(This article was first published in 2010 at StandardBlogs.)
I serve as a home teacher to an elderly woman. She has very little money and tries to stay independent. Eager not to have her death be a burden to her children, she long ago started putting money away so that when she dies, she can be cremated.
However, as she expressed to me, the decision has caused her anguish, as some members of the church have told her that cremation is not permitted in the LDS Church. “I simply have no other way of paying for my funeral,” she told me with a mixture of frustration and determination.
In the past weeks, the issue of cremation versus burial has become more personal to my family. My wife’s father, a member of the church who lived alone in Hungary, died. A somewhat reclusive man, he was dead at least a week before we were notified. Wanting to arrange for a funeral celebration in early April, we had no alternative but to have him cremated and his remains stored until the service.
The idea that cremation would be contradictory to God’s law has always struck me as ridiculous. Common sense dictates that someone killed in a plane crash, for example, is pretty well cremated. But, like the woman I home teach, I frequently was told growing up in the church that cremation was wrong. One rationale I heard often was that a cremated body could not be resurrected. That seemed like a flip answer to a serious question.
The reason for the “cremation is wrong” is probably due to its reference in “Mormon Doctrine,” which was written by the late LDS Apostle Bruce R. McConkie. Now, “Mormon Doctrine” is an amazing work, but its title is not accurate. It’s Bruce R. McConkie’s “Mormon Doctrine.” In fact, some of the book was changed after its first edition. In the second edition, here is what McConkie says about cremation: “…Cremation of the dead is not part of the gospel; it is a practice which has been avoided by the saints in all ages. The Church today counsels its members not to cremate their dead. Such a procedure would find gospel acceptance only under the most extraordinary and unusual circumstances …”
After reading that, I can understand why I, and my fellow ward member, have been told that cremation is wrong. Based on McConkie’s interpretation, poverty, it seems, would not be an “extraordinary” or “unusual” circumstance. McConkie’s opinion on cremation was shared by very early Christians, who regarded cremation as showing disrespect for God.
Except, McConkie’s wrong on this issue. Cremation is acceptable to LDS doctrine. In the July 1972 LDS Church publication, The New Era, Spencer J. Palmer, a former mission president in Korea, offered the LDS Church position on cremation: “Funerals and burials are prohibitive in cost to some of the most faithful members of the Church in that part of the world. Hence, although I personally prefer embalming and burial and although it has been the pattern followed by Israel, there appears to be no prohibition against cremation in the scriptures or in the theology of the Church.”
In the August 1991 LDS Church publication, The Ensign, Roger R. Keller, associate professor of Church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University, gave a lukewarm but definitive OK for cremation as an option. He wrote, “Ultimately, whether a person’s body was buried at sea, destroyed in combat or an accident, intentionally cremated, or buried in a grave, the person will be resurrected.”
I think the “cremation is wrong” doctrine is a lot like the “caffeinated soda is wrong” or “white sugar is wrong” rhetoric you hear often from well-meaning but over-exuberant members of the church. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is designed to provide comfort to our lives, not worry a poor old woman to her death quicker than she deserves.
-- Doug Gibson
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