Monthly Archives: March 2018

A Funeral Industry Trapped By Protective Walls

Rational Death, , ,

Part of the problem the funeral industry caused for itself many years ago was to embrace the role of a quasi-public utility, a sort of offshoot of the public health infrastructure.

They were justified in doing so. For one thing, it was written into laws and regulations that a funeral director would be involved any time someone died. When the U.S. Public Health Service spelled out the procedure for gathering mortality statistics, as shown in the 1950 Vital Statistics of the U.S. report, there was the funeral director in the flowchart on page 16, right after the doctors and right before the government registrars and health departments.1

Funeral businesses had to be available to make “removals” whenever someone died, under just about any circumstances, making them a 24/7/365 operation. The typical funeral director did not get a lot of holidays off, nor expect a full night’s sleep. Embalming works best the sooner it can be done after death, so the funeral director on call overnight often had a lot more to do than pick up a body after the phone rang.

Although the custom was informal for decades, indigent care also became a somewhat standard part of the business model.

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Funeral Business Critiques, Part 1

Rational Death,

Most companies get criticized at some point, but funeral businesses are somewhat unique in coming under fire merely for existing. This is especially true in the U.S., home of some of the most plentiful, and most celebrated, works of funeral criticism.

As I mentioned last week, funeral prices have been questioned for millennia, but that isn’t the primary topic today.

Even She Who Shall Not Be Named did not focus solely on prices. Professor of religion Stephen Prothero believes that her contemptuous book mainly found the American funeral gauche, rather than overpriced: the modern funeral director a priest of “sham ceremonies” conducting a “tacky parade of the fake” on “a boulevard to bad taste.”1

Undoubtedly, in her cursed monstrosity, She seemed to signal that the American Way of Death might not have seemed so strange if She had not been accustomed to the English Way of Death.

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The “Nones” And The Funeral

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Americans who do not identify with any religious organization or tradition are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, in terms of religious identification, as shown by the data on the “Nones”.

Actually, those data also show that Americans who refuse to even answer survey questions about religious identification are really the fastest-growing segment—but lacking any idea what to do with that information, I will set it aside for now.

The Nones are the latest manifestation of Americans going their own way in religion, a tradition that extends back in the nation’s past and often has been cause for alarm. Thirty-eight years ago, a prominent polling organization noted a movement toward personal religion as harbinger of “an absolute goodbye to the present religious arrangement in North America.”1

That did not happen, precisely at the time, because “church” Christianity in America became stronger through the 1980s and beyond, although the denominations that grew were relative newcomers.

But as sort of a delayed effect, although not necessarily bidding us adieu, the “religious arrangement” of the United States now does seem to be changing.

In the funeral business, such trends merit attention, if only because of the apparent strong link between decreasing religion, and increasing cremation.

A 2015 survey commissioned by the funeral industry found that 91 percent of people with “No organized religion” would consider cremation as an option if they had to make arrangements for someone else, compared with 64 percent of Protestants, 62 percent of Catholics, and 57 percent of “Other,” with large across-the-board increases over the previous decade.2

Cremation as an Option for Friend or Family Member

Source: FAMIC Study, 2015
Definitely or Somewhat Likely 2004 2015
Protestant 41% 64%
Catholic 36% 62%
Other 36% 57%
No Organized Religion 60% 91%

Two trends foretelling a continued increase in cremation are the growing favorable attitude by all Americans—as the numbers above show, each religious segment may be as likely to choose cremation as another option for bodily disposition—and the tremendous growth of the non-religious segment, whose attitudes toward cremation are most favorable of all.

Apart from more cremations, what else might we expect from a nation of less religious funeral buyers?

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The “Nones”: When No Religion Is The New Religion

Rational Death,

In the history of the human species, few ideas come more naturally to us than the belief that everything is going to hell in a handbasket. Along with pastors, politicians, and social scientists, funeral directors can be heard observing that the world seems to be losing its religion, and that this is probably a bad thing.

Nothing shows the present ruin more vividly than the light of a sacred past.

Perhaps it is ominous, then, that one of the fastest-growing and largest religious segments in the United States today is the group known as the “Nones,” who comprised 2 percent of the population in the 1950s but now make up between 20 and 25 percent, depending on the survey.

The Nones are defined in the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) of 2008 as a “nonreligious, irreligious and anti-religious bloc” who answered the identification question with “None” or “No Religion”. Survey respondents could fall into any of the following categories: “None, No religion, Humanistic, Ethical Culture, Agnostic, Atheist, Secular.”1

Exact percentages of Nones within the U.S. population have varied, but the trend has been similar among all surveys of American religion. Because the Gallup organization has the longest record of tallying such information, I’ve used Gallup results for the past 70 years to create the following graph:2

The data raise interesting historical questions, such as what occurred in America in the 1950s to cause such a return to religion, and then what happened in the 25 years after 1992 to cause such a falling off.

For my purposes, the more relevant questions have to do the “Nones” themselves, including what they believe, and what kind of changes they might signal, or even cause, in American funeral practices.

Even more important, both for people who may be buying funerals and those who may be selling them, is the bigger question of what exactly is the relationship between religion—or lack thereof—and funerals. The Nones give us a useful angle for exploring such questions because they will eventually have a direct influence on American funerals when they make the purchases.

Answering these questions will require a series of posts, beginning here, with a brief look at who the Nones are, and where they really are on the “religious” spectrum.

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Growth Of Non-Denominational Protestantism

Rational Death,

Among American religious groups, Protestants comprise the largest, with 49% of the adult population, compared to Catholics with 23%, according to the latest Gallup poll conducted in December, 2017.1

Within the Protestant community, the fastest-growing group, by far, are “non-denominational” churches, which the Pew Religious Landscape Study of 2014 estimated as including from 4.9% to 6.5% of the U.S. population, depending on how you define the data.2 The largest Protestant denomination was the Southern Baptist Convention with 5.3% of the population, making “non-denominational” Protestant churches the de facto largest or second-largest denomination.

Data from the General Social Survey revealed that from the 1970s through 2014, the number of non-denominational Protestants grew at a much faster pace than any of the denominations—more than 400% over a forty-year period, shown in the following graph:3

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U.S. Church Participation Changes: Detail

Rational Death,

How has membership changed in the largest U.S. religious bodies? The previous post was a bit data-heavy so I’ve created a slightly different version that shows more clearly what occurred in American church participation from 1990-2010.

Below is a list of reported membership totals for the largest groups, in five-year increments from 1990-2010, also from the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA).

The data below are different because they show “membership” figures where the previous was reported “attendance.” For some groups the totals are very close and for others not close at all. (Please see the “Notes” at bottom). But there is only one major discrepancy, and overall the data show the same trend.

Change in U.S. Church Membership, 1990-2010 (negative in red)

Source: ARDA databases, http://www.thearda.com/denoms/Families/groups.asp

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U.S. Church Attendance 1990-2010

Rational Death,

As mentioned in previous posts, religion and funeral practices in the U.S. are related, although who influences whom in the relationship is not always clear. People who work in or comment on the funeral business have noted changes in customer preferences that seem to be influenced by religion, and surveys of customers have also noted different attitudes toward funeral options among those with different religious beliefs.

Changes in American religion, therefore, seem worth discussing. Among the most interesting of the changes have been in church participation.

During the past few decades, churches that occupied dominant roles in American culture for a century or longer saw their participation drop steadily while others rose to numerical prominence. If we look at rates of change the trends are dramatic.

Let’s start with the big picture:

From 1990 through 2010 (year of the last comprehensive survey), the U.S. added 11,269 congregations, bringing 5,755,745 new adherents, for a total increased church membership of 7%.

In a secularizing world, it seems pretty impressive that we have such a big, rising tide of faith here in America.

The picture is not so simple, however.

First, as you can see on the graph, some groups have increased while others have decreased.

More illuminating, perhaps, is the data detail, below, for that 7% rising tide:

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Religion And Funerals

Rational Death,

We know there are relationships between religion and funeral practices in America. For a long time, almost all funeral ceremonies were primarily religious, and today that still probably describes the vast majority.

When religion changes, therefore, we might expect some effect on funerals and burials. The effect isn’t easy to predict or quantify, though. Funeral changes, in turn, might arise from various causes apart from religion.

Theologian John Heywood Thomas notes that funerals touch on the meaning of life, but are also practical processes that, over time, have become neat and efficient, wherein the goal is to provide a “nice” service:

All too often death is for many both comfortless and without fear, a non-event. Besides the psychological effects of such an ignoring of death there is the more important ethical consequence that we neither properly value the life that has ended nor apply ourselves to that—perhaps secondary but still urgent—task of bringing our hearts to wisdom.1

The minister and professor Thomas Long suggests that as our religion has become less serious, our funeral practices have followed suit:

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Questions About What We Need From Funerals

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What do we need from funerals?

Some people say the answer lies in rituals having certain psychological effects. Others say it’s about doing what humans have done in the past. Some point to religion, or community bonding, or ecology.

It all gets very involved. In order to help potential funeral buyers get a handle on what they might need, I plan in future posts to discuss ways different parties have answered the question, and domains of knowledge supporting or contradicting their opinions.

Without delving into controversies, let’s just list the related questions that arise when we ask the main question above.

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Funeral Price Increases Since 1986

Rational Death, ,

Since at least the fourth century BC when Herodotus, the Greek philosopher, reportedly criticized lavish funeral practices1, a common complaint about the funeral business has been that the cost of dying is too high. We’ll look at funeral price ranges in detail in a later post, but for now I’ll note the price of a funeral can easily surpass $10,000, depending on where you live, and cremation might be had for as little as $1,000, also depending on where you live.

In his 1921 study of funeral costs, Quincy Dowd recommended cremation “because enlightened choice sees therein a beautiful and economical, not to say Christian, practice.”2 Forty-two years later, Ruth Harmer said the rate of increasing funeral prices was so steep that regardless of how frugally they lived, most people were “dying beyond their means.”3

And we won’t even mention She Who Shall Not Be Named.

Whether something is “too expensive” is not an easy question to answer without context. Providing that context is one of the main rationales of Rational Death.

In comparison to other things we buy, prices of caskets and overall funeral expenses have increased more quickly. That is the conclusion of a recent report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) titled “The rising cost of dying, 1986–2017.”

As shown in the following graph “the price of funerals in the United States has risen almost twice as fast as consumer prices for all items. From December 1986 to September 2017, funeral expenses rose 227.1 percent, while prices for all items rose 123.4 percent.”4

Change in consumer prices, 1986-2017

Below is a summary of the BLS data covering 1986-2017.

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