Ashes to ashes

Rites reflect changing views of death and resurrection

By Hope Green

A golf course might seem an odd place for a ceremony marking one's passage from this world to the next. But practices like scattering the ashes of a relative over the 18th hole, or from a plane over the Rio Grande for that matter, are increasingly common.

Improvised rituals like these, says Stephen Prothero, CAS assistant professor of religion, reflect an ongoing change in Judeo-Christian attitudes toward the body, the soul, and the hereafter. He traces the origins of this spiritual shift in a forthcoming book tentatively entitled To Bury or to Burn: Cremation in America, 1876-Present.

Steve Prothero Photo by Vernon Doucette

"Death and the corpse fascinate us, titillate us, gross us out," Prothero readily admits. "But while writing a book about cremation might sound like kind of a goofy project, it takes you to questions that are at the center of American cultural and religious history.

"One of these questions is, what is the long-term trend in terms of the view of the self and the view of the afterlife? That's not relevant only to death rites," Prothero says. "And another central theme is, are we becoming a more secular society? My book argues that we are not."

To Bury or to Burn, scheduled for publication by the University of California Press this fall, looks at the early controversies, the ongoing religious debate, the growth of the cremation industry, and trends that have contributed to the practice in this country, such as Asian immigration. Prothero cites exposés of the traditional funeral business, among them Jessica Mitford's 1963 bestseller The American Way of Death, which encouraged the cremation movement.

"Also, during the 1960s and '70s, there was a kind of countercultural interest in the simple and natural," Prothero says. "Burial was seen as extravagant, overwrought, big, and showy. So cremation resonated with that small-is-beautiful movement."

Prothero found inspiration for the project while working on a biography of Henry Steel Olcott, the first American to officially convert to Buddhism. To angry jeers, Olcott organized a rather unorthodox funeral for a Theosophical Society colleague in Washington, Pa., and arranged for his subsequent cremation, the first ever documented in modern America, in 1876.

Prothero became curious as to how this once scandalous practice later became an accepted alternative to the casket.

"My prior work had been largely in Asian religious ideas and their adaptation to American circumstances," says Prothero, coeditor of Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (1998). "That is what got me interested initially. But it turns out that's not what this book is about. It's one of many themes, but it's not central."

Prothero interviewed funeral directors and logged many hours in historic cemetery archives, poring over faded press clippings and cremation society journals. The research helped him build his case that Americans, especially Christians, are redefining the notions of immortality they were taught in Sunday school.

Still widespread, of course, is that a person consists of both body and soul, which separate at death but are destined to reunite and ascend to Heaven during the apocalypse. But Prothero argues that some Jews and Christians are starting to adopt a view more resonant with Hindu and Greek faiths, which posit that the body is inessential and the soul makes that heavenward journey alone -- without waiting for the world to end.

This gradual change of ideology in the United States, he says, was a factor when the Catholic Church reversed its ban on cremation in 1963. But opponents of the practice maintain that reducing the body to a pile of ashes goes against their tradition, shows a lack of respect for the deceased, and is simply not religious. Proponents, says Prothero, counter that people are creating intensely personal ceremonies for their loved ones who are cremated. That could mean quoting Walt Whitman, playing a favorite song, or reciting from a multicultural selection of scriptures.

"A lot of the funeral directors I spoke to talked about this free-agent process, the do-it-yourself funeral," Prothero says. "When you look carefully at these alternative rites they emerge as religious and ritualized. This is not secularization. The real story is the shift of authority in these death rituals from funeral directors and priests and ministers to families.

"Cremation is not becoming popular because we're becoming less religious," he says. "It's becoming more popular because we're becoming religious in a different sort of way."