A world without God or state?

I was brought up a Catholic. I remember praying each night with my grandfather, J. R. R. Tolkien, when I would go to stay with him and my grandmother in Bournemouth, and sensing the certainty of his faith. I still have two circular prayer cards, the size of coins, on which he inscribed the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria in minuscule writing, geometrically following the curve of a diminishing circle: a work of art.