A new book out by a Canadian correlates the decline in the traditional “American” Funeral Industry with the decline of religion in America. There is validity and truth to this argument. Although most of America calls itself Christian, baby boomers seem to need their church less and less.
And now the same seems to be true for the traditional funeral industry:
“The death of God during the 1960s (obit pending) was almost as hard on the North American funeral industry as it was on the Christian church.
As Tom Jokinen points out in his lively and literate new book Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training, “The big, fat-sucking spiritual void that a death creates used to be filled by the redemptive magic of religion: pray over the body, sing the body into the ground, mark the casket with the sign of the cross. … All the sacred customs were ways to signal to one another that we’re not alone, that there’s continuity even in death … that God had a plan, even if His blueprints were impossible to read.”via www.theglobeandmail.com
Take God out of the picture, the writer says, and the sucking void is still there.
And so is the funeral industry, which itself is sucking harder these days as it attempts feverishly to adjust its practices to 75 million Baby Boomers, stiffs-in-waiting who, in their absence of belief, are (in the words of the old joke), “all dressed up with no place to go.”
To say that God is dead may be a tad bit extreme. To say that the decline of Religion in America (along with traditional funeral rituals) has contributed to the demise of the traditional funeral industry is not a stretch.
It is also a reason for folks seeking to pay less funeral cost- traditional funeral services vs lower cost funeral-
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