religion and the Gene Editing Divide

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.