"In this actual world a churchless community, a community where men have abandoned and scoff at or ignore their religious needs, is a community on the rapid down grade. It is true that occasional individuals or families may have nothing to do with church or with religious practices and observances and yet maintain the highest standard of refined ethical obligation. But this does not affect the case in the world as it now is, any more than the fact that exceptional men and women under exceptional conditions have disregarded the marriage tie without moral harm to themselves interferes with the larger fact that such disregard if at all common means the complete moral disintegration of the body politic"
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Atheism