Atheists are transforming Western society’s attitudes toward death and dying. Our growing numbers and increasing cultural influence are making religious rituals and beliefs about death less and less relevant. What’s coming up to replace it? That’s the topic of my latest column on the Guardian, Are we ready to face death without religion? To find out more, read the excerpt below, then click through to the full piece:
For centuries, the Christian church wrote the script for how westerners deal with death. There was the deathbed confession, the last rites, the pallbearers, the obligatory altar call, the burial ceremony, the stone, the angels-and-harps imagery. Yet that archaic and stereotypical vision of death, like a mossy and weather-worn statue, is crumbling – and in its place, something new and better has a chance to grow.
As younger generations turn away from religion, the US is slowly but surely becoming more secular. As mortician and “good death” advocate Caitlin Doughty writes in her book, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory, America is seeing a sea-change in traditions and rituals surrounding mortality…
As research for this piece, I also spoke to Rebecca Hensler, founder of Grief Beyond Belief. There wasn’t room to include her full comments in the finished column, but I’d like to add them here for being insightful:
I think that whenever we provide safer and more supportive spaces for a minority whose needs were not being met in majority-dominated spaces, those who were hiding their real feelings and beliefs โ sometimes even from themselves โ start to feel more comfortable with those feelings and beliefs and even begin to speak up. This happened with LGBT folk and it is happening with atheists too.
There is no statistical evidence that people are letting go of afterlife beliefs because there is now visibility and support for grieving without them. But there is plenty of anecdotal evidence at Grief Beyond Belief that when you both talk publicly about grieving without faith and offer confidential support free of religious or spiritual content, nonbelievers who have been grieving in silent isolation are finally able to talk about their real thoughts on death and grief. Will that conversation spread from the secular support community to the broader population? I donโt know, but we can certainly hope so.
I do know that for the past two years, the annual convention of The Compassionate Friends, a huge worldwide network of parental grief support groups, has included a workshop โ facilitated by a member of Grief Beyond Belief โ on supporting grieving parents who are nonbelievers. So we are slowly seeing secular grief support become a recognized need in the broader community of grief support providers.