The tragedy of Reformation Protestantism is that it both confirmed and then gave new impetus to the notion that Christianity fundamentally concerns the relationship between God and the individual. After 1,000 years from the death of Jesus when Christians believed that Jesus died for public, collective sins of omission as well as commission, the trend began to move away from the public to the private, confirmed in the nineteenth century by Romanticism, and in the twentieth by the pressure of public atheism to reduce religion to private choice.

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