The BBC commissioned C.S. Lewis’s wartime radio talks that were later collected as Mere Christianity.
Lewis delivered the talks during the Second World War, beginning in 1941. The broadcasts were intended for a broad British audience and presented core Christian ideas in accessible language. Their success helped make Lewis a major public religious voice beyond the universities where he taught.
The talks were revised and published in book form as Mere Christianity. The title refers to the common Christian beliefs shared across many denominations, rather than to a new church or denomination. Lewis organized the material around themes such as morality, belief, Christian conduct, and the person of Christ.
The broadcasts are sometimes called sermons, but Lewis generally treated them as reasoned talks for radio listeners. His broadcaster was the BBC, Britain’s national broadcasting organization, not the later commercial television network ITV. The book remains one of Lewis’s most widely read works of Christian apologetics.