Article January 15, 1979 Issue

Signs of the times

The Economist

"The last third of the twentieth century is a period in which the familiar forms of organized religion have lost their hold on most people who would call themselves members of the educated middle classes. There are exceptions. ... But this is probably the first time in history in which, at least in fashionable assumption, to be intelligent and educated is also to be without religious belief.

"The result, however, is not what the cheerful rationalists of the nineteenth century had expected. The disintegration of the old religious institutions has not produced a world in which everybody is contented to live in the confines of an existence without gods. One by one the secular heroes of the past century's one purely secular philosophy—Lenin, Stalin, Mao, even Marx himself—have begun to lose their appeal. Instead, a groping has begun for new forms of spiritual experience. ... The cults and sects and communities which are looking for new ideas in this field are most numerous in the United States because America is, in this matter too, 20 years ahead of the rest of the world; but they are to be found in Europe, west and east, and in many other places. The grass has begun to force itself through the cracks in the agnostic concrete.

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