Fear Of Death: Fire Insurance For The Afterlife?
(ANALYSIS) 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 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.
You can read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.