Home

Subscribe

Prophetic Trends

Current Issue

Newsletter Archive

Frequent Questions

Featured Item

Make A Donation

Contact Us

When the Rev. Enoch Fuzz dies, he has one request for his family.

Please don't bury him.

Instead, like a growing number of Americans, the pastor of Corinthian Baptist Church in Nashville wants to be cremated.

"I don't want to be out in that snow, in that ground, in that rain," he said. "Cremate me and put me in one of those bottles. And then throw me up into the attic."

Fuzz's family and congregation aren't too keen about the idea. His daughter objects to cremation. And so far, he said, none of his church members have been cremated. And, he doesn't expect that to change anytime soon. That's not surprising.

About a third of Americans are cremated when they die, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. But Baptists and other evangelicals have been slow to embrace the practice. A recent survey among leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals found that only 8 percent said they would choose cremation. Cremation rates in the Bible Belt remain among the lowest in the country.

Americans first began practicing cremation in the late 1800s. But it remained relatively rare. In 1967, for example, less than 4 percent of Americans were cremated. By 1990 about 17 percent of Americans were being cremated. That figured doubled to about 34 percent by 2007.

Gary Laderman, a religion professor who studied the history of cremation, says that Christian taboos about cremation have declined.

Traditionally, Hindus and Buddhists have cremated their dead, while Christians, Jews and Muslims have buried their dead. But today, Laderman said, Americans are more likely to mix and match spiritual practices. For example, a recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life showed that 24 percent of Americans, and 22 percent of people who call themselves Christians, also believe in reincarnation.

"It shows the decline of traditional religious sources of authority," Laderman said.

Some Christian groups also have dropped their traditional bans on cremation. Until 1963, the Roman Catholic Church banned cremation. When that ban was lifted, cremations among Catholics began to rise. By 1998, 26 percent of those cremated were Catholic, according to the Cremation Association of America.

Mainline Christians, like Episcopalians and Presbyterians, have been more likely to cremate.

Evangelicals, on the other hand, have two main objections to cremation. First, they believe in the resurrection of the body — and for most of Christian history, that meant having physical remains to be resurrected.

There's also the tradition. Since the beginning, Christians, unlike Hindus and Buddhists, have buried their dead. So while Buddha was cremated, Jesus was buried.

Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said that the Bible doesn't ban cremation, and as a pastor, he's conducted a number of funerals for people who've been cremated. But he still wants to be buried.

"The symbolism of ground burial captures me," he said. "There's a certain attraction to being able to go to a cemetery and find a connection there. That's more emotional than it is theological."

Cultural influence

James Hudnut Beamler suspects that the reluctance to cremate also has cultural, rather than theological influence.

"Here in the South we still have a connection to the land, and to the cemetery as a kind of home place that that you don't have in big cities where the cemetery isn't down the street," he said.

The Rev. Bruce Chesser, pastor of First Baptist Church in Hendersonville, also thinks culture, rather than religion, makes evangelicals reluctant to cremate.

"Basically, I don't think you can characterize cremation as an 'evangelical' issue," he said in an e-mail. "I believe it is really more of our Southern culture, whether a person is of an evangelical persuasion or not. There is nothing in the Bible about it one way or the other."

Local laws also make cremation more complicated, said Steve Spann, president of John A. Gupton College in Nashville, which trains funeral directors. That may be one reason why it is less common in Tennessee, he said.

"We can have the viewing, a funeral and bury you tomorrow, without the permit or the death certificate being signed," he said. "For a cremation, you've got to get the death certificate signed and the cremation permit ahead of time."

Those extra rules are in place to protect against the slim chance of a mistaken cremation.

"If I bury your daddy in the wrong place, I can dig him up and fix it," he said. "If I cremate your daddy, there's no way to fix that."

Spann, who runs funeral homes in Dickson and in Waverly, Tenn., believes many people think that cremation means no funeral or viewing. That's not the case, he said. Instead, families can have a tradition funeral and viewing, and then cremation.

"All cremation means is that, after the funeral, I drive to the crematory instead of the cemetery," he said.

Anderson expects that cremation will become more common for evangelicals. There's some evidence that's happening in the Bible Belt in general.

In Tennessee, cremation rates rose from 4.9 percent in 2001 to 16.9 percent in 2007, according to the Cremation Association of North America. Alabama jumped from 5 percent to 14.6 percent.

This past year, Christopher Taylor helped found the Cremation Society of Tennessee, a funeral home in Spring Hill, to serve a growing number of people interested in cremation.

Taylor, who also is a worship leader at Maury Hill Church of Christ in Columbia, said he has no religious objections to cremation. He said that cremation accelerates the natural process of returning the human body to dust.

"I was created from dust — we are returning to dust," he said. "My great-grandmother was traditionally buried in 1961. There is no body laying in the ground today. It has completely deteriorated."

Faith, cremation conflict

Still, Steven Prothero, a religion professor at Boston University and author of Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation, thinks that cremation is incompatible with traditional Christian understandings about the body.

"For Christians, human beings are made up of a body and soul. If there's no body, there's not you," he said.

In contrast, faiths like Hinduism see human beings as primarily spiritual beings housed in the body. Because Hindus believe in reincarnation, not resurrection of the body, cremation makes sense for them.

"If you believe that human beings are primarily spirits, then cremation makes sense," he said. "If you believe that human beings are bodies and souls, cremation doesn't work."