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The Coddling of the American Funeral
Friends were surprised when we had a funeral for Asher, since he never took a breath in this world. He was stillborn, but his life was sacred, his death evil, and his funeral a time for mourning. The tragedy demanded we (his mother and brother) both reckon with death in unique ways.
As his then 5-year-old brother, I (Noah) convinced myself I’d killed him because I ran into my mother’s pregnant belly one time in the hallway. I took months to confess my guilt, and then she assured me of my innocence. But I can’t forget holding his lifeless body in the hospital and later laying it in a grave. I can’t forget wondering why this happened and thinking the answer was “because of me.” It wasn’t, but it made me hate death and forced me to remember it.
As Asher’s mother, I (Megan) recall his funeral with agony. My memories begin with the tiny casket draped in roses and end with the bizarre, hurtful comments of family and friends. “At least you have your other children,” one said. Others, with the attitude of Job’s wife, thought we should rail in anger against “the kind of God who would do this.” I thought of the many women across the world who were in my position without any resurrection hope. What would they do with all this grief?
The answer, to some degree, is that as a culture we’ve exchanged the mourning of death at funerals for the “celebration of life”; we’ve separated graveyards from church property and relegated them to memorial parks, hidden from view; and we’ve overwhelmingly chosen cremation (61.9 percent) rather than burial (33.2 percent), so we don’t have to see dead bodies. Perhaps there’s a cultural illusion that if we don’t think about it, don’t talk about it, and don’t see it, it won’t happen to us or our children. But it will. We’re going to die.
The coddling of the American funeral is a tragedy worth grieving. As Christians, we should ponder death with more grief and more hope than our unbelieving neighbors.
Remember Your Death
Memento mori is an ancient maxim meaning “remember your death.” It has roots in Stoic philosophy, but remembering death is a deeply Christian notion: “You are dust,” says the Lord, “and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19). Many Christians annually practice remembrance by having ashes smeared on their foreheads for Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. It’s an important reminder we will die and have died in Christ.
Most would rather ignore death altogether, but those who acknowledge its inevitability are torn in two directions: naivety or control.
Mortal Naivety
“Mortal naivety” is an acknowledgment of but inappropriate romanticizing of death. We see this in the New Age movement and Eastern religions, where one might imagine the deceased person as a perennial flower blooming somewhere in the multiverse. Or even among Christians who recite the Henry Scott Holland poem “Death Is Nothing At All,” content to believe our loved ones have merely “slipped away to the next room.” Those who choose to have “celebrations of life” betray their natural intuitions about reality. As Carl Trueman wrote,
To celebrate life at a funeral or memorial service is a nonsense. . . . It is also a ridiculous contradiction in terms: if life has meaning, then death is an outrage; if death is not an outrage, then life has no meaning. In either case, what is there to celebrate?
For Christians, life does have meaning and death is an outrage—it’s the wages of sin, the price Christ paid for our redemption. If death is nothing at all, or even an occasion for celebration, then the cross is as empty as the tomb, drained of all its power and significance. It’s a futile endeavor, a grand gesture at best but ultimately senseless.
If death is nothing at all, or even an occasion for celebration, then the cross is as empty as the tomb, drained of all its power and significance.
We should mourn death. Scripture says, “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart” (Eccl. 7:2, NIV). Death shouldn’t be glorified.
Our culture participates in celebrations of death reminiscent of the Roman amphitheaters. We laugh and cheer at graphic horror movies as if it were nothing for a human being to be dismembered, beheaded, or gutted. The brutality doesn’t stay in the realm of fiction, though. Social media feeds are filled with “moment of death” content: body cam footage from a police raid, security camera footage of an armed pedestrian stopping an attempted theft, or several angles from the most recent school shooting. It takes severe cultural desensitization—perhaps even traumatization—to exchange dust and ashes for popcorn and a soft drink.
Mortal naivety can also manifest as a hopeless nihilism that accepts death’s vileness while rejecting life’s goodness. Agnostic philosopher Bertrand Russell claimed mankind builds their lives on “the firm foundation of unyielding despair.” This is naivety expressed as morbidity, like gallows humor that minimizes death by chalking it up to the cold cruelties of a meaningless cosmos. This is the outlook that appropriates Isaiah 22:13 (“Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die”) as an excuse for hedonistic living. Death’s sting is subdued when we frame it as simply the “last call” to life’s frivolous party.
It takes severe cultural desensitization—perhaps even traumatization—to exchange dust and ashes for popcorn and a soft drink.
Our mortal naivety makes it possible for us to pretend that more than a million babies weren’t murdered in 2023. Killing unborn children is a “reproductive right,” a mere “medical procedure,” where the fetus is rarely seen through an ultrasound and never referenced as a human being. The baby doesn’t die; the pregnancy is simply terminated. According to Planned Parenthood, “Abortion is self care.” Death is celebrated alongside spa days, long walks, and morning journaling. We shouldn’t mistake such naivety for innocence. It’s a willful denial of the truth.
Mortal Control
“Mortal control” is a desire for jurisdiction over life and death. It motivates and justifies the murder of innocent lives through abortion and euthanasia, while mortal naivety allows us to act like nothing happened. However, only the One who died and is alive forevermore has authority over life and death. He alone declares, “I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Rev. 1:18).
Some remember they’ll die, but they don’t know the purpose of life, which isn’t control but surrender to the immortal God. This is common among the affluent, who have the resources to play pretend. For example, Yuval Harari argued in his best-selling book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow that death is merely a biological “glitch” to be overcome through technology. Or consider the centimillionaire Bryan Johnson, who founded Blueprint, a scientific algorithm aimed at preventing aging and ultimately death. When materialism undergirds your anthropological and biological beliefs, man exists as a machine with no higher purpose except leveraging autonomous control for a maximally long life (“Death is our only foe,” Johnson declares on Instagram).
A symptom of our desire for mortal control is that our culture isn’t just trying to overcome death; we’re also trying to overcome aging and decay. This is prevalent in biotechnology and in our obsession with cosmetics. Cosmetic surgery is a rapidly growing trend, and many surgeries are specifically marketed as anti-aging procedures: liposuction, eyelid surgery, facial fillers, breast lifts, face lifts, and so on. We have creams for our aging skin, steroids for our atrophied muscles, and a never-ending supply of experimental diets to make us young again. We develop these coping techniques because most of us will die slowly, not suddenly. We watch ourselves painfully become less and less whole as we experience bodily corruption. The problem of death isn’t merely about the end of life; it’s also about corruption, the rotting of the body.
The problem of death isn’t merely about the end of life; it’s also about corruption, the rotting of the body.
The Bible confesses that God is both immortal and incorruptible. He cannot die, but he also cannot decompose or rot as we do. As one commentator notes, the opposite of corruption isn’t only extended duration of life but “ethical, aesthetic, and psychological flourishing and abundance, even perhaps perfection, and certainly fullness of life.” This is important because at Pentecost the apostle Peter declares that Christ died yet “his flesh [did not] see corruption” (Acts 2:25–32; cf. Ps. 16:10). Christ was always whole. Fred Sanders explains, “The Son of God died our death for us, but did not rot for us. Instead, he made a way for our corruption to become invested with his incorruption.”
The gospel’s promise is the complete undoing of decay along with participation in the beauty, fullness, and flourishing of abundant life.
Remember Your Life
In their article “Death and Dying: A Catechism for Christians,” Ewan C. Goligher and Kyle Hackmann answer the question “When should we begin to prepare for death?”:
Faithful Christians will regard all of life as a preparation for death because we anticipate a day of judgment and accountability to God. It is therefore wise to live with our mortality and the [transience] of this life in view, even from our earliest days. Like the ten wise virgins whose lamps were ready, we should strive to grow daily in readiness to meet the Lord. Moses the man of God gives us a model prayer of preparation: “So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom.”
A wise man or woman lives well by preparing to die well. As with all hard things, dying well takes practice, so we must begin today. Our Lord prepared for his bodily death by denying himself every day and obeying his Father’s will. We’re called to the same deadly way of life as the crucified Savior.
A biblical understanding of death requires us to practice lament and self-denial, grieving with hope in the resurrection of the dead, without clinging to this mortal life. We don’t deny the goodness of life, yet we deny our lives for the sake of following Christ. Without him, we’re dead already; with him, we’re alive forevermore.
In their best-selling book The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue that ignoring hard truths and teaching our kids to do likewise won’t lead to a better life. They’re right. And one way to reject the coddling of the American mind is to oppose the coddling of the American funeral. Humanity’s greatest enemy—death—shouldn’t be romanticized, and it cannot be controlled.
Humanity’s greatest enemy—death—shouldn’t be romanticized, and it cannot be controlled.
So take your children to funerals, and teach them how to mourn. You might be surprised by what they teach you in return. Children often know something is wrong at a funeral, since they haven’t yet learned to forget. But we can explain why we cry and who receives our tears—a Lord who wept at death (John 11:35) yet trampled the grave in resurrection. As we mourn, we’re comforted (Matt. 5:4), and as we grieve, we’re called to hope (1 Thess. 4:13–14). What might feel like a cascade of loss can be a glimpse of the death Christ conquered and of why eternal life is good news.
If we grieve with hope, we offer a Christian apologetic to a world that views death as something to be avoided or controlled. When the shadow of death brings pain, loss, and more questions than answers, we lament sin’s wages (Rom. 6:23), considering it an invitation to pray—even to groan—along with all creation (8:19–23) as we await the day when all sad things become untrue. On that day, we’ll be face-to-face with Asher and with our Lord, the resurrection and the life.
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