In Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, New Testament scholar N.T. Wright discusses the centrality of the resurrection to early Christianity:

In early Christianity resurrection moved from the circumference to the center. You can't imagine Paul's thought without it. You shouldn't imagine John's thought without it, though some have tried. It is enormously important in Clement and Ignatius, in Justin and Irenaeus. It is one of the key beliefs that infuriated the pagans in Lyons in A.D. 177 and drove them to butcher several Christians, including the bishop who preceded the great Irenaeus. Belief in bodily resurrection was one of the two central things that the pagan doctor Galen noted about the Christians (the other being their remarkable sexual restraint). Take away the stories of Jesus' birth, and you lose only two chapters of Matthew and two of Luke. Take away the resurrection, and you lose the entire New Testament and most of the second-century fathers as well (42-43).

He goes on to note that this belief in resurrection and its implications was perceived as a major threat by the Roman authorities, and was one of the reasons Christians in the early centuries faced persecution:

Because of the early Christian belief in Jesus as Messiah, we find the development of the very early belief that Jesus is Lord and that therefore Caesar is not... Already in Paul the resurrection, both of Jesus and then in the future of his people, is the foundation of the Christian stance of allegiance to a different king, a different Lord. Death is the last weapon of the tyrant, and the point of the resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated. Resurrection is not the redescription of death; it is its overthrow and, with that, the overthrow of those whose power depends on it. Despite the sneers and slurs of some contemporary scholars, it was those who believed in the bodily resurrection who were burned at the stake and thrown to the lions. Resurrection was never a way of settling down and becoming respectable; the Pharisees could have told you that. It was the Gnostics, who translated the language of resurrection into a private spirituality and a dualistic cosmology, thereby more or less altering its meaning into its opposite, who escapted persecution. Which emperor would have sleepless nights worrying that his subjects were reading the Gospel of Thomas? Resurrection was always bound to get you into trouble, and it regularly did (50).

Resurrection has moved to the periphery in twenty-first century Western Christianity. With the exception of Easter, you find little mention of it in the everyday language of Christians. Talk of Jesus' death and what he did for individual believers is plentiful (it is the major theme, for instance, in much of contemporary worship music), and while lip service is paid to Christ being Lord over all, the implications of this are not often thought of or practiced. Christians who are content to privatise and internalise their faith are hardly a threat to the established order. It should not be surprising, then, that society generally views them with passing indifference. What would happen if the church were to restore the resurrection to its proper, central place? Our comfortable lives would probably not be so comfortable anymore.