The BBC announced its services for the week before Easter and said: "This is a week of special importance for Christians" - with the intonation "those Christians over there", as if there were no such thing as English Christianity.

The announcement was like a report on the obscure rites and rituals of an exotic tribe. It was all done as if the English church in the English landscape were a thing long gone and the sacred ceremonies of Holy Week a suitable case for social anthropologists. As if reflecting the mere social phenomena that Christians have Easter, Muslims have Ramadan, the practitioners of Voodoo make dolls and the consumer society goes shopping.

It's all a lesson to us about how suddenly things we thought were eternal can pass away. I grew up in a more tolerant society before there was a penchant for banning things such as hunting, smoking, cuddling small children and expressing opinions disapproved by the government. Nobody was forced to go to church or chapel in my childhood days. But there were no newspapers on Good Friday and so my grandad enjoyed a rare day off from his newsagent's shop in Armley, Leeds. The engineering and tailoring factories closed for the day and the shops were shut.

Britain is no longer even a nominally Christian country. We are ruled by secular totalitarianism - a regime a lot less easy-going than the old way. Whether people were explicitly religious or not - and most weren't - everyone could see the sense in the public observance each year of a few holy days that were part of the faith which created western civilisation and sustained it for nearly 2,000 years.

This confidence in our heritage and way of life has been replaced by a nervous insecurity amounting to paranoia. The newspapers and the broadcasting media hardly dare mention the Christian faith without worrying that members of other faiths might be "offended".

As a Christian priest, I don't come over all terrified and outraged when I hear of the Jewish Feast of the Passover. I don't suppose you get an attack of the vapours when you see devout Hindus preparing for Diwali. We have lost the old sense of easy acceptance and tolerance.

Instead, the secular society has imposed a bossy intolerance of what is officially disapproved. And the Christian faith has not merely fallen away in this country as if by an accident of history.

Christianity has been actively persecuted and subverted for 40 years and more. The licensing of abortion as a form of contraception has devalued human life. Sexual permissiveness which equalises any act between/among any number of people of whatever preference has undermined marriage and the family.

The secular totalitarians haven't managed to obliterate the faith completely, and there remain outposts of religious sanity here and there. There will be one or two near you. There's one here in my church in the City of London where, this week, we shall again commemorate the everlasting truth: the death and resurrection of the Saviour.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.