ABSTRACT
The quest for immortality runs deeply throughout the earliest known Western stories, whose themes involve not speculation of the existence of an afterlife but rather how to keep the dead in their place. Underlying Western civilisation is Christianity's synthesis of these stories, featuring its grand assumption of immortal existence. Since the time of the Edwin S. Shneidman's concept of the postself's coinage, technological innovations, legal expansion of posthumous rights, and capitalism's commodification of symbolic immortality have expanded considerably the roles of the dead in everyday life. Given the increased presence of the dead in American civic and popular cultures prior to 9/11, the publicity given to the terrorists' immortal motivations strengthened the Republican Party's hand in the country's culture wars. Afterlife beliefs assumed a dramatic increase in political saliency; Christian notions of desirable eternal lives being reserved for those having lived morally worthy lives had to be reaffirmed.
