When a person who didn't practice a religion dies, their family is often left wondering: what does a meaningful farewell look like without a church, a clergy member, or a liturgy? The answer is: deeply personal, carefully crafted, and increasingly common. Humanist and secular funerals are among the fastest-growing ceremony formats in both the UK and the US — and they are built on the idea that a life without religious belief is still a life of profound meaning, worthy of a ceremony that honors it honestly.
In 2025, 28% of Americans identify as religiously unaffiliated — up from 16% in 2007, according to NFDA data cited by US Funerals Online. The UK tells a similar story: the SunLife Cost of Dying Report 2025 found that 49% of farewells in 2024 were non-religious. For families navigating the death of someone who lived outside of organized religion — an atheist, an agnostic, someone who described themselves as "spiritual but not religious" — a humanist or secular ceremony offers a genuine alternative: one that centers the actual person, their actual values, and the actual relationships they built.
This guide is part of Tribute Plan's series on funeral and memorial traditions across cultures. If you're exploring other ceremony formats, we also cover Irish wake traditions and the customs of sitting shiva elsewhere in the series. Here, the focus is entirely on building a ceremony that is honest, human, and complete — without religion.
What Is a Humanist or Secular Funeral — and What's the Difference?
The terms "humanist funeral" and "secular funeral" are often used interchangeably, but they describe subtly different things. Understanding the distinction helps families choose the format that best fits the person they've lost.
Humanist Funerals
A humanist funeral is a non-religious ceremony that explicitly reflects humanist values: the belief that human beings can live ethical, meaningful lives without religion, and that each life has intrinsic worth. These ceremonies are entirely free of religious content — no prayers, no hymns, no references to an afterlife or deity — and are defined instead by deep personalization around the life actually lived.
In the UK, humanist funerals are conducted by accredited celebrants trained and certified through Humanists UK, which conducts more than 8,000 funerals per year in England and Wales alone. Over one million people in England have now attended a humanist funeral. In the US, the American Humanist Association and the Humanist Society train and certify officiants for secular ceremonies across the country. The defining characteristic is not merely the absence of religion — it is the presence of something deeply considered in its place: a ceremony constructed around the specific person who lived.
Secular Funerals and Civil Celebrant Ceremonies
A secular funeral is the broader category: any ceremony without religious content, led by a civil celebrant rather than a religious minister. Civil celebrants can include or exclude spiritual elements based on family preference. Some families want a completely secular service; others want something that acknowledges "something greater" without invoking a specific religion or tradition.
The distinction matters when families are choosing a format. If the person who died was specifically non-religious — and would have rejected any spiritual content — a humanist ceremony is the more fitting choice. If the family has mixed beliefs and wants a ceremony that can hold both believers and non-believers in the room with equal dignity, a civil celebrant ceremony may give more flexibility. According to Aura Life, the key differentiator is that a humanist funeral involves "no acts of worship," whereas a civil celebrant may adapt the ceremony's spiritual tone based on the family's wishes.
The Structure of a Humanist Funeral
A typical humanist funeral runs 30 to 45 minutes and follows a loose but intentional structure. It is not liturgy — there is no fixed order, no required text — but there are recognizable elements that most humanist ceremonies include, each fulfilling a purpose.
The Opening Welcome
The celebrant opens by welcoming guests, setting the tone — warm, honest, human — and naming the purpose of the gathering: to remember, celebrate, and say goodbye to a specific, irreplaceable person. Unlike a religious service that begins with a liturgical prayer or invocation, a humanist opening grounds the ceremony in the present moment. It acknowledges why everyone is there and gives permission for the full range of emotions — grief, laughter, gratitude, sadness — to be present in the room.
The Life Story (The Tribute)
The heart of a humanist funeral is the spoken tribute — a detailed, personal account of the person's life, character, relationships, and values, compiled by the celebrant in close consultation with the family. Good celebrants conduct one or more interviews with family members before writing the tribute, weaving specific stories, habits, phrases, and memories into a narrative that feels genuinely true to who the person was.
This is what distinguishes a humanist ceremony from a generic non-religious service: the specificity of the tribute. The goal is that anyone who loved the person leaves the ceremony feeling that what was said was true — that the celebrant captured something real. Families often describe this as the most important element of the ceremony to get right. When interviewing potential celebrants, ask to read an example tribute they have written. Specificity is the standard.
Readings
Rather than scripture, readings at a humanist funeral are drawn from poetry, literature, philosophy, music lyrics, or the deceased's own writing. Common sources include Mary Oliver's "When Death Comes," Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," Kahlil Gibran's reflections on love and loss from The Prophet, or simply a passage from a book the person loved and annotated. The family may choose to have a family member or close friend deliver a reading — which itself becomes a form of tribute and gives the reader something purposeful to do in the ceremony.
The selection of readings is worth taking time over. A poem that the person quoted in a card twenty years ago, or a passage from a novel they reread every year, carries far more weight than a generic "appropriate" reading selected from a list. Ask the family: what did this person read? What did they quote? What did they love?
Music
There is no restriction on music at a humanist funeral — any song that mattered to the person is appropriate. Music may open the ceremony, accompany the entry or exit of the casket or urn, or accompany a period of quiet reflection. Families often choose music that would have played at the person's kitchen table, in their car, or at their favorite place — rather than music selected to seem appropriate for a funeral.
This can be one of the most moving elements of a humanist ceremony. When a song that a person genuinely loved fills the room at their funeral, it does something that no liturgy can do: it brings the person back for a moment, recognizably and completely.
Contributions from Family and Friends
A humanist ceremony typically includes space for family and friends to speak — brief personal tributes, stories, or expressions of love. This can be a formal slot in the order of service or a more informal open invitation. Unlike some religious funeral formats, where personal eulogies may be restricted or placed outside the formal service, a humanist ceremony is structured around personal expression. The tributes from those who knew the person are not incidental — they are the substance of the ceremony.
Symbolic Rituals Without Religion
Ritual without religion is not a contradiction — it is one of the distinctive strengths of humanist ceremonies. Ritual gives the body something to do during grief, creates shared memory, and marks the ceremony as different from ordinary time. Common non-religious rituals include:
- A memorial candle lighting ceremony — each person lights a small candle in memory of the deceased, creating a moment of collective acknowledgment
- A moment of silence or collective reflection — one to two minutes of shared quiet that allows each person to be with their own thoughts and memories
- Planting a memorial tree at the graveside or in a meaningful location — a living symbol of continuation
- Passing around a meaningful object — a book, a tool, a piece of jewelry the person wore — for guests to hold briefly before it is placed with the person or kept by the family
- A collective reading aloud — everyone in the room reads a short passage together, creating a unified voice
- A water blessing — drawing on secular traditions of rivers and the sea without religious framing
The choice of ritual should feel authentic to the person. The question to ask is: what would this person have found meaningful? What connected them to the world and to the people they loved?
The Farewell and Committal
The ceremony closes with a farewell — the celebrant's words of parting, which acknowledge the sadness of loss and the enduring nature of memory without reference to an afterlife or theological comfort. At a cremation service, this is the moment when the curtains close or the casket is lowered. At a graveside service, the celebrant leads the committal words. The closing should feel true: honest about the loss, and honest about what remains — the love, the memories, the people in the room who were shaped by knowing this person.
How to Find a Humanist Celebrant
Finding the right celebrant is the most important practical step in planning a humanist or secular funeral. The ceremony is only as good as the person leading it.
In the UK, Humanists UK maintains a searchable directory of accredited celebrants at humanists.uk/find-a-celebrant, covering England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. All listed celebrants have completed the Humanists UK training program and are bound by its professional standards.
In the US, the American Humanist Association's Humanist Society trains and certifies Humanist Celebrants across the country. Funeral directors can also suggest local civil celebrants; in most areas with a meaningful number of non-religious families, there are experienced secular ceremony leaders available.
Celebrant fees typically range from $300–$600 in the US and £150–£350 in the UK, with higher rates in major cities. Interview two or three candidates before choosing — ask to read sample tributes they have written, ask how they gather information from families, and ask how they handle mixed-belief situations if that applies. The right celebrant will make the tribute feel like the family wrote it.
Readings, Poetry, and Music — A Starter List
Choosing readings can feel overwhelming when you're in the early days of loss and don't have the bandwidth for research. This is a starting point — not a prescription, but a set of directions to explore.
Poems and prose for humanist funerals:
- Mary Oliver, "When Death Comes" — a meditation on living fully that is widely used at secular and humanist ceremonies; focuses on presence and engagement rather than afterlife
- Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" — appropriate for deaths that felt untimely or for those who lived with fierce energy
- Kahlil Gibran, "On Death" (from The Prophet) — spiritual in feeling but not theologically specific; speaks of death as part of life's river
- Henry Scott Holland, "Death Is Nothing at All" — often requested for its gentleness; written by a canon of St. Paul's Cathedral but regularly used at secular services for its emphasis on memory and presence
- Rainer Maria Rilke, "I Live My Life in Widening Circles" — meditative and well-suited to someone who was curious, expansive, and searching
- Michael Rosen, "Grief" — an honest, modern piece about how grief actually works, rather than how we imagine it should
- The person's own words — a letter they wrote, an email, a journal entry, something from their social media that captured who they were — often the most powerful reading of all
A framework for music selection: Rather than selecting songs that "seem like funeral music," consider a three-part structure — a piece for reflection or arrival as guests take their seats; a piece during the tribute section that connects musically to the person; and a closing piece for the exit that feels like the right final sound. The person's own playlist, or what a family member recalls them listening to most, is almost always the best starting point.
Creating a Lasting Tribute Through the Ceremony
A humanist funeral is not just an event — it is an opportunity to create lasting artifacts that will carry the ceremony forward long after the day itself. Because a humanist ceremony is not bound by liturgical structure, there is considerably more space for creative tribute-making.
Consider an order-of-service booklet designed as a keepsake rather than a functional program — including photographs, a short biography, and the texts of any readings, so that guests leave with something they'll want to keep. A memory book passed around during the reception invites guests to write down a memory, a sentence, a message — creating a document that the family will return to for years. A display of photographs and meaningful objects, arranged to tell the story of the person's life across decades, gives guests something to gather around and share their own memories beside.
Learning how to create a tribute book can transform these ceremony elements into a lasting volume that captures not just the person's life but the love that was present in the room that day. Memorial photo display ideas range from simple framed collections to elaborate timeline arrangements — the right approach depends on the person and the setting, but the principle is the same: a ceremony can generate memory objects as well as memory experiences.
The humanist ceremony's emphasis on the person as they actually were — not as filtered through liturgy or doctrine — makes it particularly well-suited to this kind of specific, detailed tribute-making. Everything about the person is fair game: their work, their humor, their obsessions, their failures and recoveries, the things that made them specifically and irreplacably themselves.
Answering the Hard Questions Families Ask
Planning a non-religious ceremony often comes with anxiety — about what others will think, about how to hold a mixed family, about practical logistics. Here are the questions that come up most, answered plainly.
"Will people think it's disrespectful if there's no religious content?" Almost certainly not. What people remember about a funeral or memorial service is whether it felt true — whether the ceremony captured the person and created space for genuine grief and love. A humanist ceremony conducted well will be remembered as moving and meaningful by people of any faith or none. Sincerity is what makes a ceremony feel respectful, not format.
"What if some family members are religious and others aren't?" This is a common situation, and a skilled civil celebrant can hold it gracefully. A moment of quiet reflection can be included — interpretable as a moment of prayer for those who pray, and as a moment of silence for those who don't, without the ceremony endorsing either interpretation. The ceremony can acknowledge that people in the room hold different beliefs about what comes after death, and that what everyone shares is the love for this specific person.
"Can we still have a burial in a church cemetery?" In most cases, yes. Most cemeteries, including religious ones, allow non-religious ceremonies at the graveside. The cemetery may have requirements about the interment itself (particularly Catholic cemeteries), but the ceremony at the graveside is typically separate from any requirements about religious affiliation for purchase of a plot. Call the cemetery directly and ask — most will accommodate.
"Do we need to call it a 'funeral'?" No. Many families choose to call a non-religious ceremony a "celebration of life," a "memorial gathering," a "farewell," or simply use the person's name. The naming is yours to determine. What matters is that it is intentional, that it gathers the people who loved the person, and that it creates space to remember and grieve.
Sources:
Humanists UK — "What Is a Humanist Funeral?" — https://humanists.uk/ceremonies/funerals/blog/what-is-a-humanist-funeral/
Aura Life — "Humanist vs Celebrant: What Sets Them Apart?" — https://aura.life/articles/humanist-vs-celebrant
Distinct Cremations UK — "How to Arrange a Non-Religious Funeral Service" — https://www.distinctcremations.co.uk/funeral-guidance/types-of-funerals/non-religious-funerals/
US Funerals Online — "What Was the Cremation Rate in the US in 2025?" — https://us-funerals.com/2026-us-cremation-rate/
Religion Media Centre / Theos Think Tank — "As Religious Rituals Fade, Funerals Become More Personal" — https://religionmediacentre.org.uk/news/as-religious-rituals-fade-funerals-become-more-personal/
American Humanist Association — Humanist Celebrants Program — https://americanhumanist.org