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Notes -
I’m not convinced by those replies. Re: 1, the early Christians themselves abstained from participating in normative Jewish life, and the Roman Christians abstained from the Pagan civic rituals which defined mainstream Roman life. They formed their own schools based on Christian teachings. Even if we didn’t have this historical example, an insular community may do a better job at securing and promoting Christianity than a lukewarm, mainstream Christianity. The Great Commission is time neutral — it took Lithuania 1400 years to become Christian. And a Christian has an obligation to love God, which means surely he has an obligation to develop a community which permits the most love of God.
Re 2A: we are lucky, because the original founding document of America recognizes that God provides the right to freedom of association and freedom of religion. What better way to practice these rights than to worship the one who provides it?
Re 2B: America’s lax tolerance of this is because the community is insular and skilled at politicking. When you organize 200,000 men hierarchically, who all believe the most important thing in their life is the protection of their community, they are able to accomplish great things.
Critically, it was the very abstention of the early Christians from public life that, ultimately, led to their success -- while there were certainly some failures to communicate doctrines like the eucharistic presence (leading to claims that Christians were slaughtering and eating human babies) and universal fraternity (leading to non-Christians seeing Christian spouses calling each other "brother" and "sister"), there was also a sense in which the strength and conviction of the early Christians impressed the Romans. Later on, Christians whose theology spared them from the fear of death worked in hospitals treating the sick, which astounded the Romans who abandoned the plague-ridden. It was these things that the later Christians could point to and say, "look how impressive we are, you should adopt our belief system."
This co-existed, of course, with attempts at public preaching. You've got to do both. You can't abandon the public spectacle of St. Paul, but you must, you must, embrace the cloistered enlightenment of St. John. Any form of Christianity that embraces one while rejecting the other becomes imbalanced.
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