Margaret Knight

In January 1955 the BBC Home Service broadcast two talks by a lecturer in psychology at the University of Aberdeen. They were addressed, she said, to the ordinary man and woman who do not quite know what they believe. She told them that their doubts were justified, that Christianity was not the only alternative to communism nor the only basis for training a child's character, and how unbelieving parents might bring up their children.¹² For three weeks afterwards, a historian of the episode writes, she was hounded and pilloried in the press; nearly three thousand letters reached the BBC and her.³ One headline called her "The Unholy Mrs Knight."⁴

The lecturer was Margaret Knight. This chapter asks how a woman with a nominally Christian education came to say on the national radio what few had said there before, and why, twenty years later, she judged Christianity more harshly than she had in the talks that caused the uproar.

A nominal Christian

She was born Margaret Horsey in Hertfordshire in 1903; Wikipedia gives the date as 23 November.⁵⁶⁷ Of her childhood religion she said only, looking back in 1975, that she had had a nominally Christian education, and that before her broadcasts she had been interested in philosophical theism rather than in the history of Christianity, about which she knew no more than any layman.⁸ The often-repeated statement that she had an Anglican upbringing is not supported by any source read for this chapter.⁹ On the belief timeline, her faith is only a weak mark, and an inferred one.

She went to Girton College, Cambridge, and graduated in 1926.¹⁰ There, according to Wikipedia, which says it is quoting the preface of her 1955 book, she found in her third year the courage to give up religious beliefs that had long made her uneasy, and let them go with a profound sense of relief. The preface could not be read for this chapter, and no source names what she read or what moved her.¹¹¹² On the timeline, this is where her doubt begins, about 1925 or 1926.

Psychologist

For ten years she worked as a librarian and editor at the National Institute of Industrial Psychology.¹³ In 1936 she married the psychologist Rex Knight, who in 1947 became the first professor of psychology at Aberdeen; she lectured there from 1938, and with him wrote an introduction to psychology that went through many editions.^14151617

The broadcasts

Eight years earlier, the historian Callum Brown writes, Bertrand Russell had made the first full broadcast by an atheist on the same station.¹⁸ Knight's talks, Brown writes, had to overcome considerable resistance from Christian managers at the BBC who thought the Corporation had a leading part in evangelising Britain; by one account it took three attempts to get them on the air.¹⁹²⁰ The first was broadcast early in January 1955; Wikipedia gives 5 January.²¹

She was careful with her audience. She was not out, she said, to destroy the convictions of people in whom they were deeply rooted and to whom they meant a great deal; what she argued was that it was a mistake to impose those beliefs on children and to make them the basis of moral training.²²²³²⁴ She set out the minimum a Christian must believe, an all-powerful and wholly good God, the divinity of Christ, the resurrection, survival after death. Her case against it was the problem of evil: leprosy, cancer, the suffering of animals, and the old dilemma that either God cannot prevent evil or will not.²⁵²⁶²⁷ Against both Christianity and communism, the two great rival dogmatic systems, she offered what she called Scientific Humanism.²⁸²⁹

The second talk was practical, and it was the one that drew the heaviest fire. Humanist parents, she said, could tell small children that some people do not think there really is a God, any more than there is really a Santa Claus, though we often talk as though there were. Children should still hear the New Testament, told frankly as legend, like the Greek myths, and remember Christ as a real man and a great moral teacher; one could feel awe at Chartres, she said, without believing in the God of Israel, as one could at the Parthenon without believing in Athene. Children should be taught to consider others because we are social beings; to say "because it is God's will" only invites the same question again.^30313233 In the talks she called herself and her listeners humanists; she did not call herself an atheist.³⁴ The timeline places her declaration here.

The uproar

The newspapers called the talks untrue and vicious propaganda; one called her a menace; another headline read "Godless Radio Repeat Shocks Nation."³⁵⁴ By one account the Daily Telegraph led the attack.³⁶ The historian Arthur Bryant, in the Illustrated London News, argued that the BBC's monopoly of the air gave it a duty not to undermine public morality or the nation's faith in itself, that morality could not stand without religion, and that needlessly undermining the faith of others was both perilous and unkind.³⁷³⁸³⁹ But letters came from supporters too, teachers and parents who said that at last someone was saying what they had long felt; one called it like opening a dungeon door.⁴⁰

On 26 January 1955, three weeks after the first talk, a member of parliament, John Hall, asked the Assistant Postmaster-General in the House of Commons about BBC programmes, saying that

there has been general public concern about the suitability of some of the radio and television programmes which have been broadcast recently⁴¹⁴²

He did not name Knight, and whether he meant her talks is not known. The minister's answer was that the government would not interfere:

It has been the practice of successive Governments to give the B.B.C. full autonomy with regard to programmes, and I think that it would be contrary to the general view of the House that we should interfere.⁴³⁴²

The talks were published that year with other essays, and a chapter on the reaction to them, as Morals without Religion.⁴⁴ In 1961 she edited a Humanist Anthology, from Confucius to Bertrand Russell.⁴⁵

The debit account

Many Christians, she wrote in 1975, had protested after the broadcasts that it was a pity she did not know more about the religion she had so irresponsibly attacked. She took them at their word. In the years that followed she studied the Bible diligently and read many books on the origins and history of the Church, and the reading, she said, altered her view profoundly.⁴⁶ In 1955 she had shared what she called the assumptions of the more highbrow type of sceptic: that Jesus, though mistaken about being the Messiah, was a great moral teacher, and that Christianity had been a great force for good in its day.⁴⁷ Now both assumptions seemed to her false. She was inclined to think that the conversion of Europe to Christianity had been one of the greatest disasters of history.⁴⁸ Her pamphlet Christianity: the Debit Account (1975) made the case, from hell and persecution to the Church's record on slavery, and ended, as the talks had, with Scientific Humanism.⁴⁹⁵⁰ On the timeline, this is her revision, which was not a softening but a hardening, brought about by the critics who told her to read more.

She retired from Aberdeen in 1970, and died in 1983; Wikipedia gives 10 May.¹⁶⁵¹

Did her unbelief change shape?

Her unbelief began quietly, as a relief at Cambridge from beliefs she had never held firmly. It became public at fifty-one, in two talks that were careful to the point of gentleness, addressed to doubting parents rather than to believers. The storm that followed did not make her retreat. It sent her to the Bible and the history of the Church, and twenty years later she judged that she had been too kind: Jesus was not the moral teacher she had granted, and Christianity had not been a force for good. The label never changed. It was always Scientific Humanism.

Bertrand Russell, who made the first full broadcast by an atheist on the same station eight years before her talks, has his own chapter in this book.