A Secular Bible Movement in the United Kingdom
Getting out the word in Christianity has always depended on many secular media and technologies,
especially printing and distributing Bibles and other Christian reading materials. As John Lardas Modern
(2011) thoroughly documents in his study of the nineteenth-century United States, Christian evangelists
took full advantage of mass-produced books, tracts, readers, newspapers, and handbooks. Making and
disseminating these materials necessarily implicated them in the market, literally and figuratively: they
had to spend money, purchase machinery, hire salesmen and delivery men, and track production and
sales. And of course, the transmission of religion through secular channels hardly ended in the
nineteenth century: as discussed in Chapter 9 of Introducing Anthropology of Religion, as soon as there
were automobiles, radios, and televisions these technologies were appropriated to carry religious
messages too. One interesting but forgotten example of secular Christianity in the mid-twentieth
century is the comic book series Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact, published from 1946 to 1972 by George
Pflaum for Catholic schools, featuring Bible tales, mixed with stories of ordinary children and sports
heroes, tidbits of history and science, and games and puzzles.
It should come as no surprise, then, that a contemporary “Bible advocacy” initiative in the United
Kingdom would not only exploit these same secular channels but actually see itself, or at least promote
itself, as a secular activity. According to Matthew Engelke, in September 2003 billboards began to
appear in the vicinity of Nottingham, featuring nothing but pictures of guns and flowers. This was the
first step of a campaign by the Bible Society of England and Wales, aiming simply to catch people’s
attention. Gradually the organization added more information to its billboards, eventually including the
logo of the Society and words like, “Soap stories and the Bible. Both full of life’s struggles, choices, and
emotions. The Bible: More relevant than you thought? www.getthestory.co.uk” (2010: 39). This “tease-
and-reveal media campaign” (39), fit for any television show or movie, was a well-planned project—
called the Campaign for Culture—to excite interest in Christianity. “But the idea was not to sell Bibles. It
was not even to evangelize” (39). Instead, Engelke and the Bible Society claim, the goal was “to get the
‘man on the street,’ as staff members put it, thinking about the Bible” (40).
Subsequently, in 2006, the Bible Society hired a consulting firm to run focus groups “on the attitudes of
‘unchurched’ people toward the Bible,” which revealed that citizens respected it as a source of “moral
character” while holding many negative opinions of the book (40). The consulting agency concluded that
“the Bible ‘is fundamentally felt to be at odds with modern life. Therefore people drift away from the
Bible as they, and society in general, increasingly [free themselves] from official reasons to come into
contact with the Bible’” (41). This may sound like the classic definition of secularism, and indeed the
Society wanted to reverse this trend, as its motto—“making the Bible heard” (43)—suggests. It saw its
mission, then, as Bible advocacy, which the head of the Bible advocacy team, Ann Holt, characterized in
these words: “Advocacy is about moving [people] from the mindset that says, ‘[the Bible] is rubbish, this
has nothing to do with me, it’s difficult, it’s irrelevant’… to somewhere different’” (43), namely, to a
position where the Bible is credible once more.
In order to accomplish its mission, the Bible Society employed a staff of more than eighty people, from
various Christian denominations, as well as “a handful of agnostics and atheists—albeit none in strategyrelated posts—and a self-declared pagan” (43). The organization posts billboards, as mentioned, and
naturally distributes Bibles, but it also manages “a wide range of technologies and mediums, including
audiotapes, CDs, podcasts, and text messages,” not to mention “educational materials for schools and
various films and documentaries, such as the recent BBC production The Miracles of Jesus” (43). In 2006,
the Society also inaugurated a project called Theos, which Engelke describes as “a ‘public theology’ think
tank that aims to contribute to the analysis of social and political trends by addressing issues not only of
obvious religious significance but also of more general concern, thus suggesting that faith matters
cannot be bracketed off” (44).
In a word, the Bible Society explicitly perceives “the Church” as separated from “the Culture” and seeks
bridge the gap between the two worlds: “The Bible Society thinks of itself as situated in that divide,
furnishing support in each direction. The hope is that in building such a bridge, the Society can provide
the church with a more effective platform from which to regain market shares, as some staff might put
it” (44). Clearly, the point is to (re)inject the Bible into British culture—to desecularize British culture,
ironically by using all the tactics of secular culture—although Engelke quotes David Spriggs, a Baptist
minister on the Bible advocacy team, who steadfastly asserts:
Our job isn’t to tell people what to believe. It is to give them the opportunity to begin their
engagement with the Bible…. I think we would say that making the Bible available is our part of
the deal…. Because we actually do believe in the God who has chosen to work in and through
this text (50).
Engelke concludes quite rightly that “the Society walks in its work between what we might call, for lack
of better words, its sacred and secular commitments,” or what he calls strategic secularism, which
is the use of secular subjects and objects as part of an overarching religious agenda. Strategic
secularism is a process by which organizations such as the Bible Society use the language and
tools of an ostensible other. It is a strategy of encompassment that does not seek to deny the
history of differentiation; rather, it seeks to shape the direction in which it points. This is not the
teleology of God-is-dead, but rather a Christian one of divine presence revealed otherwise.
There are some Christians in England, then, for whom secularization is not necessarily a dirty
word. For them, the secular and the religious are mutually constitutive, not only as categories
and concepts, but as elements in strategies of social transformation (53).
References
Engelke, Matthew. 2010. “‘Strategic Secularism: Bible Advocacy in England.” In Bruce Kapferer, Kari
Telle, and
Annelin Eriksen (eds.) Contemporary Religiosities: Emergent Socialities and the Post-NationState. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 39-54.
Modern, John Lardas. 2011. Secularism in Antebellum America, with Reference to Ghosts, Protestant
Subcultures,
Machines, and their Metaphors. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.