Widespread dying creates demand for paid services that once didn't exist or barely mattered, such as catered funeral meals, life insurance sold to ordinary people, and cremation. These businesses become highly visible and unsettle a society that values doing things the traditional way.
When people from different churches pool money, cook, and pray together to bury their dead, they build a practical unity from below. This everyday cooperation challenges the authority of official, top-down efforts to bring churches together.
When an epidemic makes burying the dead a constant, ordinary task, the burial customs themselves begin to change. Families facing sickness and loss over and over end up inventing new ways to hold funerals, and these new ways become part of everyday life.