Majority Now Choose Cremation Over Casket Burial

The Washington Post reports:

In 2020, 56 percent of Americans who died were cremated, more than double the figure of 27 percent two decades earlier, according to the Cremation Association of North America (CANA). By 2040, 4 out of 5 Americans are projected to choose cremation over casket burial, according to both CANA and the National Funeral Directors Association.

Other countries have been quicker to embrace the practice, like Japan, with a rate of almost 100 percent, in part because of its high density and paucity of burial grounds. Cremation is central to Hindu and Buddhist funeral practices, releasing the soul from the body. But Judaism, Catholicism and Islam resisted it, because of views about the sanctity of body and spirit in death.

Read the full article.

By 2040, 4 out of 5 Americans are projected to chose cremation over casket burial, reflecting an increasingly secular, transient and, some argue, death-phobic nation.https://t.co/LBK6co5edN

— Karen Heller (@kheller) April 19, 2022