The Nationwide Festival of Light got off to a bad start. Its press launch on 9 September 1971 was disrupted by members of the Gay Liberation Front dressed as nuns, who released white mice and stink bombs in Central Hall, Westminster. ‘This is real pornography’, chanted the demonstrators. ‘People are dying in India in their thousands. What about Vietnam? Not this hypocritical bullshit.’ One of the speakers, Malcolm Muggeridge, was unable to make himself heard above the protests, complaining, ‘I think it is a waste of time to try to develop any sort of cogent thought in the presence of such yahoos.’ ‘He tried dialogue and derision without avail’, noted an Anglican observer. ‘Eventually he abandoned any attempt at a speech and ended by declaiming Romans 13.12 like a revivalist preacher.’ The demonstrators countered the Festival of Light with their own rival Festival of Life. ‘All those coming together for the Festival of Life will protest at the increasingly apparent symptoms of fascism growing in this country’, one of them said. ‘The Festival of Light is people trying to get into thought control. It’s the start of a right-wing backlash and we’re very frightened of it.’

This farcical debut demonstrates some of the problems faced by the Nationwide Festival of Light (NFOL) throughout its existence. The campaign’s apparently puritanical aims made it easy for its critics to lampoon it as ridiculous. The involvement of the Gay Liberation Front was a harbinger of an increasing preoccupation of the Festival of Light, and of conservative evangelicals in general, with homosexuality, an issue in which evangelicals had evinced little interest in the 1950s and 1960s. Muggeridge’s declamation of biblical texts also revealed the tension between evangelism and the moral aims of the movement. Although Muggeridge was not an evangelical (and eventually became a Roman Catholic), the movement was dominated by evangelicals. The Anglican observer noted that ‘the campaign ... has little or nothing to offer either in the form of guidance or invitation to co-operation to Christians who do not consider themselves as belonging to the conservative evangelical tradition and others in the community who share the main declared objectives of the Festival.’ As this observer’s comments show, criticism of the Festival came from Christians, as well as the radical left.