I took a funeral this week too. It wasn’t for a well-known Liverpool celebrity. Cliff didn’t come along to sing. And 15,000 people didn’t line the streets to say goodbye. But nonetheless both services were remarkably similar – a requiem mass. Celebrity reporters at Cilla Black’s service all noted the touching things that were said about her by other famous people. But few mentioned the dramatic core of the service she chose – the sharing of bread and wine and the anticipation of that eternal feast to which all are called. And it was here, in this, the religious part of the service, that Cilla was not a celebrity standing before an audience, but a human being standing naked before God. There is a basic democracy in this aspect of religion that is often absent from the secular funeral.

As we drove up Brixton high street, the mourners in the back of the hearse broke out into song: Amazing Grace. Carl died in a fire at his flat. His partner was left with nothing, not even the price of the funeral. But, despite every worldly difference between them, Carl and Cilla had the same service. In life, they had little in common. In death, they were treated the same. And they both sung the same hymn. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.

Secular funerals are not a blind date with the truth | Letters Read more

In contrast to the religious funeral, the secular memorial service faces one massive problem. What if the deceased didn’t merit the effusive praise of the recently appointed biographer? What if they had done little of note? Or indeed, even more problematically, what if they had been a total shit throughout their lives and no one has a good word to say about them? The secular memorial service is generally based on the optimistic idea that the deceased was worthy of some sort of public commendation – which is why the whole idea of a secular memorial service for a paedophile or a mass murderer feels totally impossible. Would people really stand up to laud their achievements? Would people tell funny little stories about them? Of course not. I use this extreme example to make a point. The secular memorial service began as something for important statesmen and was then adopted by the increasingly Godless bourgeoisie as a way of celebrating their personal achievements. But it’s often poorly designed for those of us who are not a part of the great and the good.

And one unexpected consequence of the rise of the secular memorial service is that funerals are more full of half truths and evasions. Yes, the atheistic mindset is happy that the lie of God has been eliminated. Everything is more honest now, they say. Death is death. No more dressing it up. But things turn out to be far more complicated – for in the secular funeral this so-called lie about God is commonly replaced by another sort of lie, a lie about humanity. Or, at least, a lie about how good this particular person was. It is, of course, not unreasonable that the oration is designed to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. But this can sometimes lead to a peculiar emotional disconnect with reality. Which is why, in so many secular funerals, we no longer recognise the person being buried.

It’s not wholly dissimilar to how things have changed with weddings. The less they have become about God the more they have become about narcissistic expressions of “my special day”. And this is arguably a much deeper fantasy than the God one. For even if you have a problem with the whole God thing, it’s worth recognising the value of setting human life in a context where it’s not all about you, and where human beings don’t have to be particularly good or famous in order to be supremely valuable. At a Christian funeral, human life and death is understood as a part of some cosmically wider story. And from this perspective our many achievements don’t seem all that enormous. Indeed, here there is little need to lie or impress. Which is why, properly speaking, there is no such thing as a Christian celebrity funeral.