Just a brief comment about Peter Hitchens’ next chapter, which addresses the bloody war on the church conducted by secularist revolutionaries.
The end result was this:
“The link between the people and their Christian inheritance — in custom, seasons, traditions, music, and belief — had been effectively broken, and Christianity had been reduced to a private matter, much as it is in Muslim nations” (p. 183, emphasis mine).
There were, as now, people who were engaged in doing this, people who resisted it, and people who denied that anything of the kind was going on.
The Christian faith is personal, but not private. Individuals are baptized, but not individualistically. There is no way the Christian faith can be made private and remain faithful to the commission that Christ gave to her. The secularists know this . . . and precious few Christians do.