Over in the vicarage, my teenage girls are tearing the place down getting ready for Halloween. The younger one is thinking about a zombie bride look and has drawn bones on her limbs with a marker pen. The eldest has decided to go with a ghoulish version of Marsellus Wallace’s wife from Pulp Fiction, complete with snot and blood pouring from her nostril.
While all this is going on, I am sitting quietly in church next door, escaping the chaos and contemplating a list of names my congregation has submitted of loved ones who have recently died and for whom they have asked me to pray. It strikes me that the Eve of All Hallows has a much friendlier attitude towards the dead than Halloween. A dozen or so of my congregation join me for an evening service. There isn’t much chat tonight, just an atmosphere of loving, mournful concentration, as people sit with the memories of their wife, husband, lover, friend, mother, daughter, son. I try and recall all those I have buried – both saints and sinners. A few tears roll in the darkness. Afterwards, there is a palpable sense of emotional solidarity.
Christian and post-Christian/secular attitudes to the dead in modern Britain still share much in common. Not only does Halloween piggyback on an ancient Christian festival, but many of the rites and ceremonies of the secular funeral borrow their stage directions from religious equivalents: they generally last a certain amount of time, they have readings and singing, often in a sandwich-type arrangement, often a few moments of quiet, sometimes candles. I often take non-religious funerals for friends and they feel remarkably similar as events.
But one of the things a religious funeral is able to accommodate in a way the secular funeral cannot is when the deceased was a complete and utter bastard. I have taken a number of funerals for men who were paedophiles – but I have never been to a memorial service for one. Being built around eulogies, the secular memorial service generally finds it difficult to conduct a service for someone about whom nobody has a good word. In this regard, the Christian liturgy – however much the atheist believes it to be built on a fantasy – allows for a greater accommodation of reality. When I take the funeral for a man who used to beat up his wife, no one is lying about him or pretending it didn’t happen. Talk of judgment is a reminder of that, if nothing else.
In my experience, taking God out of death doesn’t necessarily lessen superstition. I often conduct funerals for people who self-describe as being “not religious” but who still believe that their husband is looking down on them from above and who feel he is still with them long after death. Those who tell me this sort of thing often expect me to share their view.
But my position is totally the opposite. Christians believe in the immortality of God and the mortality of the human. Now a great many people believe in the mortality of God and the immortality of the human. From pseudo-scientific ramblings about the post-human and uploading our personality on to computers to produce digital immortality, to the popular superstition of the dead still being with us – God is dead but human beings have borrowed some of his power. Ironically, this can make the post-religious worldview much less realistic about the reality of death.
Atheism is no prophylactic against superstition. It can sometimes make matters worse, allowing the non-believer the comforting thought that simply by turning off the God switch they have done all the work needed to exorcise superstition. This is rubbish, because it is when the intellectual guard is down that strange beliefs often start to appear, like weeds in an unattended garden.
I return from church to find my kids dressed head-to-toe in gothic porn. I have been just sitting with a man who has recently lost his father. But apparently, I am the weird, superstitious one with funny attitudes to death.