As the canton of Zurich moves toward a referendum on assisted dying, a Swiss elder-care advocate with more than a decade of experience accompanying dying people is urging churches and society to stop waiting for ballot results and start learning to talk about death.
Dr. Markus Müller, founder of the advocacy group Initiative Pro Aging and author of a recently published book on aging, argued in a commentary for the Swiss Evangelical Alliance that the debate over assisted suicide cannot be reduced to a policy question. The deeper issue, he wrote, is whether contemporary culture still knows how to love life when it is frail, painful, and close to its end.
"Unbroken love for broken life" — that phrase is the heart of Müller's argument, and he offered it as a counterweight to what he sees as a civilization increasingly conditioned to exit difficulty rather than endure it.
A culture shaped by improvement
Müller spent 12 years working with elderly, very old, and dying people at the Rämismühle Center in Switzerland. That experience shapes his reading of what he calls a "breathtaking" value shift across Western societies since the 1950s.
He traced the arc from postwar norms — in which cohabitation, same-sex relationships, abortion, and gender reassignment were socially or legally forbidden — to a present in which the individual's subjective sense of well-being has become the dominant moral standard. The movement, he argued, was always in one direction: away from duty and toward self-determination.
For generations raised in postwar Central Europe, Müller wrote, virtually every dimension of life has improved. Prosperity, medicine, technology, comfort: all of it has trended upward. The cultural lesson absorbed, often without reflection, is that the world can be made better — and must be made better. Aging, decline, and death are the only experiences that resist that logic. Assisted dying, he suggested, presents itself as a solution to that tension: a way to skip over the part that cannot be improved.
"The definitive counterpoint to 'always better' is — logically — dying and death," he wrote. "The problem and the tension intensify, and the question suggests itself: might the desire to escape this tension not naturally raise the question of a back door?"
Life made secondary
Alongside that cultural drive toward improvement, Müller identified what he called a quiet "de-valuing of life" — not a conscious ideology but a drift in everyday assumptions. Three orienting values have gradually displaced the unconditional worth of human life, he argued: health ("the main thing is to be healthy"), well-being ("the main thing is that you are doing well"), and self-determination ("the main thing is that you decide for yourself").
Each of those values is reasonable in itself. But when they function as the primary measure of whether a life is worth living, Müller argued, they leave frail and suffering life without a foundation. "Life, above all frail life, literally becomes secondary," he wrote. When that happens, he said, the fundamental objection to assisted dying disappears — not because anyone set out to eliminate it, but because the cultural framework no longer supplies one.
The commentary was published by the Swiss Evangelical Alliance, which represents evangelical Protestant churches across Switzerland, as the canton of Zurich weighs whether to permit assisted dying practitioners access to care homes and institutions.
Three forms of pain
Müller was direct that he did not think moral argument alone would change the direction of public opinion. Societies, he said, have grown immune to moralizing. Instead, he tried to name what he called the unmistakable but usually unspoken pain caused when an elderly person ends their life — whether assisted or not.
The first pain is relational. When someone dies with assistance, those closest to them are often left standing helplessly. Müller challenged the framing of assisted dying as purely an act of self-determination, arguing that a relationship built over years cannot simply be set aside at the moment of death under the banner of individual choice. Something breaks in those who remain.
The second pain concerns pressure. The distance between a freely chosen death and a death that is subtly encouraged by a social environment in which the elderly are seen as burdens is, he argued, shorter than it appears. He cited a remark — made without irony — that "dying is cheaper." The fear of being nudged toward death, he said, is not paranoid. It is already being felt in hospitals and care homes.
The third pain Müller called the greatest. Every generation, he wrote, leaves behind more than money. It leaves behind a story. Future generations will ask not only what was accomplished, but whether those who came before loved life — including its hard and diminished seasons. "Will people say of us — personally and as a generation — that we loved life beyond health, well-being, and self-determination? Or will they say that we chose the back door because we apparently never learned to cope maturely with hardship and suffering?"
"Dying is not an individual-private matter," he wrote.
What churches are for
Müller turned from cultural analysis to what he called "the imperative of the hour," addressing Christian congregations directly — though he said the word "congregation" should be understood broadly, to include associations, schools, friend circles, and small groups.
His argument was that churches have misunderstood their purpose if they function primarily as sites of personal faith. They must instead be, he wrote, places where life is "de-privatized and de-individualized" — where the end of life is not left solely to the individual to navigate alone.
He offered five specific functions he believes congregations should fulfill. First, they should be training grounds for what he called the "mature handling" of frail, besieged, and broken life. The goal, he specified, is not the elimination of suffering but the cultivation of resilience — "the ability to cope well and with inner health with brokenness at every stage of life." That, he said, is not the same as simply enduring.
Second, congregations should celebrate life precisely in its vulnerability and transience, rather than only in its vitality and success. Third, they should cultivate what Müller called the "joy of the future" — a hope grounded in something beyond present circumstances, which he argued makes it possible to face loss and decline without desperation. "Those who are secure in the future are able to shape the present," he wrote, adding that this principle must be practiced for decades before it can be relied upon at the moment of dying.
Fourth, he argued that congregations must free themselves from what he called the "tyranny of achievement" — the assumption, absorbed from surrounding culture, that life must always be productive, improving, and justifiable by its outputs. The Christian "yes" to life, he wrote, is unconditional. It does not depend on performance or capability.
Müller cited the theologian Gunda Schneider-Flume's work on the "tyranny of the well-managed life" as a resource for this argument. He also referenced his own recently published book, "Rethinking Aging — How Your Thinking Shapes Your Getting Older," as an attempt to develop these themes at greater length.
Practical questions without easy answers
The commentary closed with a list of real situations Müller said Christians should be prepared to navigate — not with a simple yes or no, but with actual words.
He offered several examples: a relative who has registered with the assisted dying organization Exit and asks what you think; a school friend who has scheduled his death for the following Thursday and invites you to a farewell gathering; a friend who asks whether you would be present when the end-of-life companion arrives; an elderly person who says they are only a burden and asks for help joining an assisted dying group; a sibling conflict over whether aging parents should register with such an organization "just in case"; a neighbor who argues that God does not want suffering and that assisted dying therefore serves God's purposes.
None of those conversations, Müller acknowledged, admit of easy answers. His point was not to supply a script but to argue that churches — and society — should stop treating the absence of a position as a form of neutrality. Silence, he said, is not neutral. It is a choice to leave individuals alone with decisions that carry consequences far beyond themselves.
"Why not begin — precisely because the subject is so existential — to search for words and find language?" he wrote. "This within circles of friends, in associations, in the congregation — and as a society. I extend this invitation. It would be the alternative to helpless and speechless waiting to see what majorities decide."
