Theos’s report Love, Grief, and Hope: Emotional responses to death and dying in the UK features in The Telegraph. 29/11/2023

The Victorians were steeped in death; an ever–present reality for all ages. Funerals were an extravagant business for everyone but the poorest, designed to demonstrate respectability and abundant grief. As recently as three generations ago, straw was spread in the street to muffle the sounds of hooves and carriages. Even during my mother’s lifetime, curtains in rural villages were drawn and neighbours would make a ceremonial call to pay their respects to the dead.

The British way of death, however, has altered radically. According to a survey by the religious think tank Theos, less than half of the population would now choose to have any kind of funeral.

Many would consider this a welcome break from a morbid ceremony that enriches only the undertakers… but the enforced cheeriness of secular mortality can be equally strange; the vapidity, the innate refusal it implies to face up to reality. We are turning away from traditional ways of death, but what replaces them may not be an improvement.

Love, Grief, and Hope: Emotional responses to death and dying in the UK, published earlier this week, examines emotional responses to death and dying in the UK, presenting the findings of a nationally representative poll commissioned by Theos and conducted by YouGov.

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