It's time to rethink evangelical funerals

Altar calls isolate people at their most vulnerable

Photo by Mayron Oliveira on Unsplash

Around the time my Facebook friends began posting exuberant Easter messages about a risen savior, my Substack friends were writing about death.

Michael Mohr

wrote about his father’s mortality,

Sherman Alexie

responded with a poem about his late father,

<Mary L. Tabor>

wrote about losing her son, and

Robert Leonard

shared “Burying Uncle Jerry: White ‘Christian’ Nationalism and the Armor of God” on

Inner Life

. The dissonance between Bob’s essay and the public professions of faith in my feed brought back memories of my grandfather’s and grandmother’s funerals, which took place six months apart in 2021, and the more recent memorial in February for my friend Steve. I attended all three of these services remotely, which amplified the estrangement that I often feel as an atheist in a family of believers. But there was a moment in every service when I was glad to be so far away. It is a cornerstone of the evangelical eulogy: They were ready. How about you? 

We might go our separate ways on Sunday mornings, but humanists and other non-believers typically accommodate religious family members for funerals, which overwhelmingly take place in houses of worship. This perhaps made more sense throughout the twentieth century, when roughly 70% of Americans belonged to a church. But the latest Gallup poll shows that less than half of Americans — just 47% — now are church members. And the number of us who profess no religious affiliation has doubled over the past twenty years, from 8% to 13%. 

If more than half of those who attend a funeral do not belong to a church, and if 13 out of 100 people are non-believers, then it might be time to reevaluate our default settings for these ceremonies, which are among the most important events of our lives. I’m not arguing for stripping all markers of faith from celebrations of life. Religious ceremonies might well be what the departed preferred. But might it be possible to honor our loved ones without leveraging their deaths to convert those who did not share their beliefs?

When my grandfather died in January, 2021, death rates from Covid-19 were still rising. January would become the deadliest month on record at that stage of the pandemic, with more than 77,000 deaths nationally. And traveling from Iowa to Montana would have required at least two connecting flights. Even if I didn’t fall ill, I might have been a super spreader, myself. So I did what felt like the responsible thing: recorded a eulogy to be played at my grandfather’s service and logged on via livestream. 

Much of the service was lovely, and I was grateful to the assistant pastor for turning the laptop to the congregation during the time for open sharing. My grandfather suffered from dementia for at least a decade before he died, and near the end he cycled through his favorite lines, which many in the crowd recalled. See you later, alligator. In a while, crocodile… The last time I saw Grandpa, he didn’t know who I was. But he ribbed me for being bald and generously offered me a knuckle sandwich, as he did to everyone during his last years. I tried to preserve some of these salty notes in my eulogy, recalling the time he buttonholed my high school football coach after a game and gave him an earful for not playing me. 

But there was a lot that I didn’t say out of consideration for those in attendance. Grandpa wore a metal belt buckle that said “Jesus,” with a giant fish hook for the “J.” But he wasn’t above fishing on Sundays, and he ignored hunting regulations the way peasants quietly harvested game from their feudal lord’s estate. He bought me my first beer when I was fifteen years old, on the way back from ice fishing. He wore his Jesus belt buckle into a bar called The Dirty Shame, bought us each a can of Coors, and told me about the parties he took my grandmother to when they were young. 

I would never say that any of this disqualified my grandfather from heaven, if there were a paradise for his soul. But the truth of who he was jangled against the saintly image the pastor painted, and I got the feeling that when the eulogy reached its evangelical turn, my grandfather’s name was a fill-in-the-blank for a line that fit all lives. Herman was ready to die. Are you?

If my grandfather’s eulogy felt generic, the effect was magnified when I heard the pastor deliver the same line to many of the same people just six months later at my grandmother’s funeral. Peggy was ready. Are you? The refrain serves a dual purpose: it comforts believers and it tries to call lost sheep back into the fold. But hidden in that message is an unspoken one: We believers have examined our lives more closely than you. We are here to lift the scales from your eyes. If you do not listen to us, you will suffer eternally. In fact, my grandmother was wary of accepting hospice care because she feared that it would be committing suicide, that sixty years faith could have been nullified. If she found comfort in heaven, she was also haunted in those last days by the thought of hell. Was she really ready in the way that the pastor implied?

Neither of my grandparents ever implied that they loved me less because I was not a Christian, and while I know they both preferred a religious service, I am confident that they would not have chosen to end it by holding a gun of fear and guilt to anyone’s head. The same was true of my friend Steve, who recoiled from cliché and enjoyed long email exchanges about works such as Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. Steve’s philosophy was to love people and laugh uproariously with them. He was never much of a sermonizer and believed that people who live by principle largely find their way toward similar conclusions. Never once did he try to convert me.

I joined the conference call for Steve’s service from my car in the parking lot outside my daughters’ theater studio. It was a sunny day, and I was able to bask in the beauty of the choir for many minutes. Steve attended a Mennonite church, where hymns are sung a cappella in four-part harmony. I appreciate the simplicity and symmetry of hymns and especially enjoy Steve’s favorite, “It Is Well With My Soul.” I do not believe in a literal soul, but I sang the chorus with a more figurative meaning in mind. I didn’t much care whether anyone saw me singing and crying in my car — I was glad to be included in the service.

One thing I admire about my Mennonite and Amish friends is their calmness. Maybe some of them are churning inside, but they always manifest peace and humility. The eulogy began with exactly this note, and for a time I thought it might avoid the evangelical turn. The pastor seemed to agree with me — he could scarcely believe that we had lost Steve so soon. He, personally, would have liked to know him longer. I nodded along for a time through my tears. But then the question came, as it always does, “Would you be ready to die tomorrow?” It was a gentler message, but the implication was the same: there is only one way to be ready to die. 

Steve was 61 when he died of a heart attack. His two children are both college age. They lost their mother to cancer when they were quite young and are now orphaned in their early twenties. Were they ready to say goodbye to their father? Was Steve really ready to say goodbye to them? I’m quite sure that Steve would not have intended to convey to anyone at his service that the answer to his death was so simple, or that his death was simply God’s will, or that to avoid eternal punishment, everyone should prepare their soul in precisely the way that he did. But this is what the call to repentance suggests. 

Here’s the other thing: leveraging fear in the way that evangelical eulogies do only encourages dishonesty. I spent much of my childhood professing faith because I was terrified of hell. At best, such belief follows Pascal’s Gambit, wagering that nothing is lost by conversion, but that all might be lost otherwise. As Christopher Hitchens has explained more eloquently, an omniscient God would surely see through such insincerity. I see what you did there. Hedging our bets, are we? Scaring people toward salvation is problematic under any circumstances, but it is particularly cruel when they are already hurting.

My honest answer to the pastor’s question is that I’m not ready to die. Not because I fear death — at times it seems merciful, like Jim Burden’s meditation in My Ántonia that death is being “dissolved into something complete and great.” No, I’m not ready because I know my children aren’t ready. My wife isn’t ready. My friends are not ready. If I were to die tomorrow, I know they would feel the way I did when my grandmother drew her last breath, when I heard that Steve’s heart had stopped while he was running an errand for a friend. Too soon, too soon. Everyone in my life will survive when I’m gone. They will shore up their ruins with each other. But I’m fine with saying I’m not ready. It’s not the same as saying that I fear for myself.

So what am I proposing? Certainly not that funerals be reimagined in a thoroughly secular way. I’m suggesting something subtler, like the way that people who care about others say “Happy Holidays” when they are not sure if a stranger celebrates Christmas. I’m suggesting that when we pay our respects, we create space for everyone who is already laid low by grief. That we try not to isolate anyone who is hurting. That we consider our audience, as I did by omitting the bar scene from my grandfather’s church eulogy.

Robert Icke tackles a version of this issue in his 2021 play The Doctor. Dr. Ruth Wolff, the lead character, is caring for a young woman who is dying from an attempted abortion when a Catholic priest tries to enter the woman’s room, ostensibly to save her soul. Dr. Wolff refuses — not merely because she is a secular Jew, but because she feels that tormenting the young woman with guilt just before her death is unethical. The priest, naturally, feels that eternity is at stake. But because both sides are unyielding, everyone suffers more as a result. 

I know that my parents would prefer a religious service when their time comes, and I will do my best to honor their wishes while keeping my own polarizing thoughts to myself. For my part, I would prefer not to be remembered in a house of worship at all. I’d rather that the service be held outdoors, where no one is a sinner or a saint, where the sun shares its warmth equally with everyone. I wrote a poem some years ago describing a place in the Idaho wilderness where I hope to take my final rest. 

First published in Natural Bridge