he death of Diana, Princess of Wales provoked an outburst of national grief on a scale unprecedented in modern Britain.  However, Christians should have experienced a deep sense of unease at the manner in which such grief was expressed by the people.  Roy Clements, writing in Evangelicals Now, October 1997 is surely correct when he says:
          "I struggled as I wandered through those crowds to put my finger on what it was about all this exhibition of public grief that left me feeling slightly uneasy.  It was a passing comment made by the overseas student who had accompanied me to the park that enabled me to identify the source of my disquiet.  He rather innocently observed that the scene reminded him of one of those flower-decked shrines one finds dedicated to Hindu deities in India."
          What was crucially missing amongst the written tributes attached to the thousands of flowers was anything specifically Christian.  What the tributes of the nation did reveal was that we are now officially a post-Christian country, with an understanding of spiritual matters that is essentially pagan.
          And what, if anything, is the central understanding of this pagan folk-religion concerning the meaning of existence and the destiny of the human soul after death?  The answer seems to be a strange mixture of utter hopelessness and forced optimism.  While on the one hand the outpouring of grief betrayed a sense of empty incomprehension in the face of sudden death, on the other hand there were words of false hope from influential sources.  The denominational clergy lined up almost to a man to suggest that this princess, so well-known for her good works, was now in heaven.  Stephen Sykes, the Bishop of Ely, writing in the Daily Telegraph on the day of the funeral, demonstrated how the major denominations have now become the institutionalised expression of this pagan folk-religion:
          "If I want a straightforward, clear sentence to use for myself and others in answer to the questions which pile in this week, I shall say, 'She has gone to stay with God, and to discover with God what it all meant and means'."
          Thus the liberal-dominated apostate churches have an answer which is no different from that of the unbelieving masses.  Faced with the fact of the grave, utter despair, it appears, can only be assauged by forced optimism of Elton John's Candle In The Wind, the song which became the pagan folk-hymn to Diana at the funeral itself.
          John articulates the hope, although it amounts to unbelieving wishful-thinking, that Diana, as Bishop Sykes said, is with God:

          Thus, in the absence of the Christian understanding that all men and women stand under the righteous judgement of God because of sin, hell is abolished, and the only destination after death can be heaven.  The secular press confirmed this tenet of pagan folk-religion in the aftermath of the funeral.  Jo Knowsley, writing in the
Sunday Telegraph of 21st September, reported some of the suggestions made by child psychiatrists to explain to children the meaning of death:
          " Explain that the soul has gone to heaven and the body is just the house of the soul, if this is what you believe...."
          So we see that liberal churchmen, secular professionals and the unbelieving masses have joined hands to anaesthetise the pain felt when death occurs by proposing that everything is alright when in fact the issue of eternal verities remains unresolved.  The reality today is that people are finding ways of dealing with bad news without being confronted with the problem of God's wrath against human sin and the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ.
          And these methods are at best mere sticking-plaster measures which cannot bind up the deep wounds of despair which scar an unbelieving populace.  Our
society is in deep trouble, and our churches are on a steep decline. 
          A funeral held in the most prominent  Protestant church in the country which, in the minds of many, had its centre-piece a pagan hymn sung by an avowed homosexual can surely only bring further judgement upon the churches and the nation.
          The beliefs which predominate today have taken their cue from the unbelieving liberalism which has fatally infected the witness of the major denominations.  Can we be surprised that what people believe is blown about like a candle in the wind if churches which still claim to be Christian are themselves tossed about by every blast of new teaching which comes their way?  More than ever, this is a time for repentance in the churches and for Christians to call the nation back to biblical truth.  At present the silence is deafening and an opportunity seems to have been missed.  How much more time will our gracious God grant us that we might turn from our pagan ways?