ABSTRACT
This chapter has drawn on Ronald Inglehart's argument that economically secure and egalitarian industrial societies tend to become secular. Secularisation is a complex social process including both syncretism and polarisation of secular and Christian elements. Inglehart goes on to argue that post-industrial affluence and security go on to produce another post material cultural formation. The process of secularisation, the attempt to humanise the technological and bureaucratic modern way of death is profoundly changing the way people die; practices originally developed in hospices and bereavement care are becoming mainstream. This poses relatively little problem for secularised Christians, but it can for some from more traditional communities whose focus is not on the feelings of the living but on the spiritual destination of the dead. One of the curious things about Judaism and Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity, is that in contrast to, say, Hinduism or animism there is an inbuilt potential for secularisation.
