The potential unwieldiness of popular religiosity and devotional spirituality and their ambiguous relationship with the liturgy have made them objects of perennial ecclesiastical concern. More recently, magisterial discussion of popular religiosity has come to value more positively its cultural and anthropological value and its spiritual content. The reforms of Vatican II were followed by a significant demise in devotionalism amongst Northern European and North American Catholics, yet demographic change and other factors have resulted in the resurgence of popular religious devotions. Manifestations of grassroots faith may express valuable convictions and important insights, including the value of the collective and the non‐verbal. However, these values may be easily dismissed by social elites for aesthetic reasons, or by academic theologians for reasons of the cultural milieu and preferences of academia. Given the preference of the theological tradition for lexical intelligibility, and the symbolic and the physical nature of many kinds of popular religiosity, how the sub‐disciplines of theology may now responsibly and respectfully treat these perduring phenomena is not clear. A healthy relationship between the fides qua and the fides quae demands taking seriously the sensus fidelium, understood as a broad experience that embraces the daily lives and local circumstances of Christians as well as their worship. The contemporary construal of the discipline of Christian Spirituality, understood as the study of Christian experience, promises to provide a multidisciplinary approach that can address the topic of popular religiosity and devotional practice.

This article examines images of Jesus broadcast on the BBC from the 1930s through the 1950s. During these years, the BBC sought to use its cultural influence to replace popular religiosity with what the clerics who staffed its Religious Broadcasting Department (RBD) regarded as a more masculine, modern, and vigorous national religious faith. To achieve this aim, the RBD marshaled the might of British New Testament scholarship and its image of a warrior-like, apocalyptic historical Jesus. Yet the RBD's hopes of bridging the gap between popular religiosity and its own vision of Christianity went unrealized. Programs on Jesus that reached a genuinely national audience—The Man Born to be King, Dorothy L. Sayers's wartime radio drama, and Jesus of Nazareth, a popular television series from the 1950s—instead featured Anglicized and ahistorical images deeply embedded within British popular culture. The story of Jesus on the BBC highlights both this popular culture's strength and Christian Britain's fragmentation.