Malcolm Muggeridge and Marshall McLuhan are two now-mostly-forgotten TV stars who converted to Catholicism.
In the current issue of the St. Austin Review, Daniel J. Mahoney writes of Malcolm Muggeridge, describing him in the title of his essay as a “vendor of words, scourge of ideology, Catholic convert, and witness to the truth.” In introducing Muggeridge to a new generation of readers, Dr. Mahoney commences by describing him as being “once well known by the cultivated public on both sides of the Atlantic.”
It is both tragic and true that one can say of Malcolm Muggeridge that he was “once well known.” He was one of the most famous faces on television in the 1950s and ’60s, belonging to the first generation of talking heads. His unusual face and even more unusual voice and mannerisms made him a favorite subject of comedians, who delighted in mimicking him. That such an important cultural figure and Catholic convert should be largely forgotten today shows the fickleness of fame but also the fecklessness of modernity.
As a young man, Muggeridge was a communist; but he became disillusioned with Marxist utopianism while working as a reporter in Moscow in the 1930s. His book The Thirties remains an invaluable chronicle of that most ominous of decades. His flickering literary reputation was fanned into full-blown celebrity status by his work on BBC television in the 1950s.
He was a critic of the sexual promiscuity and hedonism of the so-called “swinging sixties,” even though his own life up until then had been sexually promiscuous. His conversion to Christianity, heralded by the publication of his bestselling book Jesus Rediscovered, in 1969, was deepened two years later by his making of a documentary on an unknown missionary, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The success of the documentary, Something Beautiful for God, was responsible for bringing the work of Mother Teresa to the attention of the world. For this alone, his praises should be sung.
Malcolm Muggeridge was received into the Catholic Church in 1982 and died eight years later.
Another star of the early years of television is Marshall McLuhan, who shot to fame in the 1960s for his philosophical critique of the consequences of new technology. Known as the “father of media studies,” McLuhan made his lasting mark on popular culture with the coining of the maxim “the medium is the message” and for first using the term “global village.” More than merely a philosopher who criticized the present, he was also a prophet who predicted the advent of the internet thirty years before its emergence. Something of his importance and his impact on the culture can be gleaned from his cameo appearance as himself in Woody Allen’s Oscar-winning film Annie Hall, in 1977.
Considering McLuhan’s enduring status as the “father of media studies,” it could be argued that he is hardly unsung and perhaps does not warrant a place in this series of unsung heroes. What is not as well known, however, is McLuhan’s deep Catholic faith and its importance to the way he perceived modernity in general and technology in particular.
Canadian by birth, McLuhan came to England to study at Cambridge University in the 1930s, where he discovered the writings of G.K. Chesterton. Writing to his mother in 1935, he explained how Chesterton had influenced his conversion from agnosticism to Christianity:
Had I not encountered Chesterton I would have remained agnostic for many years at least. Chesterton did not convince me of religious faith, but he prevented my despair from becoming a habit or hardening into misanthropy. He opened my eyes to European culture and encouraged me to know it more closely. He taught me the reasons for all that in me was simply blind anger and misery.
Two years later, in March 1937, he was received into the Catholic Church. Thereafter, he would remain devout in the practice of the Faith, teaching at Catholic universities and keeping his philosophical reasoning in harmony with his orthodox Catholic beliefs. This can be seen in his critique of the “progressive” ideas of the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
“I am not a fan of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,” he wrote. “The idea that anything is better because it comes later is surely borrowed from pre-electronic technologies.” Further, McLuhan noted to the Catholic philosopher Frederick Wilhelmsen: “The idea of a Cosmic thrust in one direction… is surely one of the lamest semantic fallacies ever bred by the word ‘evolution’.… That development should have any direction at all is inconceivable except to the highly literate community.”
Far from believing in a blindly beneficent progress, McLuhan shared Chesterton’s skepticism with respect to technology, fearing that it portended slavery rather than liberation:
Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and super-imposed co-existence.
These words from McLuhan’s second book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, were published in 1962, decades before the unleashing of the internet would entangle global culture in a worldwide web. Clearly, Marshall McLuhan is not merely a prophet whose praises should be sung; he sings a song that more of us should be singing. May we learn to raise our voices in harmony with his.
Republished with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine (February 2025).
This essay is part of a series, Unsung Heroes of Christendom.
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