"What about Christ?"

Not for years have Britons boiled and bubbled in a religious controversy as they did last week over the affair of Mrs. Knight.

Margaret Knight, fortyish, wife of a psychology professor at Aberdeen University and herself a part-time lecturer on the subject, had asked the BBC if she might broadcast her views on what she called "scientific humanism." The BBC duly scheduled her for three talks on its Home Service. Her subject: "Morals Without Religion." Mrs. Knight's first broadcast drew some criticism. Her second lifted the roof of Broadcasting House.

Neither Nymph nor Virgin. Soft-voiced, schoolmarmish Margaret Knight, who has no children of her own, undertook to advise "humanist parents" what to tell their offspring about God. "We can tell them," she said, "that everyone believed at one time, and some people believe now, that there are two great powers in the world: a good power called God, who made the world and who loves human beings . . . and a bad power called the Devil, who is opposed to God and who wants people to be unhappy and bad. We can tell them that some people still believe this, but that most people now think there's not really a Devil . . .

"And we can tell them that some people now don't think there's really a God any more than there's really a Santa Claus, though we often like to talk as though there was.

"What about Christ? I don't think that it would be desirable for children to grow up in ignorance of the New Testament. We don't want a generation who don't know what Christmas and Easter mean, who have never heard of the star of Bethlehem or the angel at the door of the tomb ... All I urge is that [the child] should hear them treated frankly as legends . . . There was a real Trojan War and Hector and Achilles may well have been real people, but we don't now believe Achilles was the son of sea nymphs. Similarly, there was a real Jesus Christ who . . . was crucified. But we don't now believe that he was the son of God and a virgin or that he rose from the dead."

Bossy Female. Although some of Britain's most eminent newspaper editorialists started swinging at Mrs. Knight, philosophers, including Bertrand Russell, have been saying the same things for years. Clergymen and letter-to-the-editor writers soon joined in. The issue: Should the government-owned BBC have given Humanist Knight the air?

The conservative Daily Telegraph snorted at the idea that a question of free speech was involved. Atheistic views, it held, are no more entitled to broadcast time than a defense of polygamy, homosexuality, or Communism. The conservative Daily Mail did not agree. "Christianity is not so weak a faith that its adherents should run screaming from those who attack it," proclaimed the Mail on its front page. "Mrs. Knight has perhaps shocked a number of people into thinking for themselves." The liberal Star came out against the BBC; the conservative Standard and News both defended public airing of Mrs. Knight's views. The "panic" over Mrs. Knight, said the Laborite Daily Herald, is "an insult to public intelligence."

The Church of England's Archbishop of York dismissed Mrs. Knight's views as "the stock in trade of atheists and agnostics for at least two centuries," and the Bishop of Coventry rounded on both BBC ("irresponsible") and Mrs. Knight (a "pernicious performance" by a "brusque, so-competent, bossy female"). The Rev. Dr. Donald Soper, fire-eating Methodist leader, went to her defense. "The alternative to such discussion is to mollycoddle religion . . . As Christians we should welcome the opportunity for examination of the fundamentals of our faith . . ."

With all the clipped detachment it could muster, the BBC announced that Mrs. Knight's third talk this week would be a debate with a partisan of religion, Mrs. Jenny Morton--ex-missionary, clergyman's wife and mother of four. "I'm not angry," said Mrs. Morton. "Mrs. Knight's attitude is rather out-of-date."

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