The Many Faces of Television

Beale, John R.

doi:10.1080/1358165770030408

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“…He was proud that religion was not confined to religious broadcasting, but that religious content was to be found across the schedules in talks, drama and other output. 135 The ' T H E U N H O LY M R S K N I G H T ' A N D T H E B B C BBC's Religious Broadcasting Department had won the policy battle that the Knight affair had instigated. There was even some talk, including in the House of Lords in 1959, of banning atheists such as Margaret Knight from British airwaves.…”

Section: S E C U L a R H U M A N I S M A N D T H E 'C H R I S T I A N...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Brown¹

2012

The English Historical Review

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In January 1955, the Home Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) broadcast two talks (and a third discussion programme) by Margaret Knight, a lecturer in Psychology at the University of Aberdeen, in which she argued that scientific humanism, founded on atheism, would be better for children than Christian teaching. Though Bertrand Russell had made the first full broadcast by an atheist on the same station eight years earlier, 1 Knight's programmes were seen as a landmark, causing a huge controversy in which the BBC was accused of permitting attacks on Christian faith, on Christian values and on the Christian monopoly of religious education for children. To get to air, her two half-hour talks on 'Morality without Religion' had to overcome considerable resistance by some Christian managers at the BBC who considered that the Corporation had a leading role in evangelising Britain. The broadcasts prompted outrage in the press, with nearly 3,000 letters sent to the BBC and to Knight personally, and thousands more to national papers. For three weeks, she was hounded and pilloried by the press.The Margaret Knight affair of 1955 marked an important turning point for Christian culture in Britain, one of at least equal significance to the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial of 1960 and the furore over John Robinson's book Honest to God in 1963. On the one hand, it showed the rising church investment, from the end of the Second World War, in the BBC as a bulwark of Christian values and faith, leading to a rise in the number and intensity of religious broadcasts in 1953-5. At the same time, Knight's broadcasts exposed Christian hostility to women who breached traditional gender roles, as well as a British press corps willing, in the midst of the Cold War, to portray an atheist as what Cohen called a 'folk devil'. 2 This sense of threat was heightened by the fact that Knight's broadcasts came at the peak of the postwar religious revival and church growth, in 1954-5, after which church membership declined and the popular reverence for organised religion waned (especially among the young), leading to the wider religious crisis of the *For assistance in the preparation of this article, I wish to thank Ms Trish Hayes at the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham Park, and the staff of Aberdeen University Special Libraries and Archives, the National Library of Scotland and the Edinburgh University Library Centre for Research Collections. I am very grateful for comments on an earlier version by Lynn Abrams, Gerald Parsons and Jim Tomlinson.1. 'The faith of a rationalist' on 20 May 1947; published as B. Russell, Why I am Not a Christian and the Faith of a Rationalist (1983), p. 2. 2. S. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972).

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Section: S E C U L a R H U M A N I S M A N D T H E 'C H R I S T I A N...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Brown¹

2012

The English Historical Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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The Many Faces of Television

Cited by 1 publication

References 2 publications

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

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

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