Mary’s war

The two-minute “God slot” at 7.50am on Radio 4’s Today programme has long seemed anachronistic. At its most benign, “Thought for the Day” has offered comfortable homilies from the likes of Rabbi Lionel Blue, and while dominated by Anglican and Catholic voices, it is inclusive of several major world religions. But it remains closed to humanists. In my two stints working on the Today programme in the early 90s it was clear that whatever the programme’s editors thought of TFTD, it could not be touched.

The battle to get humanists on the strand has been going on for decades. It has become a symbolic issue, given TFTD’s prominent position on the nation’s flagship morning news programme. And there is an untold side to this history. While researching the private diaries and letters of the late Christian activist Mary Whitehouse, I uncovered evidence of her efforts and strategic role in allying establishment forces – including, it seems, the Queen – in keeping humanists off the strand. In exploring the roots of Whitehouse’s hostility to the movement in the 1960s and 70s, there are valuable lessons to be learned for our own culture wars today.

It is 20 years since Whitehouse died, at 91 years of age. Often compared to the American conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, she fought many battles over four decades of campaigning for “decency”. Whitehouse came to prominence in the 1960s as Britain was being transformed through the youth-focused energy of pop music, film and television. Churchgoing was in significant decline and new immigrant communities were widening the range of religious beliefs.

One of her earliest campaigns, in 1964, was to “clean up TV”, with a particular focus on the BBC. In 1965, she founded the grassroots National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association which, even when its membership numbered tens of thousands, was never more than a platform for her personal lobbying power.

In her early career, Whitehouse was an evangelical outsider challenging the complacency of the established Churches. By the 1980s she was very well connected with those in power. But to my surprise, it’s in 1994, in her final years, that she fought one of her least known, but perhaps most successful, battles: to keep humanists off “Thought for the Day”.

The decline of Christian identity in Britain

In July 1994 Mary Whitehouse had finally retired from public life, frail and suffering considerable pain from a back injury. The Conservative government was increasingly blighted by “sleaze” allegations over MPs’ sexual behaviour and financial wrongdoing. That same month the Sunday Trading Act came into force, allowing shops to open on the Christian Sabbath.

It seemed like a watershed moment in the decline of Christian identity in British life. Perhaps it was no coincidence, then, that in December that year Whitehouse spotted a Sunday Times article claiming John Birt, BBC director general since 1992, had approved humanists being included in TFTD from the following year.

“Apparently the decision will be made in the next week or two!” she wrote in her diary on Christmas morning. “And we’ve done nothing about it! We fought this battle in the early days of our campaign. And here we are – back again. Think I should write to the Queen. Dukie [Marmaduke Hussey, the BBC Chairman and by now a personal friend] to the Cardinal and leaders of the free churches.”

In January 1995 she did just that. The draft of the letter, dated 5 January, begins:

“Your Majesty,

“I write with the greatest respect in the hope that you will feel able to help in a matter which we believe to be of the greatest importance.

“We understand that the British Humanist Association, which has long been campaigning for access to Thought For The Day, the highly influential section of the BBC’s breakfast broadcasting, may soon be granted such facilities in an imminent re-organisation of religious broadcasting.

“It would be wholly inappropriate for me to point out to Your Majesty, of all people, the importance of the Christian faith in our history and culture and what would be lost in the quality of personal and national Iife were it to become merely an alternative to humanism.

“If you do see your way clear to taking any initiative in this matter then surely the nation’s gratitude would be very great.”

Whitehouse’s diary entry for 14 January suggests good news: “Really delighted to have a letter from Buckingham Palace in reply to mine to the Queen about the proposal that the British Humanist Association’s (BHA) demand for time on Thought For The Day. Although not – as we all understand – written by the Queen herself it was a very reassuring letter. I would be very surprised if doesn’t do something.” The Bodleian has redacted the palace reply.

Just over a week later, Whitehouse wrote identical letters to George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Cardinal Basil Hume, Archbishop of Westminster:

“I am taking the liberty of writing to ask if you will consider making a public stand against what could be a most disastrous move, not only in terms of the spiritual health of the nation, but also of its social wellbeing.” Adding that she had already written to the BBC Chairman, she continues, “I trust you will agree that this is a matter of the utmost importance and that you will see your way clear to employing your considerable influence in support of the Christian heritage of the nation.”

A reply dated 27 January came from Archbishop George Carey at Lambeth Palace:

“I have certainly made my views clear on this to Ernest Rea [the BBC’s head of Religion and Ethics] but I can assure you that I will exert my influence against this proposal.” He went on to warn Whitehouse against overreacting to the Sunday Times article, which “could bring about the result that neither of us wants!” It’s signed: “Yours ever, George.”

Resisting humanism on the BBC

What happened in the intervening months? Mary was out of the loop. But her diary on 14 April records that the wheels she had perhaps set in motion appeared to be nearing their endpoint.

“Delighted to see in today’s Telegraph that the BBC is to keep its TFTD as Christian, resisting the efforts of the humanists to infiltrate and no doubt come to dominate! We made our voice heard about that! Wonder, if not for the first time, if the fact that I have ‘retired’ and not likely to be associated directly with what happens, makes TV big boys more likely to ‘deal with problems’?”

The remark about “TV big boys” seems fair, given the way she had been routinely mocked and treated with disdain as a lower-middle-class, provincial older woman. However, Andrew Copson, current chief executive of Humanists UK (formerly the BHA), is less sympathetic:

“It’s really weird that she sees humanists as being like a conspiracy and organising and lobbying,” he told me. “She’s the one doing that, not the BHA in a secret shady cabal. It’s her! I don’t know how influential Mary Whitehouse was in this battle but I do think that for all her rhetoric about being like a gadfly and a challenger . . . she’s the one with the powerful friends.

“Humanism has in my knowledge got as far as three director generals agreeing with our point . . . that for the dignity of our listeners and for the fairness of our public broadcaster, humanist views should be included. Face-to-face in all three cases. And just a couple of weeks later for the invisible brick wall to appear. So it obviously is a totemic issue.”

John Birt, now Lord Birt, recalls the power of the religious leaders who sat on the UK broadcasters’ Central Religious Advisory Committee (CRAC): “In very general terms I do remember being sympathetic to allowing humanist voices onto TFTD,” he told me. “And again in general terms I was always struck by the power of CRAC, which operated across all of broadcasting, and how fiercely it defended the position of the established religions within broadcasting. And the political reality was that the [BBC] Board of Governors was unlikely to support anything CRAC strongly opposed.”

It was only in 2009 that CRAC was replaced by a new body, the Standing Conference on Religion and Belief, which does include humanists.

Undermining the west and its Christian stability

As Copson observes: “The growing humanism of the British population was everything [Whitehouse] was against . . . because it stood and it stands for freedom of choice, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, equal treatment, no religious privilege.”

But Whitehouse didn’t see humanists like that. To understand her deep loathing of humanism it’s essential to appreciate how deeply she linked it with communism, liberalising pornography and lowering the age of sexual consent as weapons to undermine the west and its Christian stability. This perception stemmed back at least to the early 70s, and a bitter culture war in the UK over shifting boundaries on decency, sexual consent and pornography, which was often fought on the airwaves as well as in the national press. Humanists were prominent in leading the national conversation.

At the time, humanism was being increasingly normalised in British society. The BHA was lobbying for state school education to reflect the growth in non-religious philosophies and traditions. A number of humanists were making influential, challenging television for the BBC, including the young producer David Kennard, who was the first to bring on atheists to challenge Christian leaders on The Sunday Debate, a high-profile television slot which ran from 1973 to 75. Kennard went on to work on landmarks of cultural broadcasting with two of the late 20th century’s best-known humanist thinkers, Professor Jacob Bronowski and Carl Sagan. The former’s The Ascent of Man challenged the narrow Judaeo-Christian view of “civilisation”, while Sagan’s astronomy series, Cosmos, placed humans in a beautiful but godless universe.

But Whitehouse’s moral outrage found particular traction on one controversial issue that the British Humanist Association got engaged with. This was the campaign to lower the age of sexual consent to 14, or even 10. Pushed by the Paedophile Information Exchange, it was backed by the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL – now Liberty).

On 3 June 1976, she published an article in the Times about her opposition to a report that recommended liberalising the teaching of religion and ethics in schools. The article references the campaign to lower the age of sexual consent and links the BHA to the NCCL as part of a permissive cabal:

“The BHA has little in common with historical humanism, which sought to discover man’s role in relation to God. Rather its natural allies are bodies like the National Council for Civil Liberties and indeed, at its annual meeting the association’s general secretary, Kenneth Furness, will propose a motion welcoming and supporting the recent NCCL recommendations ‘that the age of consent should be lowered to 14 for both heterosexuals and homosexuals and that incest be made legal’. No wonder they feel that young people educated in the Christian faith are likely to present a problem.”

It was Whitehouse and her supporters whose campaigning exposed how the Paedophile Information Exchange was jumping on the sexual liberation bandwagon, aided by the NCCL.

A few days later she wrote in the Guardian about her concerns at comments by the head of the British Board of Film Censors, John Trevelyan, on the impact of liberalising laws around film censorship and pornography:

“The apparent enthusiasm of the permissible lobby in its advocacy of an end to the age of consent shows a lack of compassion which is truly frightening. There should be no conviction says Trevelyan, ‘if consent can be proved or shown to have been probable’ – think what kind of pressure might be exerted here. ‘There can be no standard rate of maturity in young people.’ Quite so. So who, may I ask, is going to decide a girl’s maturity? Are we now to set up, on the National Health, a series of Lolita Clinics which will provide a girl/boy child, after suitable investigation, with a little badge carrying the inscription ‘certified mature – Try me.’ Certified insane, if you ask me.”

Furness himself chose to mock Whitehouse in the Guardian letters page using his BHA title:

“Mary Whitehouse displays a deep and detailed knowledge of pornographic material of all kinds. Unlike most of us, she is not apparently bored by this material. Is she however corrupted by it? And if not, why not? Yours faithfully Kenneth Furness Gen Sec BHA.”

The fight against conservative forces

Reading the sneering way some humanists responded to Whitehouse’s concerns about sexual exploitation of women and children made me think of the feminist Andrea Dworkin’s astute observation in her 1982 book Right-Wing Women: “Right-wing women are sure that the selective blindness of liberals and leftists especially contributes to more violence, more humiliation, more exploitation for women, often in the name of humanism and freedom (which is why both words are dirty words to them).”

As Copson says: “A lot of humanists were involved in some really quite distasteful legal cases. [Barrister and author] John Mortimer was an active humanist and a member of the BHA’s advisory council. And he was defending all sorts of distasteful people [pornographers] on freedom of speech grounds.”

In a witness statement in 2020 to the British government’s ongoing independent inquiry into historic child sexual abuse, Liberty’s then acting director, Corey Stoughton, reaffirmed the organisation’s apologies and regret over its “mistake” in supporting the Paedophile Information Exchange. He quoted the charity’s former director, Shami Chakrabarti, who said in 2014: “It is a source of continuing disgust and horror” that the NCCL had been infiltrated by paedophiles in the 1970s. Stoughton added that such failures would not and could not be repeated.

We can only hope that they won’t be. However, the story may still hold valuable lessons for us today. According to Copson, while Whitehouse lost her long-term war, she was successful in the short term in pushing back against the influence of humanism in British society at large for a good decade in the 70s and 80s. She was able to do so by emphasising the controversial issues being championed at the time by a few high-profile figures.

As the left today finds itself caught up in bitter culture wars, there is perhaps a warning from Mary Whitehouse’s establishment-backed war on humanism: battles must be picked carefully, for fear of losing a decade or more to conservative forces.

This piece is from the New Humanist winter 2021 edition. Subscribe today.