‘He Who Has Ears to Hear, Let Him Hear’: Christian Pedagogy and Religious Broadcasting During the Inter-War Period

Abstract

What I mean to demonstrate in this essay is the way in which early public service broadcasting developed as an extension of Christian pastoral guidance. Understood thus, early broadcasting can be seen to function as a socio-religious technology whose rationale was to give direction to practical conduct and attempt to hold individuals to it. The significance of this is that Christian utterance was a broadcasting activity to which the BBC, and its first Director-General particularly, John Reith, ascribed special importance. The BBC was determined to provide what it thought was for the moral good of the greater majority. In spite of overwhelming criticism from the listening public and secular public opinion, the BBC was unswerving in its commitment to the centrality of Christianity in the national culture. By the end of the 1930s the 'Reithian Sunday' was among the most enduring and controversial of the BBCs inter-war practices. IntroductionIn the entrance of Broadcasting House is a statue by the well-known sculptor, Eric Gill, depicting The Sower casting his seed abroad. Though the act of sowing is nowadays commonly associated with primitive farming methods, the iconography of the sower was in fact used to illustrate a well-known parable from the New Testament (Matthew 13; Mark 4; Luke 8). For just as Jesus told his disciples that the farmer goes out to sow his seed in order to yield a crop, so too do the agencies of religion sow the word of God in order that, 'He who has ears to hear, let him hear'. Ideally casting abroad the word of God would have the effect of seed sown on good soil, and produce a crop 'thirty, sixty or even a hundred times what was sown'. However, just as the farmer is likely to cast seed on ground that will not yield any crop, so too will the word of God fall on deaf ears or ears that, 'As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them'. In other words, the problem with communication as arbitrary dissemination is that the sender, to quote Peters (2000, 35), 'has no control over the harvest''. Though Bailey, 'He Who Has Ears to Hear, Let Him Hear'… 5 the farmer can act from a distance by making his expertise available in the form of instruction, once scattered, it is the recipient's responsibility, ultimately, to nurture and cultivate the cast seed through to fruition.Above the sculpture of The Sower is a high-minded Latin inscription, which translates as follows:This Temple of the Arts and Muses is dedicated to Almighty God by the first Governors of Broadcasting in the year 1931, Sir John Reith being the Director General. It is their prayer that good seed sown may bring forth a good harvest, that all things hostile to peace or purity may be abolished from this house and that the people, inclining their ear to whatsoever things are beautiful and honest and of good report, may tread the path of wisdom and uprightness. (Quoted in Briggs 1981, 146) What is clear from the above passage and the parable of the sower is the extent to which the early BBC und...

'The Unholy Mrs Knight' and the BBC: Secular Humanism and the Threat to the 'Christian Nation', c.1945-60

“…Seemingly following this interpretation, Michael Bailey has argued that, far from sustaining Christian Britain, BBC religious broadcasting had already de-ritualised Christian culture between the wars, alienating many listeners and opening up the nation to secularising forces through causing them to listen to foreign radio stations. 9 An alternative narrative has been in development. This presents the mid-twentieth century as a caesura in the history of Christianity in Western Europe.…”

‘A broadcasting university': educated citizenship and civil prudence

“…More than this, I argue that the early BBC and its educational ethos are better reconsidered as an extension of Christian pastoral pedagogy: insofar as it was constituted by normative cultural values deemed to be edifying and morally uplifting, there was a direct link between culture and self-improvement on the one hand, and religion and morality on the other (see Bailey 2007). 2 What was relatively new about the BBC's pastoral guidance, however, was that it was largely for secular purposes, that is to say, though some of the BBC's internal terms of reference were explicitly religious, its raison d'être was more properly concerned with moral training as a practical remedy, an everyday ethical practice, rather than a theology for the salvation of souls.…”