CLERGY will have noticed some dramatic changes in how people approach death and funerals in recent years. So it was apposite, and even more so in the week that Parliament voted to legalise assisted dying, that Thinking Allowed (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week) explored historical customs of death in Britain and present customs of death in China.
Laurie Taylor, who compèred, opened the programme by noting that religious instruction was not his best school subject — curiously, because actual death rites in Chinese religious practice were only touched on, and church funerals in Britain not at all.
Instead, Dr Molly Conisbee, a visiting research Fellow at the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, led us on a tour of surrounding paraphernalia in Georgian and Victorian times. The complexity of appropriate dress in different periods of mourning can seem bizarre to us now, but did signal without words being exchanged what was appropriately sensitive behaviour in a society where the higher social classes were discouraged from emoting too publicly.
In contrast, the working classes, especially the Irish, went in for boisterous wakes where the deceased, lying in state, was sent on their way to the afterlife accompanied by plenty of drinking and smoking. Victorian social improvers worried that the lengthy display of bodies at home might be the source of cholera. We even had a brief exploration of why grave-robbing became such a persistent problem in late Georgian Britain.
The end of life in Western countries struck Dr Chao Fang, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Liverpool, as medicalised and centred on the individual. In today’s China, death remains a family affair, but the downside is that life can be extended medically beyond the point that the dying person gains anything but pain in return. Palliative care is still in its infancy, but care for the dying involves much use of alternative medicine and spiritual practices. As much as in the West, there is a multiplicity of understandings of the soul and the afterlife in 21st-century China, which leads to a diversity of funeral practice.
The BBC’s more popular and high-profile programming can display a staggering ignorance of the Christian faith. BBC religious broadcasting remains a place where one can see evidence of a mutually supportive relationship between Church and State which has vanished elsewhere.
This week’s Sunday Worship (Radio 4) was an example of such. Recorded at Lambeth Palace, and led by the Archbishop’s Chaplain, the Revd Tosin Oladipo, many participants were either members of the Chemin Neuf and St Anselm communities at Lambeth, or lay staff members at the Palace, one of whom celebrated how getting a job there led her on a journey from “spiritual but not religious” to baptism and a lively Christian faith.
