We drown in screens that promise reality, yet leave us spiritually thirsty; Christ and the Media names the thirst—and shows why the well is often poisoned.
Malcolm Muggeridge argues that modern media—especially television—manufactures a seductive fantasy that habitually displaces truth, so Christians must “see through the eye (to reality in Christ) rather than merely with it (to the spectacle on screen).”
He marshals vignettes, history, and post-broadcast reflections to show how cameras stage, distort, and reframe events—famously noting that “Not only can the camera lie, it always lies,” and recounting cases from wartime propaganda to a Biafran execution halted for a fresh battery.
Best for readers who want an unflinching, spiritually literate critique of media power; not for those seeking a neutral, tech-optimist manual for “leveraging” TV and social video without moral friction.
1. Introduction
Christ and the Media by Malcolm Muggeridge was first published in 1977 by Hodder & Stoughton; the Regent College Publishing edition appeared in 2003 with a preface by John Stott and a foreword by Billy Graham.
A hybrid of public lectures and reflective essays, the book sits at the intersection of media criticism, Christian ethics, and cultural commentary; Muggeridge—journalist, satirist, former Punch editor, and BBC broadcaster—speaks as a veteran “vendor of words.”
The central thesis: the media generate a pervasive fantasy-world that rivals (and often replaces) reality, and only the Kingdom of Christ offers a durable antidote to this illusion.
In 2022 the UK public still consumed 4h 28m of TV/video daily across devices, with broadcast TV down 12% year-on-year as short-form platforms surged—evidence that the struggle over attention and truth has only intensified.
2. Christ and the Media Background
Muggeridge delivered the London Lectures in Contemporary Christianity at All Souls Church, Langham Place in November 1976; Stott notes the aim was to probe how Christians should think about mass media that now occupy “sixteen to eighteen hours a week” of the average adult’s time—roughly eight years across a lifespan.
This context matters: Britain’s public-service broadcast tradition (with its Reithian roots) coexisted with a rapidly expanding global TV culture, giving Muggeridge both a front-row seat and a conscience pricked by the gap between ideal and practice.
3. Christ and the Media Summary
One sentence to set the lens.
Muggeridge frames the entire book around a spiritual anthropology: humans are made to see truly through the eye—toward meanings that transcend images—yet the modern camera trains us to see merely with the eye, mistaking visual appearance for reality.
From fantasy to “Fourth Temptation.”
The opening lecture proposes a bracing thought experiment: suppose Christ faced not three but four temptations—the last being prime-time, networked TV offers to broadcast the Gospel. Would He accept the medium’s bargain? Muggeridge’s inference is clear: because TV packages truth as spectacle, the price of admission is already a distortion. “Not only can the camera lie, it always lies,” he says, reworking C. P. Scott’s maxim into “Comment is free, but footage is sacred.”
Credentialed skepticism as witness, not distance.
He speaks as an insider: a half-century of journalism and broadcast work, from Punch to BBC, taught him how studio logics, arc-lights, and the “blood-shot eyes” of cameras re-script conversations and subtly re-educate audiences. Leaving sets, he felt a “strange sort of desolation,” as if the glow drained meaning from the exchange.
Why the camera “always lies.”
In Seeing Through the Eye, Muggeridge invokes William Blake: “This Life’s dim windows of the soul / Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole, / And leads you to believe a lie / When you see with, not through, the eye.” From there he builds a media phenomenology: the camera is “mindless,” an instrument for looking rather than knowing, which favors dramatic footage over proportionate significance and pressures newsrooms to stage the “right” shot—famines “occur” when filmed; otherwise they vanish from public awareness.
Concrete distortions, historical and lethal.
He revisits the Hitler “dance of triumph”—a fake, created by removing frames—and a Biafran firing squad that paused so a cameraman could replace a battery, then resumed at “Action!” so millions could watch the death properly recorded. These aren’t footnotes; they are parables of a culture where image authority outruns ethics.
The Dead Sea Video Tapes.
In the middle lecture, he imagines our era discovered like the Dead Sea Scrolls—except the cache is video tape, ads, newsreels, talk shows, pop songs. What would archaeologists conclude about a civilization that invested enormous technical genius in selling and soothing—“a cult of Consumption… with Muzak for plainsong, computers for oracles, cash-registers ringing in the offertory”?
They would find a people materially “rich and… powerful,” yet spiritually impoverished, haunted by demographic panic amidst abundance—“an ascent that ran downhill,” turning plenty into wasteland. They would see prodigious educational expansion that promised sages and delivered “pop stars, psychiatrists and gurus,” climaxing in the mordant question: did Western man “decide to abolish himself,” educating himself into imbecility?
Consensus, corrosion, and children as collateral.
Within this cultural liturgy, broadcast consensus-making quietly levels convictions into a safe average—“preparation for some sort of conformist-collectivist society.” The effect, he writes, has included the discredit of Christian ethics and the near-inevitability that what once screened in “squalid… dives” will enter living rooms; delaying shows to late night will not keep children from seeing them.
Pictures as stories; “news without end, amen.”
“The pictures are the stories,” he comments, echoing a protester’s media instinct. In a tour-de-force passage, he pairs the camera with nuclear weapons and the pill as apocalyptic portents—power without wisdom, sex without fertility, and “actuality in terms of fantasy.” Yet precisely because the camera lies, God may use its failure to reveal that truth must be seen “through the eye,” as Blake taught.
Grace notes: Where light breaks through.
For all his severity, Muggeridge records moments when grace “shines triumphantly through the camera’s fraudulence”—notably filming Mother Teresa: shot in “very poor light,” the hospice appeared “bathed in a soft and very beautiful light.” The scene became a parable that with God “all things are possible,” even bringing reality onto the screen.
Final cadence.
He forecasts that future historians will say we created a media Frankenstein that we cannot control and to which we “meekly” submitted—unless we anchor our eyesight in Christ’s Kingdom, where word outlasts image.
4. Christ and the Media Analysis
Does the argument hold together?
Muggeridge’s reasoning is inductive and moral, not statistical; he proceeds by case, aphorism, and biblical echo. Yet the cases accumulate force: staged shots (Hitler’s “dance”), perverse production incentives (Biafra’s “Cut… Action!”), and agenda-setting through footage scarcity (famines that “occur” only when filmed). These support the claim that medium norms bias selection, framing, and memory.
Is there empirical backing beyond anecdote?
Modern media research does confirm how visual salience and availability bias shape perceived importance. Ofcom’s Media Nations reports show a fragmented attention economy where broadcast viewing declines while short-form and on-demand rise, multiplying incentives for spectacle over deliberation; in 2022, UK adults averaged 4h 28m of daily TV/video, with broadcasters still holding 60% of total viewing but losing mass-audience moments.
Violence and moral content.
On harm, the evidence is contested in degree, not direction. A recent meta-analysis (2015–2022; N=107,803) reports reliable, if modest, effects of media violence on aggression—consistent with earlier syntheses—indicating that content-norms matter, particularly for youth whom Muggeridge worried would inevitably watch what studios schedule.
Does he overstate?
Sometimes. The line “Not only can the camera lie, it always lies” can become a rhetorical totalism; yet he undercuts absolutism by admitting exceptions (Mother Teresa) and by concluding that God uses even the medium’s failure to tutor our hunger for truth. The argument thus functions as prophetic hyperbole designed to shock a complacent audience.
Contribution to its field.
More than a “how-to,” the book is an ascetical media-ethics—calling viewers to cultivate discernment (“seeing through”) rather than technical mastery. In today’s mobile era (UK adults now spending more time on phones than on traditional TV), the diagnosis travels cleanly from cathode ray to touchscreen.
5. Comparison with Similar Works
He converses implicitly with C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape (which he wishes had skewered modern broadcasting) and explicitly with Pascal, whose Pensées he adapts: substitute “the media” for “the philosophers,” and you describe our drift toward megalomania or erotomania without God.
Against the technocratic optimism of mid-century “TV can educate us into virtue,” he sounds closer to Neil Postman’s later Amusing Ourselves to Death—but with a sharper Christological core and a broadcaster’s scars.
On the Christian media debate, Billy Graham gently dissents—grateful for evangelistic opportunities on air—yet he summarizes Muggeridge fairly: television tends toward evil because its technical/editing demands press reality into fantasy.
The resulting dialogue models a serious, in-house Christian disagreement about whether the medium is redeemable or only survivable.
Related Reading on Probinism.com
Probinism regularly explores faith-and-media tensions—from Ben-Hur’s cinematic Christ to analyses of Bertrand Russell and “science & religion.” These posts show a house style attuned to Muggeridge’s concerns about spectacle, doubt, and public persuasion.
6. Christ and the Media Quotations
- “Not only can the camera lie, it always lies… ‘Comment is free, but footage is sacred.’”
- Blake: “When you see with, not through, the eye.”
- “So the camera is mindless, an instrument for merely looking… famines only occur when they have been filmed.”
- Hitler “dance” as fake; Biafra execution halted for a battery.
- “Frankenstein monster” of media; only antidote is Christ’s Kingdom.
- “Dead Sea Video Tapes”—a civilization of Consumption and spectacle.
- Mother Teresa: reality “shines triumphantly through the camera’s fraudulence.”
“Supposing there had been a fourth temptation when our Lord encountered the Devil in the wilderness—this time an offer of networked TV appearances, in prime time, to proclaim and expound his Gospel. Would this offer, too, have been rejected like the others? If so, why?”
“Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster which no one knows how to control or direct, and marvel that we should have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence… Nor do I see within the various broadcasting agencies any force… capable of delivering us from being totally submerged in the world of fantasy the channels they control project.”
“By the same token, I am more convinced than of anything else that I have ever thought, or considered, or believed, that the only antidote to the media’s world of fantasy is the reality of Christ’s Kingdom proclaimed in the New Testament.”
“This Life’s dim windows of the soul / Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole, / And leads you to believe a lie / When you see with, not through, the eye. Has there ever been a more perfect instrument for seeing with rather than through the eye, than the camera? … To see through the eye is to grasp the significance of what is seen… Just looked at, seen with the eye… the camera is mindless, an instrument for merely looking.”
“On the prowl for news, what the camera wants is an exciting or dramatic scene… Pictures are all. If there is footage of, say, an air disaster, that takes precedence as news… Famines only occur when they have been filmed, the others… are likely to continue unnoticed… When the Berlin Wall was completed… the policemen had to jump three times before their performance was considered visually satisfactory.”
“One of the most famous shots in the 1939–45 War… Hitler doing a little dance of triumph… turns out to have been a fake, procured by removing a few frames… The Führer’s tread was unremarkable, but in the camera’s version he will dance on through history for ever.”
“At the time of the Biafran War… a prisoner was to be executed… Just as the command to fire was about to be given, one of the cameramen shouted ‘Cut!’; his battery had gone dead… Then, with his battery working again, he shouted ‘Action!’ and bang, bang, the prisoner fell to the ground, his death duly recorded, to be shown in millions of sitting rooms throughout the so-called civilised world.”
“There’s no such thing as bad coverage for a demo. It makes no difference what’s said: the pictures are the stories. … The camera may well take its place along with nuclear weaponry and the birth pill as one of the three major apocalyptic portents of our time… we are avid for news, and Newzak assails us—news without end, amen.”
“Consensus-making and -promoting… is… an instinctive preparation for some sort of conformist-collectivist society… In this country, the same force has discredited and rendered nugatory the whole structure of Christian ethics… And… children will be watching what has hitherto been reserved for the sick, the perverse and the depraved… Only the most naïve… will persuade themselves that… children can be prevented from seeing such films by showing them late in the evening.”
“What would the archaeologists make of us? Materially so rich and so powerful, spiritually so impoverished… An ascent that ran downhill, plenty that turned into a wasteland… A cult of Consumption… with Muzak for plainsong, computers for oracles, cash-registers ringing in the offertory.”
“Instead of sages, philosopher-kings and saints, pop stars, psychiatrists and gurus. … Western man decided to abolish himself… educating himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction… images being less durable than words… It was no idle boast when Jesus said, ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’”
“It is as ridiculous to talk about the beneficent influence of the media… as it is to blame the media for all our present ills… The media… have power only to the extent that they can influence and exploit the weaknesses… carnality… greed and vanity… credulity… arrogance, which induces them to fall so readily for any agitator.”
“Simone Weil: ‘Nothing is so beautiful… as the good; no desert is so dreary… as evil. But with fantasy it’s the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied, intriguing, attractive and full of charm.’ … The transposition of good and evil in the world of fantasy created by the media leaves us with no sense of any moral order… There is only chaos.”
“There is something very terrible in becoming an image… You see yourself on a screen… and it is not you… I think with new insight of the Second Commandment… An image on a screen may not be graven, but it is indubitably an image, and carries with it sinister undertones of narcissism… Infringe the Second Commandment by making oneself into a graven image… those involved in this existence in duplicate often bear upon them marks of strain and woe.”
“This will happen in Parliament if MPs allow their proceedings to be televised. The camera will prove much more effective than Guy Fawkes in destroying Parliament as a deliberative assembly… The coming Dark Ages will be… lost in the blaze of studio lighting, with a superabundance of records, almost all falsified.”
“I remember… a crowd… everything set for a demo… ‘Action!’ whereupon, placards were lifted… arrests… kicks… until, ‘Cut!’… Later… on the screen… It looked very impressive. … The cameras are our ego’s eyes… television creates myths bigger than reality… news is not so much reported as created.”
“‘Christ is needed in television studios.’ … Reality had momentarily intruded into one of the media’s mills of fantasy—an unprecedented occurrence.”
“The media… and TV in particular… are incomparably the greatest single influence in our society today… carrying out… a mighty brainwashing operation, whereby all traditional standards and values are denigrated… Future historians will surely see us as having created… a Frankenstein monster… and marvel that we should have so meekly subjected ourselves to its malign influence.”
“One of the numerous pleasures of old age is the realisation that everything has to be just as it is, making what Blake called a ‘Fearful Symmetry’… Every happening… is a parable whereby God speaks to us; and the art of life is to get the message.”
“There’s no such thing as bad coverage for a demo. It makes no difference what’s said: the pictures are the stories.”
“God ensures that… ultimately reality will out. To every fantasy he provides an antidote… So the camera has to lie, if only to convince us that truth cannot be seen with, but only through the eye, as Blake said.”
7. Conclusion
Reading Christ and the Media today feels eerily current. When Ofcom tracks the collapse of mass-audience TV and the rise of snackable short-video among 16–24s, you hear Muggeridge’s worry about a world where pictures are all and news becomes Newzak—“news without end, amen.”
Ideal for pastors, educators, journalists, parents, and students of media studies and theology; valuable too for secular readers seeking a historically literate, morally serious critique of screen culture. Not a “balanced” handbook, but a wake-up—with enough humility to show grace breaking through the lens.
Final encouragement
Read Christ and the Media as a spiritual exercise in attention: put down the phone, lift up your eyes, and practice seeing through the eye. The world is lovelier, truer, and more demanding when viewed in that light—and Muggeridge, prickly and prophetic, is a reliable companion into it.
