God's Agents: Biblical Publicity in Contemporary England

God’s Agents

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CHRISTIANITY

Edited by Joel Robbins

God’s Agents

Biblical Publicity in Contemporary England

Matthew Engelke

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley•Los Angeles•London

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© 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

Chapter 1 was originally published, in slightly different form, as Angels in Swindon: Public Religion and Ambient Faith in England, in American Ethnologist 39(1) [2012]: 155–170. Chapter 2 was originally published, in slightly different form, as The Semiotics of Relevance: Campaigning for the Bible in Greater Manchester, in Anthropological Quarterly 84(3) [2011]: 705–735. The material from these articles is reused here with permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Engelke, Matthew Eric.

God’s agents : Biblical publicity in contemporary England / Matthew Engelke. — 1 [edition].

pages cm. — (The anthropology of Christianity ; 15)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-28046-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-520-28047-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780520957107

1. Bible—Publication and distribution—Great Britain.2. Evangelistic work—Great Britain.3. British and Foreign Bible Society.I. Title.

BV2369.E542013

267’.13—dc23

2013016100

Manufactured in the United States of America

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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Nature’s Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1192 (R 1197) (Permanence of Paper).

For Harriet and Louis

Contents

A Note to the Reader

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

1.Angels in Swindon

2.The Semiotics of Relevance

3.Kingdom and Christendom

4.Doing God

5.Good Trouble and Good Timing

6.Reasonable Religion

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

A Note to the Reader

Throughout this book there is some slippage in the terminology used to describe where this study takes place. To some readers this may appear confusing; to others, perhaps sloppy. Sometimes, for instance, I refer to the United Kingdom, other times, Britain, but mostly England. In doing so I am not being sloppy; indeed I try to follow the usage patterns of the people I studied and in accord with national-level discourses.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state with a monarchy and a parliamentary democracy. It includes England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the first three being countries on the island of Great Britain, the last sometimes referred to as a country and sometimes a region (depending on who is speaking). There are also some small islands within the group of islands known as the British Isles, such as the Isle of Man.

Under the banner of devolution, Wales, Scotland, and, with increasing regularity, Northern Ireland retain (or take, again depending on who is speaking) certain political powers—with Scotland and Northern Ireland in many ways more distinctly so. The United Kingdom is often referred to as Britain, but it would be a mistake, and an offensive one at that (at least to many non-English), to refer to the United Kingdom as England. England is the largest country within the country (itself a confusing characterization, but no less accurate for being so); it has a population well more than ten times that of any of the other countries or region in the United Kingdom. And it is, of course, home to the Houses of Parliament.

Life on the British Isles is full of accretions and what many British people call fudges, and the ways in which the places and the people are denominated are among them. This anthropological study took place in England—and indeed only in certain parts of England—and yet at times I refer to Britain or the United Kingdom for what I hope will now, with this note, be reasonable reasons. Often this switching has to do with political language or in relation to the mass-media outlets and publics about which I write or to which I refer.

With space explained, let me also add a short comment about time. This study took place, as I will remind readers at a number of points, from 2006 to 2009. Anthropologists wrestle with what verb tense to use, with some plumping for what is called the ethnographic present. I write in the past tense, at least most of the time, not because the world I studied has disappeared or because I want to deny the natives coevality but rather because that world has, in many ways, already moved on, and one of the things the staff at Bible Society were always keen to stress is that I make it clear that what’s written about in the pages to follow is not necessarily what they are doing today. Bible advocacy is driven by temporal dynamism, the texture of which will, I hope, emerge in the ethnography to follow.

Acknowledgments

The research for this project was funded by a STICERD/Annual Fund New Researcher Award from the London School of Economics and a British Academy Small Research Grant (SG-47097). It was greatly facilitated by the late Olivia Harris, who, as chair of the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics (and an inspiring colleague), allowed me to be flexible and creative with my school commitments so that I could spend lots of time in Swindon, Manchester, and other addresses in London (and South Africa and Ethiopia for week-long trips).

A very large number of friends, colleagues, and students have contributed to the direction and shape of this book, sometimes by reading parts of it or listening to parts of it, sometimes by discussing it with me, and sometimes by having the good sense to talk about something else or just generally keep me on my toes. If I tried to list them all I’d never be able to, but let me mention by name Catherine Allerton, Rita Astuti, Andreas Bandak, Mukulika Banerjee, Laura Bear, Maurice Bloch, Fenella Cannell, Alanna Cant, Simon Coleman, Girish Daswani, Abby Day, Stephan Feuchtwang, Sarah Franklin, Chris Fuller, Naomi Haynes, Deborah James, Webb Keane, Pamela Klassen, Michael Lambek, Gordon Lynch, Bernice Martin, David Martin, Meadhbh McIvor, Birgit Meyer, Danny Miller, David Morgan, Rebecca Nash, Kevin Lewis O’Neill, Jonathan Parry, Mathijs Pelkmans, Michael W. Scott, Alpa Shah, Anthony Shenoda, Don Slater, George St. Clair, Hans Steinmuller, Anna Strhan, Matt Tomlinson, Harry Walker, and Linda Woodhead. Jon Bialecki, James Bielo, Tom Boylston, and Harry West went above and beyond the call of duty; they read the whole manuscript and offered really useful comments. Joel Robbins, partly as the series editor but mostly as a wonderful friend, also needs to be singled out. And although they don’t know anything about this book, I’d like to thank Neko Case, Bill Evans, and Richard Hawley too.

Several of the chapters were presented in seminars, workshops, and conferences, including at the London School of Economics, University College London, Sussex University, Birkbeck College, Durham University, Kent University, Cambridge University, the University of Copenhagen, Bergen University, the University of California at San Diego, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, the University of Virginia, the University of Toronto, Reed College, Scripps College, the College of William and Mary, two of the Global Seminars on Religion, Media, and Culture (in Accra and Hyderabad), and the Centro Inconti Umani in Ascona, Switzerland. In addition to the individuals named earlier, I received an incredible amount of helpful feedback from colleagues in these venues.

At the University of California Press, my editor, Reed Malcolm, has been a constant source of support and has made the whole process seem easy. Two anonymous reviewers for the press offered insightful readings that helped me clarify several aspects of the arguments and ethnography. I’d also like to thank Stacy Eisenstark and the production team at California for their wonderful help. More generally in terms of production, I’d like to thank Emilie Hitch, Anne Decobert, Maja Londorf, and Alanna Cant for transcribing the interviews, Megan Laws for preparing the figures, and Rebecca Wallis for helping with the manuscript.

Without doubt my greatest debt is to the many people at Bible Society and Theos who opened up their work and lives to me. It is always humbling, as an anthropologist, to see how generous and trusting others can be, subjecting themselves to being scribbled about and gazed at from the corner of the room. Several of these people appear in the pages to follow, but there were many, many more who offered their time and thoughts.

Last but by no means least, I’d like to acknowledge the love and support of my family, especially my mother, Karen Engelke, Bill Nash and Elizabeth Becker, Suzanne and Randy Richardson, and above all my wife, Rebecca, and our children, Harriet and Louis, both of whom like to ask me what I do at work each day. (This is what I was doing, guys, whenever I said, writing a book. And now that you can both read, why not give it a go?)

Preface

When James Catford became the chief executive officer of the British and Foreign Bible Society he put a television in the lobby of Bible House. It was tuned to Sky News. The television anchored the small waiting area, past the reception desk, outside two separate doors, one of which led to meeting rooms and the other to a staircase that took you up to an open-plan office, where many of the staff had their desks. Next to the waiting area was a small, partly glass-walled room, interior to the building, that staff could use for collective prayers, if they so wished. As a visitor you would not necessarily know this, however; assuming your eyes weren’t drawn to the television screen there was nothing in the prayer room that would have caught your eye. Bible House was built in the early 1980s; nothing about it catches your eye.

It is hardly unusual these days for a waiting area to have a television. But what was going on here had very little in common with the television in a doctor’s office, airport lounge, or car repair shop. At Bible House the television had little functional value. Unlike in other waiting areas, you didn’t need to mollify your boredom; I never saw a visitor have to wait more than five minutes. There weren’t many visitors to begin with, anyway; Bible House is not the kind of workplace with a steady stream of outsiders coming through. This television was part of a theological message. This television—tuned always to the news—was a statement that what goes on at the British and Foreign Bible Society is in and of the world. James Catford was proclaiming that the Bible is public.

This book documents a vision of Christianity as a public religion. I explore the ways in which a group of staff at Bible Society, called the Bible Advocacy Team, worked to counteract the idea that religion ought to be, or even must be, a private affair, disconnected from the wider world, concerning only matters of personal belief, as if they could exist independent of wider realities. Their vision of religion refuses to keep to itself—to leave politics to politicians, the cosmos to scientists, culture to artists, media to journalists, and the economy to bankers. In the Society’s vision of public religion, Christianity should connect to and even ground all such social institutions and networks. The staff’s goal, as expressed in the Society’s motto, was making the Bible heard. And for them it had to be heard loud and clear.

The staff approached this goal in a variety of ways and means and with a variety of audiences and publics in mind. Central to all of these efforts was a commitment to publicity. To engage the man on the street, as they often put it (although I’ll say person), they ran major advertising campaigns and sponsored art projects, one of which involved Christmas decorations for the local town center shopping arcade. To engage fellow Christians and the churches, they launched a Bible study program designed to take place in coffee shops and pubs; they also established close relationships with a number of politicians, encouraging them to think Christianly about public service. And to engage the media and chattering classes they established a think tank, which published reports and put on major events to do with everything from the provision of chaplains in state-run hospitals to the value of Charles Darwin’s legacy. In all this they were striving to be God’s agents.

In this study, the term God’s agents has three main connotations. Above all, staff at Bible Society, and especially those on the Advocacy Team, can be understood as public relations agents for the Good Book. In all the work they did, they were trying to promote and in many cases improve the image, relevance, and uptake of the Bible. And it was about promotion, not proselytization. At least not in any straightforward sense. Bible Society is not a missionary organization. For most of its history the Society has functioned as a publishing house, providing Bibles to a worldwide network of churches and missionary societies, as well as the hospitals, schools, prisons, and other such institutions they run or service. Before becoming CEO, James worked for both HarperCollins and Hodder, two of the United Kingdom’s major commercial publishers, as an editor and publishing director. God’s agents is meant to capture a sense of the Society’s historical work and current set of influences: the staff as PR agents, as literary agents, working nonstop to promote their star author and His book. And indeed one of the main points of this book is that when we talk about public religion today, we’re often actually talking about religious publicity.

Staff at the Society are also agents in the sense that they understand the role of Christians to be central to the realization of the Kingdom of God. They subscribe to theologies in which waiting around is not an option. Withdrawing from the world is not possible. Keeping one’s faith to oneself is unthinkable. And while there is a clear line between the power of God’s will and their own, staff understand it to be God’s will that they be active in the world—that they redeem the gift of human freedom and become socially engaged, going public with faith.

But God’s agents are not only human. From the wind of the Spirit to the power of the printed word, there has been a long-standing conviction within Bible Society that inspiration, revelation, and change come about in numerous ways. It was during an earlier research project, on apostolic Christians in Zimbabwe, that I first came across this central tenet, one indebted to the evangelical tradition out of which the Bible Society movement emerged. Literature produced by Bible Society has often included tales and testimonies of the Bible’s agent-like qualities; falling open to a particular chapter and verse—to exactly what a given reader needs to hear—is by far the most common. There are many others. One that stays in my mind is the Bible in a supporter’s chest pocket that took a bullet in the Boer War. This Bible saved my life, said the man (in Smit 1970, 130). The Bible reads people, a phrase I first heard in Zimbabwe, was invoked as well in England—and not without realization of the intimation of enchantment. Indeed while on the face of it what the Advocacy Team did every day revolved more around the language and logic of marketing—the PR side of things—every act of advocacy is based on an underlying appeal to the mysterium. James and others were quite clear that Christians cannot wait around for the Book to do all the work; it doesn’t always fall open at the right spot on its own, and it doesn’t take everything that life shoots at us. But this magic, as James and I once discussed it, is a key aspect of what inspires the Society.

The term public religion has come to mean religion that refuses to accept any demand to restrict its role to private life. Central to this demand, certainly in terms of how staff at Bible Society understand it, is that religion be made over into a matter of personal beliefs, self-cultivation, and other-worldly concerns. Within the West there are two traditions of thought associated with this demand of particular note to the Society: the Enlightenment tradition of philosophy and the liberal tradition of political theory. In many cases these traditions overlap, coming together under the label of modernity. Indeed liberalism is pre-eminently the political theory of the Age of Reason (Canovan 1990, 9); all the same, the Enlightenment and liberalism should be recognized as separate and as having diversity within themselves.¹ According to the Enlightenment story, one general justification for the removal of religion from public life is its irrationality and unreasonableness. The work of some Enlightenment philosophers is in fact antitheistic—antireligious—and the privatization of religion can even be seen by them as the first step in its eventual elimination. Although the liberal story is often perceived to be antireligious because of its insistence that religious talk be left out of political debate, liberalism is not always driven by the same kind of reason as the Enlightenment tradition that denounces religion. The liberal justification for religion’s privacy is out of fear not that it is inherently irrational but that it is one of many particular discourses that hamper the realization of justice. In this schematic view, the Enlightenment thinker might say, Religious belief is irrational and antimodern; if we can’t get rid of it altogether, we ought at least to keep it as far away from the workings of political power as possible. Whereas the liberal might say, Religious belief is not a good base for political argumentation, especially in a pluralist society; it’s only ever likely to cause divisions and lead to people talking past one another. If an argument can’t be won on the basis of appeals to ‘common reason,’ then it’s not worth making. These are the two perceived demands of privatization that drove Bible advocacy. Neither of them was countenanced in Bible House.

Some members of the Advocacy Team spoke about the Enlightenment and liberalism in their day-to-day work. As one team member put it to me, charting what he saw as the challenge to faith, It really started big-time, I suppose, with Copernicus and the Enlightenment. And obviously Darwinism and all that kind of thing. So basically, gradually, as scientific materialism took over—took hold in Western society—the Church has gradually lost more and more ground. We will get to science and Darwin’s connection to all of this toward the end of this book. But the legacy and power of these traditions was crystallized in another word—also hinted at in this remark—the many meanings of which will be explored in the chapters that follow. That word is secularism.

Secularism was not a wholly dirty word in Bible House, and there were many ways in which the work of Bible advocacy was meant to own it, and even champion it, as a Christian concept. As what follows will show, there were important ways in which the Advocacy team wanted to be secularist, or even secular—at least sometimes. And in some instances secularism and related words were used descriptively, without a note of anxiousness or annoyance; when team members spoke of secular culture, for example, they often just meant things that were not part of the church or of a religious character. But in other cases when the staff spoke about secularism, the secular authorities, or secular humanism, they were highlighting what they took to be persons and points of view insisting that religion be kept out of sight. Sometimes the further implication was that these persons and points of view were hostile to religion altogether—that out of sight was a start but that out of the frame would be much better. In some cases the hostility was seen to be underwritten by a comforting sense that religion is on the decline anyway—that society is undergoing a process of secularization in which the spark of faith will fade. In other cases the hostility was seen to be underwritten by an active effort to extinguish the spark; not content with the hand of history, some secularists were seen as wanting to help with the snuffing out.

Like other perceptions of public moods and social states, this one among the staff at Bible Society got encapsulated in a sound bite, a pithy phrase that summed things up: We don’t do God. Ever the good agents, they deployed this phrase with great effect. It was taken from Alastair Campbell, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s press secretary, and it reverberated—as a challenge—throughout all efforts at Bible advocacy and even more widely throughout the public sphere and Christian publics and counterpublics in Britain.

The simple reading of Campbell’s pronouncement is that political figures in Britain must work according to a secular settlement in which faith remains private. This is a generically liberal position, something along the lines that religion and politics ought to be separate. Alongside this, though, Campbell’s words have been interpreted in other ways. By 2003, which is when he said it, Campbell’s public persona was as the devious high priest of spin, and an aggressive and bombastic one at that.² He was certainly never afraid to confront those who he felt were in the wrong or misrepresenting Blair or the government position. Campbell spoke his mind in plain language. On the occasion when he declared that God would not be done, Campbell was replying on Blair’s behalf to a question from a Vanity Fair reporter who had asked Blair about his Christian faith. It was well known at the time that Blair held a strong faith, and in the context of his relationship with President George W. Bush, with whom he was embarking on a war in Iraq, that faith had become a particularly interesting issue among Britain’s chattering classes (i.e., people who read Vanity Fair). What was remarked upon at the time, and subsequently, is that Campbell felt empowered—even compelled—to answer on Blair’s behalf. In accounts of the exchange, Campbell is even described as having interrupted the prime minister.³ For the staff at Bible Society—and a good number of other Christians who participate in the public sphere—Campbell’s attempt to keep religion out of the public in this memorable instance served as a troublesome indication of just how influential a certain brand of the secular settlement had become, a brand that got understood, like Campbell’s public persona, to be rather pugnacious, informed by the kind of Enlightenment sensibility sketched earlier. Moreover what Campbell said in relation to Blair’s position as a politician was taken within Bible Society and elsewhere to apply to any Christian who wanted to speak up, speak out, or be public about his or her faith. Alongside Blair, one of the most powerful symbols of such an injunction—although there have been many others besides—was a check-in clerk for British Airways, Nadia Eweida, who, in 2006, was temporarily suspended for refusing to remove a cross necklace while on the job. Indeed just as Blair’s boxing-in by Campbell, Eweida’s case was understood as a bellwether of the societal mood and reinforced the perception among some Christians that God could not be done publicly in any way, shape, or form. Signs of personal faith—be they words, jewelry, or anything else—had to be kept to oneself.

The Bible Advocacy Team were not particularly concerned with Alastair Campbell per se; as with all sound bites, who first said it, and in what context, mattered less the further it circulated. In a post on his blog several years after the fact, Campbell actually said his words were not a major strategic statement but an attempt to bring to an end an interview in which an American journalist was asking ‘one final question’ after ‘one final question.’⁴ By the logic of this argument, the journalist could have been asking Blair if he was a cat person or a dog person, and Campbell would have replied, We don’t do pets. Campbell is not religious and describes himself in the same blog post as a pro faith atheist; he did, at least, devote the core of his career to working for a deeply religious premier. Such clarifications and explanations seem not to have mattered much, however, and Campbell’s words have been kicked around the public square like a ball on a school playground.

Blair and many others have joined in the game. In one of his first extensive interviews after leaving office, Blair remarked on the power of the privacy injunction and, more, the stigma attached to breaking it. It’s difficult if you talk about faith in our political system, he said. You talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you’re a nutter.⁵ Speaking in relation to the Eweida case, the Catholic archbishop of Southwark went further, picking up on the claim of a particularly anti-Christian stance. There seems to be a prejudice against Christians or against the manifestation of the Christian faith which totally puzzles me, he said.⁶

And so, we don’t do God. This simple phrase has had more impact on the terms of debate over public religion in Britain than any other. It has defined the better part of a decade’s worth of conversation, debate, perception, and action. Within the Bible Society’s Advocacy Team the reply has been, Yes we do!

• • •

In October 2009 there was a workshop on religion and the news at Cumberland Lodge, an educational charity in Windsor Great Park. I attended the workshop with a member of the Bible Advocacy Team, who was there as an invited guest. In one of the sessions, one of the speakers, a journalist, began with a joke. There’s only one mention of the media in the Bible. It’s in Luke, chapter 8, she said, going on to cite it from the King James version: Then came to him his mother and his brethren, and they could not come at him for the press.

The journalist’s joke got lots of laughs but raises serious questions about the relationship between Christianity and its modes of publicity. What, in any given place and time, are the legitimate and legitimating forms of proclamation? How, in contemporary England, can and should the Good News garner publicity? How can Christianity be a public religion? These are the questions that frame this book.

To call something public is not a wholly modern thing; the concept, though, has been thoroughly modernized, some might even say commoditized, such that its link to the traditions of thought and life in the ancient Mediterranean world might seem lost. A central premise of this book is that public, as a term, has historical specificities, and I set out to trace them in new millennium England. But another central premise of this book is that contemporary Christian concerns with publicity are often linked to the ancient Mediterranean worlds recounted by Luke and his fellow apostles; they are certainly so linked by members of the Bible Advocacy Team. God’s agents strive for what they understand to be fidelity to the teachings of Jesus, teachings that, in their view, are necessarily public, in today’s parlance.

In this respect the gospel lesson that provided the journalist at Cumberland Lodge with the material for her joke is an important one within the Bible Society movement. It is a lesson that underscores the commitment to publicity. Jesus faces the press after telling the parable of the sower (Luke 8:1–15). The sower, you may recall, if you know your Bible, went out to sow his seed, although much of it fell on poor ground and got trodden down, withered, and choked; yet other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundred-fold. After explaining the meaning of the parable to his disciples—on the good ground are they, which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience—Jesus continues by invoking another image. No man, Jesus says, when he hath lighted a candle, covereth it with a vessel, or putteth it under a bed; but setteth it on a candlestick, that they which enter in may see the light. For nothing is secret that shall not be made manifest; neither anything hid, that shall not be known and come abroad (Luke 8:16–17). In this, as in so many other passages of Scripture, God’s agents find confirmation of their commitment to being public.

The British and Foreign Bible Society adopted the image of the sower as its colophon in 1889 and continued to use it through the late 1990s (Steer 2004, 412). It was a perfect symbol for the Society’s goal of spreading the word, of broadcasting the seed. To broadcast, in fact, is not a term invented for the age of radio and television; the pioneers of mass communication borrowed it from the Hebrew prophets (Durham Peters 1999, 206–11; Simonson 2010, 13–17), who in turn borrowed it from the arts of land husbandry.

Publicity, which we can define as a condition or quality of being public, is a modern concept. Coined in the seventeenth century, it was, as Jürgen Habermas (1962/1989, 1–26) shows, tied to the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere in Britain (publicity), France (publicité), and Germany (Publizität or öffentlich). The distinguishing feature of the public sphere, particularly in Britain, was its function as an arena for public debate distinct from the workings of the state and society; the public sphere, brought about by the discourse of private persons, could be used to hold both to account. It allowed for people’s public use of their reason (27), and the force of arguments was carried not on the basis of any given person’s status (so says the king) but rather on the rightness of the argument itself (so demands reason). What allowed for this arrangement was the medium through which the discourse took place: the medium of the printed word. By the end of the eighteenth century it had become axiomatic to assume that the precondition for any project of enlightenment or political enfranchisement was the democratization of print.

Publicity in the early modern era was governed by what the literary critic Michael Warner (1990, 42) calls the principle of negativity. For an argument or idea to be properly public it had to bear a negative relation to the person making it. The republic of letters became a powerful metonym of the age that located authority and legitimacy in printedness, in disembodied publication. In such a republic social authority, like truth, holds validity not in persons, but despite them; it is located not in the virtuous citizen nor in God nor in the King, but in the light of day, in the supervision of publicity itself (82).

Such a republic has never really existed. Habermas’s depiction of the public sphere is idealized—one prominent sociologist calls it a hazy unreality (Thompson 1995, 261)—and glosses over important considerations. For one thing, entry into the bourgeois public sphere was never as straightforward as letting reason flow forth from one’s pen. As many of Habermas’s critics have stressed, those pens tended to be held by certain classes of white men—a fact of personhood never fully negated (see, e.g., Calhoun 1992; Fraser 1992). Habermas has also been questioned for his elision of religion; The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, first published in 1962, leaves religion largely out of the story (see Zaret 1992 for a discussion pertaining to the case of England) and certainly cannot accommodate the subsequent constitution of public spheres outside the West in which religion has played a central role (Hirschkind 2006; Meyer 2004; Meyer and Moors 2006; Rajagopal 2001). Habermas has taken many of these criticisms on board (see Habermas 1992) and notably amended his view on public religion over the years (Habermas 2011; Habermas and Ratzinger 2007). In any case, even for him, if a truly laudable public sphere ever existed, it has long been lost. By the 1830s the public sphere had been tainted by commercialization and, over time, the reintroduction of personality, especially with the development of new media technologies such as radio, film, and television. Certainly when we think of publicity today we are less likely to think of the social and political projects of John Stuart Mill or Benjamin Franklin and more likely—much more likely—to think of the junkets and tours of Hollywood actors and pop stars.

The understanding of what’s public remains as much a clouded amalgam (Habermas 1962/1989, I) as ever. Yet invocations of the public, and the promises of freedom, democracy, and enlightenment such invocations suggest, remain deeply attractive. What is more, not all observers are as dyspeptic as Habermas about the effects of new mass media on publicity’s qualities and potentials (Calhoun 1992; Latour and Weibel 2005). And more generally, Habermas’s many critics are often admiring critics; they do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. However they may be defined, though, enlightenment, democracy, and other ideas and ideals associated with the reinvention of publicness (Thompson 1995, 235–65) integral to the narrative of modernity are never the exfoliation of material technology (Warner 1990, 6). Books do not make a world good all on their own; neither does revelation or salvation. These things have to be got at through social and political relations and are shaped by the currents and contingencies of history. Within Christian traditions, even those strongly evangelical ones in which the agency of the Book is palpable, this is often actually recognized. The agency of Scripture is only ever part of the story. As John Durham Peters (1999, 52) reminds us within the context of his wide-ranging study on the idea of communication, the parable of the sower celebrates broadcasting as an equitable mode of communication that leaves the harvest of meaning to the will and capacity of the recipient. Audiences and publics have always mattered in this way for the Bible Society; audiences and publics have always been part of the equation of publicity.

As clouded as our understanding may be, there remains in the contemporary moment a lasting commitment to a central aspect of the early modern acclamation of public things. Public things are supposed to be good things.⁷ Part of what makes them so is the normative demand that they must be free of personal agendas and private interests. That which is public ought to be illuminated by the light of day and nothing else, certainly not the light of the candle of which Jesus speaks in the Gospel of Luke.

In England the character of publicity still creates awkward conditions for the presence of God. The insistence on disembodiment—the separation of rightness of word and deed from the subject who expresses them—is, for many Christians, an odd and unhelpful demand. It contravenes the essence of Christian self-formation and social relations alike. In a very important sense, publicity asks us to erase ourselves. This makes no sense to the Christians I got to know in the course of this study. And this is the root of the problem for proponents of public religion; this is where the stories of enlightenment, liberalization, and secularization come together to set the scene for the Bible Advocacy Team. The central argument of this book is that we cannot understand contemporary formations of the secular without paying attention to the dynamics of publicity. Secularity and publicity are inextricably linked, and it is vital not to subsume this link under the banner term public religion. How and why is a religion ever public? That’s what anthropology must ask—and answer. What the dynamics of publicity reveal in this case is that the challenge of the secular for these Christians lies in how to reconcile the principle of negativity with the duty and desire for proclamation, for broadcasting the seed.

• • •

All the talk of doing God and Bible advocacy was not what I had in mind when I conceived of a project on the Bible Society. Having been trained as an anthropologist of religion with a focus on Africa, my initial thinking was that fieldwork would take me there; I thought I would follow some of the Society’s international projects and look at issues to do with religion and development. As part of this I expected to spend time with staff at the Society looking at issues of design, production, and distribution. I thought I might do ethnography of the Book as such. I already knew something about the Society’s international work. In the research for my PhD, carried out in Zimbabwe, I had interviewed the general secretary of the Bible Society of Zimbabwe, as well as a team of translators that had been working on a new translation of the Bible into Shona, the Bantu language spoken by the majority of Zimbabweans. I had also read a lot about the Society’s nineteenth-century roots and the important role it played in establishing print cultures and reading publics in the global South.

I was interested in the Society during the course of my PhD research because it helped set the social and theological backdrops against which the Christians I was primarily studying had defined themselves. These people, members of an African apostolic church founded in the 1930s, referred to themselves as the Christians who don’t read the Bible; they rejected the authority of Scripture for a combination of sociopolitical and theological reasons, the former having to do with colonialism, the latter based on what I detail as an ultra-Protestant concern about one’s personal relationship with God being mediated in any way (Engelke 2007). While for most Protestants the Bible is not seen as a barrier to that relationship, for these apostolics, it was, and they did without it in the same way other Protestants do without popes and rosary beads. These African apostolics wanted a live and direct faith, and they saw the Bible as something getting in the way of that.

It was the materiality of the text, in other words, that became a major theme in my earlier work, and the work of