In Hither Green, an unremarkable suburb of London, an extraordinary power struggle is being played out in slow motion on the street where a burglar died after being stabbed by the man whose house he had broken into. The burglar’s friends and relatives have made a little shrine from flowers and balloons above the pavement where he collapsed and died. Residents have repeatedly removed and trampled it. The police have appealed for calm and respect on both sides, and been roundly abused for it. That’s because this is a essentially religious skirmish, one in which symbolism brings up profound questions about the worth of an apparently worthless life. Flower power was not meant to work like this.

Henry Vincent was a career criminal who preyed on old people, sometimes using force. On 4 April he was stabbed in the kitchen of 78-year-old Richard Osborn-Brooks, who found him there going equipped with a screwdriver. An accomplice fled and is still wanted by the police. Osborn-Brooks will not be charged and public sentiment, as well as the law, is overwhelmingly on his side. Since Vincent’s death many accounts have surfaced of his earlier crimes. Yet he left a family and friends. There are those who mourn him, and they come from a Traveller community where ostentatious public displays of grief and respect are essential funeral rites.

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Nothing more clearly demonstrates your position in society than your treatment after death. Today this is a matter of respect, like granting Stephen Hawking a grave in Westminster Abbey. But historically it has often been the opposite. Denying recognition to a corpse was a way of demonstrating exclusion. People who took their own lives were denied Christian burial; the corpse of Oliver Cromwell was dug up when the monarchy was restored so that it could be mutilated and publicly displayed; in the Iliad, Achilles drags the naked corpse of Hector behind his chariot around the walls of Troy until old king Priam comes to beg for the corpse of his son to give it a decent burial.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the supporters of Osborn-Brooks want these things done to the corpse of Henry Vincent, but they want him away, they want him forgotten, and they want his memory out of their neighbourhood. Funerals and graves are ways of manipulating the sacred, but they also make territorial claims. “There is some corner of a foreign field,” wrote Rupert Brooke, foreseeing his own unglamorous death from dysentery, “that is forever England.”

To place a memorial to Vincent on the spot where he died suggests that he had a right to be there, as well as a right to live, and this is something that seems viscerally wrong to anyone who felt threatened by the activities of his gang.

For both sides, then, this unassuming wooden fence has become a shrine. It is a symbol whose meaning can neither be avoided nor agreed. To one side it is a tribute; to the other, a deliberate provocation. This row is playing on the roots of religion.

There any longer any recognised religious authority which could reconcile these two visions

The anthropologist Scott Atran talks about sacred values as being those symbols which seem so important that people are prepared to die or kill for them. This is related to the claim of one of the founders of modern sociology, Émile Durkheim, that soldiers in wartime fight, quite literally, for their flag. The thing about sacred objects, Atran says, is that they cannot be exchanged for worldly advantages. Conflicts over shrines, or sacred objects, can only be settled when both sides acknowledge the symbolic claims of the other.

In that light, it is obvious how this conflict might have been resolved: by the relatives of Henry Vincent acknowledging the pain and distress he had caused, and apologising for it before they mourned his good qualities. What actually happened was almost the opposite. Possibly angered by widely reported comments from earlier victims that the dead man had been no loss to the world, supporters of Vincent mocked Osborn-Brooks and rejoiced on social media at the way that he has been driven from his home by the pressure and media attention. It’s tempting to ask who needs religion when you’ve got social media to do the work of stirring hatred.

But in fact this is a moment when only some kind of symbolic, religious ceremony could possibly settle the dispute. Legally, a public street is public. The family and friends of Henry Vincent have a perfect right to be there, just as he did. But emotionally it’s a neighbourhood. The police cannot resolve the dispute by keeping one side or the other away. They cannot enforce one vision over another, nor should they. But neither is there any longer any recognised religious authority which could reconcile these two visions.

Perhaps the funeral of Henry Vincent will offer a remembrance of his life reflecting his family’s conviction that he did not deserve to die. Perhaps that is the underlying message of every funeral: that the dead do not deserve to die, however bad their lives. But no one should be forced to remember them who doesn’t want to.

• Andrew Brown writes on religion