As a result of an educational system no longer the prerogative of the clergy, a multiplication of fields of study, a great diffusion of culture, improved communications, and more rapid social transformations, we live in an age in which man is more ready to criticize and to challenge standards hitherto accepted. Individual persons, political institutions, schools of artistic style, humanist ethical movements, racial and national groups, women’s and youth organizations, economic blocs—all are more conscious of their differentiations within a highly complex society and demand that their freedom and autonomy be recognized, refusing to be dictated to by religious leaders or state authority. The accelerated pace of change in modern life, the movement of populations to the towns, their lack of social roots or stability, overt and subconscious advertising, heavy work, group pressure, mechanical and psychological noise, the shock to routine thinking consequent upon emigration deprive man of the solitude and peace needed for constructive thinking, while technological advance makes man seem less in need of God’s help for his daily bread, and so more ready to pick holes in traditional religion, amidst the heightened fascination and lure of the world.

The present religious choice is not simply between Catholicism and Protestantism, nor between Christianity and Natural Religion. It is a choice for or against God. Open, popular, organized and widespread, atheism is no longer hidden and exceptional, but, buttressed by polity and culture, constitutes the world’s most urgent problem.