Leadership Quote by Hu Shih

A line like this is less a census of belief than a tactical repositioning of Chinese modernity. Hu Shih is writing as a reformist philosopher who wanted China to stop treating metaphysics as a credential and start treating evidence as one. By claiming that “practically all” prominent intellectual leaders are “openly” agnostic or atheist, he’s normalizing irreligion as the default posture of serious thought - and daring the reader to see it not as moral vacancy, but as intellectual adulthood.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “Prominent leaders of thought” invokes an elite vanguard: if the people steering culture are already there, the rest of society is implied to be catching up. “Openly” signals a break with older norms where heterodoxy survived in private or in coded language; it also suggests courage, even a kind of civic hygiene, in stating what was once taboo. And “agnostics and even atheists” draws a ladder of boldness: agnosticism as respectable skepticism, atheism as the sharper edge, both grouped under the banner of modern reason.

Context matters: Hu Shih emerged from the May Fourth era, when “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy” were rallying cries against Confucian orthodoxy, superstition, and inherited authority. The subtext is political as much as spiritual: if the nation’s thinkers are shedding religious frameworks, they’re also shedding the old legitimizing stories of hierarchy. In a China wrestling with humiliation, revolution, and reinvention, disbelief becomes a cultural argument for rebuilding the world from the ground up.