Excerpt:
I recently discovered a depressing statistic. While analyzing data from the World Bank, I learned that the U.S. was among the 10 countries that experienced the largest increase in the number of reported suicides throughout the 2005-2015 period, from 11.7 to 14.3 per 100,000 people. There is no shortage of possible causes to which one could attribute this 22 percent increase. As a political scientist who studies the intersections between faith and politics, I was naturally curious about (a) whether religious decline in the U.S. could be among the plausible explanations, and, if so, (b) what political factors might account for this decline.
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