Grief Shouldn’t Come With a Religious Markup | Column

Opinion. Humanist funerals are becoming the only dignified option many families can still afford. A new report this week confirms what grieving families already know: dying in America has become a luxury good. Funeral and burial costs have climbed roughly 77 percent over two decades, and a full burial now costs the average family nearly $8,600 — sometimes north of $20,000, depending on where you live (Rolling Out, Sept. 25, 2026). NBC News has already documented the human cost of that math: one family’s mother has sat in an urn on a shelf for months, because the family could not raise the money for a proper burial (NBC News).

Notice what is not driving these costs down: religion. Faith communities like to present themselves as grief’s safety net, the place families turn when they cannot cope alone. But the funeral home invoice does not care what you believe. Caskets, embalming, “cosmetic preparation,” clergy honoraria, chapel rental — the liturgy of the American funeral was built by an industry, not a church, and it prices grief the same whether you are devout or not.

Humanist funerals cut the cost of grief

This is where humanist funerals actually outperform the tradition they are so often accused of lacking. A humanist celebrant charges for their time, not for absolution. There is no requirement for a consecrated building, no expectation of a particular casket blessed by a particular denomination, no assumption that the family must buy the “complete package” to honor the dead properly. The ceremony can happen in a garden, a living room, a rented hall — wherever the people who loved the deceased can afford to gather.

None of this makes humanism a budget alternative to something better. It makes it the more honest option. A funeral’s job is to let the living say goodbye and mean it — not to prove piety through spending. When cremation is projected to hit 82 percent of American deaths within two decades, driven overwhelmingly by cost rather than preference, that is a verdict on what families actually value once the marketing falls away.

Grief is universal. It should never require a creed, a clergy fee, or a mortgage to be honored properly.

Fact-basis: Rolling Out, September 25, 2026; NBC News, “Even death is unaffordable in America now.”