Big Brother and the Grim Reaper: Political Life After Death

"Death is a social and political as well as a biological phenomenon. Efforts to regulate death have become an important source of power for states and secular rulers. States not only threaten death to their enemies but hope to secure popular loyalty and obedience by extending citizens' lives, by promising to effectuate the post mortem fulfillment of citizens' ante mortem desires, and by offering loyal citizens ersatz forms of immortality the state treats the loyal dead with respect, sometimes offering them a place in the secular afterlife of honor and memory, while consigning the faithless to the void"--