RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS II
Editorial Statement
One of the most significant tendencies of our time, es–
pecially in this decade, has been the new turn toward religion among
intellectuals and the growing disfavor with which secular attitudes
and perspectives are now regarded in not a few circles that lay claim
to the leadership of culture. There is no doubt that the number of
intellectuals professing religious sympathies, beliefs, or doctrines is
greater now than it was ten or twenty years ago, and that this num–
ber is continually increasing or becoming more articulate.
If
we seek
to relate our period to the recent past, the first decades of this century
begin to look like decades of triumphant naturalism; and if the pre–
sent tendency continues, the mid-century years may go down in
his–
tory as the years of conversion and return. In this comparison we
notice in particular that whereas for a long time modern thought
envisaged .a future society that could and would exist without religion,
at present many thinkers sound an insistent note of warning that West–
ern civilization cannot hope to survive without the re-animation of
religious values. Here is a cultural and historical issue that demands
a more rigorous discussion than is afforded in the popular press, with
its noisy publicity for the latest conversion of one or another prominent
personality.
There are, of course, other powerful tendencies in this period
that run counter to the turn toward religion. Weare speaking of a
trend among intellectuals, and more particularly among intellectuals
in the English-speaking countries. (It is open to doubt whether there
has been a revival of religion in our society at large.) Intellectual
fashions and fads are a matter we have all experienced, having all
witnessed how these puffs of the
Zeitgeist
catch up the intellectuals for
a decade or so only to let them down just as abruptly into disillusion
