ABSTRACT
Secularization is the quantitative decline in the allocation of material and psychological resources to supernaturalism. Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology, wrote: Originally religion pervades everything; everything social is religious; the two worlds are synonymous. The reality of secularization can be assessed along the dimensions of uniformity, collectivism, and pluralism. The rhetoric of secularized funerals focuses on the personal life and relationships of the deceased, marginalizing religious ideas about death and the afterlife. The secularization of death in the modern world has been another momentous historical change. In modern societies, death may be conceived as the true extinction of the self or as a way station on the road to ultimate salvation. Secularization has meant privatizing and marginalizing all religious messages, including those dealing with death. The "New Age" phenomenon reflects both secularization and the persistence of supernaturalism, because it combines supernaturalist thinking with privatization and low investment, in most cases, but through the privatization, supernaturalism survives.
