Which medium first carried the talks that became C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity?

BBC radio broadcasts first carried the talks that became C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

During the Second World War, Lewis delivered a series of short radio talks for the BBC. The broadcasts were intended to explain basic Christian beliefs in clear, accessible language to a broad audience, including listeners serving in the armed forces.

The talks were revised and collected in book form. The resulting volume, Mere Christianity, was published in 1952 and organized material from the broadcasts into sections commonly known as “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe,” “What Christians Believe,” and “Christian Behaviour.”

Mere Christianity is not a transcript of one single speech, nor was it originally a newspaper column. Lewis’s radio voice and conversational style helped make him widely known beyond academic and church audiences, while the later book became one of his most influential works of Christian apologetics.