C.S. Lewis’s first BBC talks for Mere Christianity began in 1941.
During the Second World War, Lewis delivered a series of radio broadcasts for the BBC’s religious programming. The talks addressed shared Christian beliefs and were later revised and collected in book form. Their purpose was not to present one denomination’s distinctive theology, but to explain what Lewis viewed as common ground among historic Christian traditions.
The broadcasts were delivered in several series between 1941 and 1944. Lewis’s clear speaking style and ability to turn abstract arguments into everyday examples made him a popular broadcaster. The eventual book, Mere Christianity, was published in 1952 and became one of his best-known works of Christian apologetics.
The title did not originally describe a single broadcast. It became associated with the collected and edited material that developed from the wartime talks. Readers sometimes use the publication date of the book, 1952, when answering questions about the broadcasts, but the first radio series began a decade earlier, in 1941.