Preaching Death: The Transformation of Christian Funeral Sermons

13 Two Alternatives

183 13 Two Alternatives The genre of “alternative history” has little repute among professional historians. Books based on “what if the South had won the Civil War?” are entertainment, but do not, it is assumed, tell us anything about the real world. Given the North’s overwhelming superiority of manpower and materials, the outcome of the war was never really up for grabs. However, we are not convinced that in the realm of ideas and beliefs, things are this fixed and inevitable. It seems that some trends could have gone differently, that people’s responses are variable, and that there is at least the possibility of roads not taken. So, in this chapter and the next, we look at several alternatives to what has happened. The alternatives are to actual current Christian views of death and funeral patterns, to the triumph of the biographical and its aim of “celebrating the life” of the deceased. We trace possibilities of responses to the death awareness movement’s language and images that might have been. Our purpose is to offer another perspective on changes we have examined, changes that happened without public debate or outcry, without the kind of publicity that accompanied other religious controversies. All along we have been speaking primarily about mainline Protestants , and that group itself changed during the eras we examine. In 1942 Presbyterian clergyman and funeral manual author Blackwood could assume with great confidence that his style of religiousness represented 184 Preaching Death “mainstream” America. Not just the Presbyterian Church in particular of which he was a member, but the tradition of white, middle-class, nationally spread denominations whose roots lay both in the Reformation and the British evangelical movement of the eighteenth century. Yes, there were distinctive regional differences, and organizational splits left over from the Civil War, but Southern Presbyterians (PCUSA) and Northern Presbyterians (UPCUSA). shared the views of death and afterlife we have discussed, not to mention polity and worship style. Lutherans might still have an “immigrant” ethos about them, but overall we are speaking of a style of religiousness that saw itself, and was seen by others, as in the heartland of American faith and life. It did not have to pay any attention whatsoever to what anyone else (Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, or African Americans) was doing, Indeed, in all the sermon anthologies and pastors’ manuals from that era, such groups are absolutely invisible. They might as well have been on Mars. By the time the death awareness movement brought its new words for death, dying, and bereavement to Americans, in the early 1970s, this situation had already changed. The 1960s was the era of major decline in the numbers and prestige of mainline denominations of Protestantism . In that one decade, the Presbyterian Church lost one-third of its members, and other mainline groups also found themselves floundering and divided over issues such as the Vietnam War. Religious alternatives among Protestants included “nonmainline” groups such as Assemblies of God, while the civil rights movement had drawn national attention to the important role of African American clergy and the black church. Roman Catholics were fresh from Vatican II’s reforms, and had also, in this country, lost much of their perceived role as an immigrants’ church. Catholics moved out to the suburbs, used English in the liturgy, and in some ways became more “mainline” themselves. And on the fringes of this religious landscape (although not on the fringe of media attention ) the counterculture of the 1960s created a plethora of “new religious movements,” “cults” to their enemies, which marketed themselves to those who sought a religious alternative to mainstream America. Therefore, the generation of American mainline Protestant leaders who greeted and embraced the death awareness movement were different from Blackwood’s generation. They were, in some sense, an embattled establishment, on the defensive but also trying to remain open to new Two Alternatives 185 cultural developments and resist what was already seen as resurgent “fundamentalism.” This gave mainline Protestants at home with pastoral counseling experts such as Wayne Oates or (already critical of conventional funerals ) Paul Irion the responsibility to welcome the work of Kübler-Ross, the death awareness movement, and hospice. These clergy leaders saw themselves as pastoral counseling experts or chaplains who dealt with dying and grief. By 1983, when Mitchell and Anderson wrote All Our Losses, All Our Griefs, there was no doubt that the dominant response of this...