The Moral Hazard of American Evangelicalism.
On my commute home last night I turned on an episode of “Hidden Brain” produced by NPR. This episode entitled Life, Death And The Lazarus Drug: Confronting America’s Opioid Crisis was informative, poignant, and thought provoking. Interviews of victims and their families paint in vivid detail the severity of the Opioid crisis and the negative effect Naloxone, a drug used to reverse the effects of an overdose, may be having on users. One study argues that Naloxone has actually increased the mortality rate of Opioid victims, rather than decrease. The theory is founded in the concept of Moral Hazard (the lack of incentive to guard against risk where one is protected from its consequences, e.g., by insurance.) If Naloxone can bring me back, why not up the dosage? Why not risk a little more?
As I listened to the episode, I found myself drawing parallels between the Moral Hazard of the Opioid Crisis and another ideology I’m more familiar with: American Evangelicalism. I started to realize that this economic identifier is not only active in our American culture, it also, much like Naloxone, may be increasing the mortality rate of our cultural integrity and (presumed) moral substructure.
