Denomination, Religious Context, and Suicide: Neo-Durkheimian Multilevel Explanations Tested with Individual and Contextual Data1

In Suicide, Durkheim found that involvement in religious com-munities is inversely related to suicide risk. In this article, two ex-planations for this relationship are examined. One is that religious networks provide support. The other is that religious communities prohibit suicide. To examine these hypotheses, individual-level data on suicide in the Netherlands from 1936 to 1973 are used. The results show that with an increase in the proportion of religious persons in a municipality, the chances of committing suicide decrease for every denomination in that municipality, as well as among nonchurch members. Furthermore, along with the secularization of Dutch so-ciety, the impact of religious composition on suicide wanes. These results contradict the network-support mechanism and confirm the notion that religious communities have a general protective effect against suicide. One of the best-known studies in sociology is Durkheim’s Suicide ([1897] 1951), and perhaps the most famous proposition that came out of this study is that Protestants are more likely to commit suicide than Catholics. The Protestant-Catholic difference was confirmed both in Durkheim’