A fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at non-religious funerals in contemporary London

An Honest Death is an intimate and moving ethnographic account of funerals for people who don’t believe in God or an afterlife. Focusing on secular funeral celebrants of the British Humanist Association, the book examines how their ritual work is geared toward helping realize a secular world. There is a strong ethical commitment behind this effort, which is to face death with honesty based on the belief that this life is all we have. For the humanist celebrants and those they serve, this is what allows for a life with meaning and purpose.

Written in a vivid style, the book centers on the lives and the funerals of particular people, from a three-year-old child to a man in his nineties. Anthropologist Matthew Engelke, who trained as a humanist celebrant as part of his research, describes how these officiants try to craft “sincere” funerals, avoiding language and music that might suggest that the person who died had any religious beliefs. The book also captures the highs and lows for humanist celebrants of working in the funeral business—a business that is, for many of them, a kind of vocational calling.

Above all, An Honest Death draws out the tensions in secular humanist thought and practice between reason and the body, rationalism and materialism. Nothing matters more to the humanists than “daring to know” in the Enlightenment tradition, but nothing is so certainly known as the fact that we are finite and embodied creatures.

Matthew Engelke is professor and chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University and previously taught for more than fifteen years at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a recipient of the Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion and the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing. His books include How to Think Like an Anthropologist.