God, Death And The Right To Choose: A Religious Divide On Assisted Suicide
(ANALYSIS) Several years ago, Canada began a program called Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID). It’s a government initiative that’s beginning to reshape how Canadians are facing end-of-life situations.
An article published in The Atlantic in August of 2025 titled “Canada Is Killing Itself” reports 5% of all the deaths in 2024 that happened in the country were through physician assisted suicide.
This is a topic that will garner increasing attention in the United States as medical aid in dying is already legally permissible in 13 states and Washington D.C. And the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today includes a piece by Kristy Etheridge titled, “Death is Not a Right.”
Given this interest, I wanted to see if I could provide some empirical background on how views of suicide have changed over time, particularly across the religious landscape in the US.
The General Social Survey has been asking a four question battery about suicide (with various justifications) for decades now.
Luckily, the Association of Religion Data Archives makes it easy to search the codebook for the GSS and pull out the relevant questions. They all start with the same preamble: Do you think a person has the right to end his or her own life if this person.
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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.