A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

In 2000 cremations formed more than 70 per cent of British funerals and 25 per cent of those in the United States, starting from a basis of nil in the Christian world in the 1860s. The arguments are not so much theological as practical considerations for public health and space – particularly in crowded societies like Britain. Yet the liturgical transformation involved is huge, not least the removal of a corpse’s final parting from the church, which is a community place of worship, a setting for all aspects of Christian life, to the crematorium, a specialized and often rather depressingly clinical office room for dealing with death. There are indeed signs that the disposal of ashes is creating a variety of inventive new personalized ritual, including the use of Roman candles to send the ashes of one Florida fireworks enthusiast into the heavens, and an unmanned satellite to speed various others still further from the earth. The theological implications are also profound. Death is not so much distanced as sanitized or domesticated, made part of the spectrum of consumer choice in a consumer society. The Church is robbed of what was once one of its strongest cards, its power to pronounce and give public liturgical shape to loss and bewilderment at the apparent lack of pattern in the brief span of human life.110