![]() ![]() Indeed, he did not even mention Christianity until the end of his fourth talk - building, instead, from the common ground of our intuitive sense of right and wrong. Lewis’s own journey from staunch atheism to theism and then to Christianity had been an arduous one, and he knew well he had his work cut out for him. Welch estimated that two-thirds of BBC listeners lived without any reference to God a survey of British army recruits showed that only 23 per cent knew the meaning of Easter. Welch, who had the bright idea to invite Lewis to give some radio talks which might outline the basics of Christianity for a modern audience. It was the director of the BBC’s Religious Broadcasting Department at the time, Reverend J.W. The talk was vetted in advance and had to be exactly 15 minutes long any dead air on a show could be cut into by Lord Haw-Haw, the German propagandist, who was broadcasting on the same wavelength (a friend of mine explained it this way: “Think of it as The Chaser, if The Chaser were Nazis”). ![]() ![]() ![]() The American historian George Marsden, in his biography of Mere Christianity, explains that the time slot - 7:45 to 8:00pm precisely - might sound like primetime, but actually Lewis found himself sandwiched between a news broadcast from Nazi-occupied Norway (in Norwegian) and a program of songs from a Welsh cultural festival. The circumstances of that first talk, on Wednesday, 6 August 1941, were not overly auspicious. ![]()
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