Popularity of cremation heats up in America

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More than a third of the 2.5 million Americans who die this year likely will be burned in crematories rather than buried in caskets.

Funeral customs in the United States are undergoing rapid change. In the 1980s, the percent of bodies cremated first reached double digits, according to the Cremation Association of North America. The group estimates that cremation will account for the disposition of nearly 60 percent of all bodies in 2025.

"The increase in the cremation rate is the most significant change in U.S. mortuary customs in the past 50 years," said Thomas Lynch, author of the award-winning book "The Undertaking" and a funeral director in Michigan since 1974.

People choose cremation over burial for a number of reasons, according to the Cremation Association of North America: it costs less, it suits a more mobile society and it's considered more environmentally friendly, to name a few. Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University, suggests that religious, cultural and spiritual factors play the greatest roles.

Most religious communities in America considered cremation heathen in the 19th century, Prothero said.

Since then, many religious attitudes towards cremation have changed, but a preference for earth burial is still evident. A statistical analysis by Scripps Howard News Service showed that states with higher rates of church attendance generally have lower rates of cremation.

Utah, for example, has the highest participation rate in organized religion, according to the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, and one of the lowest cremation rates, at only 23 percent. Conversely, Oregon has the lowest religious participation rate and one of the nation's highest cremation rates, at 65 percent.

Cremation accounts for between 50 percent and 68 percent of deaths in 13 states in the West and Northeast: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.

Other states, such as Kentucky, Alabama and Mississippi that have higher rates of church attendance, still cremate less than 15 percent.

Among Christians, by far the largest religious group in America, cremations are increasing. Many Christians are coming to view themselves in a more spiritual and less physical way, Prothero said. They find the process of cremation and the rituals with ashes, whether scattered or kept in an urn, more appealing.

Some denominations are more accepting than others; the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church and the United Methodist Church are all open to cremation.

"Over time, the more liberal denominations open to change have accepted it," Prothero said.

The Roman Catholic Church, whose members account for about a fifth of the U.S. population, lifted its ban on cremation in 1963. In the '90s, it allowed cremated remains to be present at a Catholic funeral.

In a 1998 statement on funeral rites, the Bishops' Committee on Liturgy clarified that while "cremation is now permitted, it does not enjoy the same value as burial of the body," although cremated remains should be treated with the same respect as the body, it states.

Evangelical Protestants, according to Prothero, cremate less due to their belief in the resurrection of the body.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination, does not take a position on cremation, but some theologians, such as Dr. Mark Coppenger, prefer burial.

Coppenger is a professor of apologetics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and pastor of a Baptist congregation in Evanston, Ill. He lost both his mother and father in the last decade, and his family decided to bury them both.

"We like the honoring of the body; we're looking forward to our resurrection body," he said. "This is the body that held me as a child, and played catch with me," he said of his mother and father.

Despite the increasing popularity of cremation, many Americans are still squeamish about the actual process, which involves incinerating the body at temperatures up to 1,800 degrees. According to funeral directors and cemetery managers around the country, customers rarely are as willing to witness the process of cremation as they are to view a burial.

Chris Wells and his father added a crematory to their Wells Funeral Home in Batesville, Miss., about a year ago. Only about 12 percent of customers opt for cremation, consistent with Mississippi's statewide rate.

Not once has a family member asked to witness the body being put into the cremation chamber, Wells said, although the option is always offered.

"People in this area look at cremation completely differently than burial in terms of taking part of the process," he said.

Dennis Werner, general manager of St. Michael's Cemetery in the Queens borough of New York City, said St. Michael's serves just about every religious and ethnic group. Werner said that witnesses to cremation are rare aside from Hindus and Buddhists, for whom cremation is the long-standing tradition.

Thomas Lynch operates the only funeral home in Milford, Mich., a town in which more than half the dead are cremated. Yet few choose to witness the process there, too.

"At some level, we are not as comfortable with fire and we are with earth burial," Lynch said. For example, crematories are often housed in industrial parks while cemeteries are landscaped parks.

"We do not witness cremation in the same way that we witness burial, and I think that is a sign of some kind of disconnect."

(E-mail Elizabeth Lucas at lucase(at)shns.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)

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