Nationwide Festival of Light

The Nationwide Festival of Light was a short-lived grassroots movement formed by British Christians concerned about the development of the permissive society in the UK at the end of the 1960s.

Its leading lights included the "clean-up TV" campaigner Mary Whitehouse, the journalist and author Malcolm Muggeridge and a number of leading clergymen. The British pop star Cliff Richard was a leading supporter. The movement was opposed to what they saw as the growing trends in the mass media for the explicit depiction of sexual and violent themes. Its culmination was a pair of mass rallies in Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park, London in September 1971.

It encouraged a number of other campaigns on similar themes, including the continuing Festival of Light movement in Australia, although it did not persist as a high-profile campaign in the UK, and the subsequent growth in the availability of sexually explicit and violent material would suggest that it had little effect on the media or on consumers.

In November 1970 a young couple, Peter and Janet Hill, returned to England after four years as evangelical Christian missionaries in India. They were surprised to find a much more "permissive" society than the one they left.

Hill imagined tens of thousands of young people marching on London to take a stand for Christian moral principles. The idea took root when he heard of 10,000 men engaged in a March of Witness through Blackburn calling for Christian moral standards to be restored to the nation.

Soon,Hill was in contact with a wide network of people, who shared his concern, and offered their encouragement. Among these were Malcolm Muggeridge, Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford, Bishop Trevor Huddleston and Cliff Richard. Grassroots support came from Anglicans, Baptists, Plymouth Brethren and Pentecostal church denominations.

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