Diana's devotees join the new religion

There have been flowers, messages and tears to mark Diana's death. But beyond Westminster Abbey and other churches, few Christian symbols have been on display. For every cross, you will find many more cards with hearts drawn in them. This is Diana's icon, representing a devotion to feeling, compassion and emotion. But little mention of God.

Diana's funeral showed post-Christian Britain out in force. Just as there was a gulf between the people and those in the Palace, the beliefs of many listening to the funeral from outside bore little resemblance to the faith of those within the church walls.

People have a new religion. Most did not gather outside the Abbey and Kensington Palace to find God. They came together for a more internal exercise, to explore their all-important inner selves and feelings, an event prompted by the death of a woman who excelled in expressing her own emotions.

This religion is the creed of the confessional society and has been developed by a priesthood of analysts, therapists, counsellors, agony aunts and psychobabblers. Like most religions, its practitioners are predominantly women. Its first commandment is to get in touch with your inner self. Diana followed that commandment and, though she flirted with formal, established religion, she never really, as the Archbishop of Canterbury has indicated, had much time for it.

Some see the new religion as Britain taking on a more Mediterranean, perhaps Catholic temperament, less hung up about feelings. To me, it remains characteristically British, still calm and reserved. At Diana's funeral, there was none of the hysterical wailing seen on television after the latest Middle East atrocity. And its individualism is essentially Protestant, about each person's relationship with him and herself. What is innovative about what is happening - let's call it New Protestantism - is its secular quality, the banishment of God in favour of a spirit inside ourselves.

We have tended to miss this religious phenomenon because its explicitly individualistic nature, easily pilloried as narcissism, means it has no churches, no great institutions. And so apparently no power. Saturday changed that. Diana's death brought a massive New Protestant congregation together and demonstrated that even a religion which is so personal and fragmented can have a collective voice. It is also evangelical and judgemental, critical of those who do not subscribe to its nostrums. The Queen, head of the Established Church, and her family, have felt the criticism of the already converted.

Over the past century, philosophers have rubbished the notion of there being any concrete basis for morality, citing the impossibility of proving the existence of God or an absolute morality. They have dismissed ethics as expressing little more than the speaker's own emotions. Yet the unprecedented collective expression of emotion seen in the past few days has given fresh authority to morality, be it with respect to press behaviour or the actions of the Royal Family. New Protestantism, when it gets its congregation together, is a powerful force.