MATTHEW ENGELKE
London School of Economics
Angels in Swindon:
Public religion and ambient faith in England
A B S T R A C T
In this article, I introduce the idea of “ambient
faith” in an effort to clarify the stakes in
long-standing debates about public and private
religion. I take as my starting point the increasingly
common recognition that conceptual distinctions
between publicity and privacy are difficult to
maintain in the first place and that they are, in any
case, always relative. The idea of “ambient faith,”
which I connect to work on the turn to a materialist
semiotics, can serve as both a critique of and
supplement to the ideas of “public” and “private”
religion. Introducing ambience—the sense of
ambience—allows one to raise important questions
about the processes through which faith comes to
the foreground or stays in the background—the
extent to which faith, in other words, goes public or
stays private. I use my research on a Christian
organization in England, the Bible Society of
England and Wales, to illuminate these points,
discussing the society’s campaign in 2006 to bring
angels to Swindon and its promotion of Bible
reading in coffee shops. I also consider Brian Eno’s
music and recent advertising trends for additional
insights into the notion of “ambience.” [Christianity,
secularism, semiotics, public religion, England]
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 155–170, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. ⃝C 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01355.x
I
t is now almost two decades since José Casanova declared “that re-
ligious traditions throughout the world are refusing to accept the
marginal and privatized role which theories of modernity as well
as theories of secularization have reserved for them” (1994:5). Dur-
ing that time, understandings of both modernity and seculariza-
tion within the human sciences have increasingly accommodated the oft-
mentioned return of the religious and, in particular, a return of the religious
to the public sphere and public square. Jürgen Habermas (2009; see also
Habermas and Ratzinger 2007) and Richard Rorty (2003, 2010) are just two
of the more prominent public intellectuals who, in their later work, increas-
ingly recognize the viability and even legitimacy of public religion in their
respective philosophical and sociopolitical programs.
These matters are not settled. Within many European national contexts,
for instance—the main staging grounds for theories of modernity and secu-
larization that Casanova has questioned—what constitutes public religion
is still the subject of passionate debate and an impetus for social action.
How public is public? What role should a church, or a bishop, or a rabbi,
or an imam play in the public square? How should these figures speak? To
what extent should an established church appear on the national stage or
in the state corridors of power? To what extent should a national identity or
European identity be linked to a Christian heritage? How should the citizen
dress? These are just some of the questions and issues being debated, all of
which hinge in part on balancing conceptions of publicity and privacy.
In this article, I explore the balancing of such conceptions in relation to
the ideas and activities of a Christian charity based in England, the Bible
Society of England and Wales. I look at how one group of religious actors
tries to set the terms for religion’s place in the nation as well as the condi-
tions for its possibility. As I explain, this involves something of both a re-
fusal and confusion of the ideas labeled by the three key terms in play—
public, private, and religion—and puts in their place something that I call
“ambient faith.” This refusal and confusion is often central to the strate-
gies and tactics of religious actors the world over, from imams in Cairo
American Ethnologist ! Volume 39 Number 1 February 2012
(Hirschkind 2006) to Pentecostal preachers in Accra (Meyer
2006). What this particular strand of work on public reli-
gions highlights is the extent to which the mediums and
forms of such action are integral to the strategies and tac-
tics of creating publicity. This is more than acknowledging,
as within Habermas’s (1989) historical sociology, the im-
portance of the newspaper and the coffeehouse as vehicles
and sites for the production of a public sphere. It is about
recognizing the sensual and material aspects of such com-
municative channels, modes of sociality, and imaginings of
community.
To show how the ambient faith of Bible Society is being
imagined and enacted, I turn to two examples. The first
concerns a project to provide the Christmas decorations for
the shopping center in an English town; the second is about
efforts to encourage Christians to meet for Bible reading
sessions in coffee shops and pubs. Notwithstanding the
importance of coffeehouses to the emergence of modern
conceptions of publics, these examples may seem, on first
thought, relatively inconsequential. They have not, as with
concerns over blasphemy in Denmark (Asad et al. 2009) or
headscarves in France (Bowen 2008), stirred international
debates. Even so, Christmas decorations and coffeehouse
sociality are, as I hope to show, far from trivial matters
when it comes to understanding how a public religion gets
constituted.
And so to an important scene: One day in January
2006, Luke Walton went with a colleague to the Parade,
an outdoor shopping center in the heart of Swindon,
the town in Wiltshire, England, once famous for housing
Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s railway works. The Parade is a
good example of the modernist architecture that dominated
so much postwar building in Britain; that is to say, it is pretty
stark. It was cold that day, and windy, especially given the
tunnel-like effect among the Parade’s buildings. Luke was
looking for an idea. He had been hired not long before as the
arts officer for Bible Society, itself based in Swindon since
the mid-1980s. Bible Society is an independent Christian
charity, not affiliated with any one church or denomination.
It was founded in 1804 on the wave of the Evangelical Re-
vival, its mandate to promote the “circulation and use” of
Scripture. When I was doing my research, this commitment
was expressed by the motto, “Making the Bible heard.”
About one hundred staff worked for the society during
the period of my research (2006–09), almost all of whom
attended or belonged to Protestant churches, with many
being Anglican.1 The label “Anglican,” however, is not very
precise, and what really united the staff was a love of the
Book—a commitment to the centrality of the Bible for
coming to know and foster a relationship with both God
and the world. As I discuss below, eschewing labels and
even denominational affiliation was de rigueur for some
staff, but if one label had any sticking power or appeal,
it was “evangelical.” There were three Roman Catholics
156
on staff whom I got to know, and they did not use this
label, but almost everyone else was comfortable with it,
and even the Catholics were happy to accept its general
applicability—in large part because many of the society’s
early 19th-century founders were pivotal figures in the
Evangelical Revival (see Ditchfield 1998). Even this label,
though, where appropriate, signified only a passionate love
of the Book, and, for many, being an “evangelical” in the
current stereotypical sense—knocking on doors, standing
on street corners—was unappealing. This was also a period
of time during which the U.S. president, George W. Bush,
stood for what it meant to be an evangelical Christian. This
made many of the staff at Bible Society uncomfortable, for
they saw him as too conservative.
Ecumenism has become an increasingly common
trend in many parts of England since the 1980s (Davie
1994:163–167), yet a large part of what has allowed such
a loose arrangement to work for Bible Society for over
200 years was a decision by the society’s founders to pro-
mote and provide the Bible “without note or comment.”
What one “hears” from the Bible, as staff might put it now,
is not tightly proscribed. While the staff are conscious that
“no comment” is a comment in itself and that it is impos-
sible to present a view from nowhere, the constitutional ar-
rangement functions remarkably well as an as-if state, such
that people with very different interpretive standpoints and
theological commitments can work side by side.
One of Luke’s first major tasks in the arts post was
to coordinate the 2006 Christmas decorations for the Pa-
rade, which the society was in the process of arranging with
Swindon Borough Council, the local government body. The
2005 Christmas ceremonies, which had just concluded, had
been dubbed the “Harry Potter Christmas,” complete with
a holiday visit from two members of the cast of Harry Pot-
ter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell 2005), who were on hand
to turn on Swindon’s Christmas lights the night before the
film’s national release. Luke had nothing against Harry Pot-
ter per se, but he did not see how the stories had any-
thing to do with Christmas, much less—as a Christian—
the most important part of Christmas. Luke wanted to do
better.
Not long before taking the Bible Society job, Luke,
who is an ordained Anglican priest (not a prerequisite for
the arts post), had been involved in arranging the annual
conference of the Fellowship for Parish Evangelists. At the
conference, two researchers, Yvonne Richmond and Steve
Hollinghurst, had presented some findings that caught
Luke’s attention: At the same time that most people look
down on religion, many also acknowledge the importance
of spirituality and, even, the existence of spiritual beings.
What the researchers emphasized, in particular, as Luke re-
called it for me, was what he described as “the spirituality of
angels in the common domain.” Angels, Luke got to think-
ing, can still capture the imagination. Angels can still inspire

a faith of sorts, even if the traditions in which they are found
do not.
Luke’s interest in the presentation by Richmond and
Hollinghurst can be related to academic debates in recent
years about shifts away from religion and toward spiritual-
ity. In Britain, one of these debates has taken shape around
the sociologist Grace Davie’s (1994) thesis on “believing
without belonging,” simply put, that even though church
affiliation and attendance levels are dropping, Britons
themselves are not necessarily becoming disenchanted—
that they still recognize, as Luke wanted to emphasize it,
a spiritual dimension to life. As other scholars of religion
in Britain have gone on to argue, people express their con-
nection to this dimension through more “individualistic”
rather than “institutional” channels. According to some
researchers, there is a “spiritual revolution” (Heelas and
Woodhead 2005) underway that is reconfiguring the tenor
and tone of religiosity.
Luke wanted in on any such revolution. As he stood
on the Parade in Swindon that cold, windy, winter day, the
point about angels and “spirituality in the common do-
main” hit home. Luke got his idea. For the Bible Society’s
Swindon Christmas, why not use angels rather than movie
stars to mark the celebrations? Why not create a spectacu-
lar display of angels flying in the wind above the Parade’s
shops? Angels in Swindon might be the perfect way for Luke
to reach the spiritual-but-not-religious public.
That Swindon Borough Council had gone with a Harry
Potter Christmas in 2005 was hardly surprising or shock-
ing to Luke, just as it would not have been to many other
Christians in England (and elsewhere), for whom the “true”
meaning of Christmas has long since been changed by
consumerism and other onslaughts of secular modernity.
Although 72 percent of people identified themselves as
Christian in the United Kingdom’s 2001 Census, some
Christians in England see themselves as a minority, some-
times even an embattled minority that faces “aggressive”
atheists and secularists.2 Among the staff at Bible Soci-
ety with whom I worked (as well as the many Christians
in church and para-church organizations, the media, and
charities whom I observed in the course of my research),
evidence for such aggression often comes in the form of
particular events reported in the news: an airline employee
forced to remove a cross necklace, a nurse reprimanded for
praying for a patient, and so on.
Alongside such specific cases, Christmas provides an
annual opportunity for reflection on the sense of embat-
tlement. In the run-up to Christmas in 2006, there was ca-
sual talk among staff at Bible House (the headquarters of
Bible Society) about a story that the Christmas holiday sea-
son was going to rebranded as “winterval.” One version or
another of this story seems to crop up in the news every
year, or at least circulates as rumor, and although the de-
tails are often vague, it feeds into staple preholiday moral
Angels in Swindon ! American Ethnologist
panics. In 2006 alone, plenty of other indicators of such
preseason moral panic were available to choose from, with
the Daily Mail (2006b) reporting that “only one in
100 Christmas cards sold in Britain contains any religious
imagery or message”; Gordon Brown, then chancellor of
the exchequer, criticizing a government-funded children’s
center in Sheffield for referring to a “winter celebration”
rather than “Christmas” in a newsletter (see Daily Mail
2006a); and the Very Revered Colin Slee, dean of Southwark
Cathedral, complaining about the “pathetic spinelessness”
of local government councils for “deleting Christmas from
their greeting cards and street decorations” (very much in
“threat of winterval” tradition; see Guardian 2006).
So part of what was appealing to Luke about the angels
idea was that it allowed Bible Society to meet the Harry Pot-
ter public on a conceptual middle ground. Angels, Luke sur-
mised, could be relatively easily fitted into the spiritual-but-
not-religious imagination. Moreover, as society staff have
long felt, there is no point shoving “religion” down peo-
ple’s throats. Even if most people are not part of an ag-
gressively atheist vanguard, the general populace is wary
about too much religion and does not like to be preached
at. The good thing about the angels, then, was that they
would not be preaching—in fact, they would keep their dis-
tance, high above the walkways of the Parade, fluttering in
the wind. This general approach was a good fit, as well, with
the society’s historical commitment to refrain from offering
“note or comment” when it came to how people should take
up the messages and meanings of Scripture. Luke thought
that the angels idea could probably work for the Borough
Council too; he suspected that the councilors would have
to be mindful, in this secularly sensitive age, of not coming
across as sanctioning a “Christian” project. The Christmas
angels would not be depictions of Gabriel delivering the
divine message to Mary, then. They would, rather, be just
angels. They would not force the local councilors to face up
to whether they were pathetically spineless.
So, indeed, the angels would not be part of any “pub-
lic religion.” But if their association would not be with
public religion, neither would it be with its assumed post-
Enlightenment opposite: “private religion.” Part of such a
suggestion, as I have highlighted, had to do with the ap-
peal to spirituality that the angels allowed. If the angels
were to work, Luke hoped they could do so on the basis
of tapping a spiritual channel among Swindon’s shoppers.
Just as much, though, it had to do with playing on the sen-
sual registers that often serve to confuse the coherence of
public–private divides. Luke wanted the angels to have a
material impact—to demand, in their physicality, a sensual
engagement with the shoppers of Swindon. Their presen-
tation was going to be something akin to a site-specific
art installation, incorporating the ambience of the Parade
and, in the process, challenging what the society per-
ceived to be the normative understanding of public–private
157
American Ethnologist ! Volume 39 Number 1 February 2012
distinctions. What Bible Society wanted to foster was an
ambient faith.
Ambience and the public–private
Bible Society’s effort to bring angels to Swindon allows for
the clarification of what might be called the “sensual” stakes
in long-standing debates about public and private religion.
These debates—and the very ideas of religion being pub-
lic or private in the first place—have their origins in sev-
eral sources: the interiorization of faith, often associated
with the Reformation (Asad 1993:27–54; Keane 2002; Taylor
2007:539–544); the emergence and codification of the dif-
ference between politics and religion, as understood in re-
lation to both church and Enlightenment narratives of sec-
ularization (Casanova 1994:11–39; Gauchet 1997:101–161);
and the increasingly common recognition, especially after
the Romantic age, of religion (and now spirituality) as about
feelings and immaterial truths not subject to institutional
arrangement or control (Bender 2010:1–20; Heelas 2008;
Taylor 2007:313–317). In just the brief introduction to the
angels project I have provided, it should not be difficult to
see how all three of these source traditions are relevant, re-
flecting back on Casanova’s observation with which I began.
Rather than rehearse these traditions further, however, in
this section I make the case for ambience as a helpful con-
cept for thinking through the issues each tradition raises. I
then return to my ethnography, drawing out the issues, first,
in relation to the angels in Swindon and, then, in relation to
another Bible Society project, called “Lyfe,” about promot-
ing Bible reading in such public places as coffee shops and
pubs.
Ambience is akin to what anthropologists have often
called “context,” which is itself indexed to the more gen-
eral notion of “culture,” but I want to distinguish ambi-
ence from context. For one thing, ambience often conveys
a more distinct sense of what is in the background, es-
pecially in acoustical terms. So, when one has a romantic
candlelit dinner, complete with violin music, one says the
ambience is right, not “the context is right.” Equally, it is
the ambience of a church—rather than the context—that
inspires a contemplative mood. Ambience is also more per-
tinent here than context because of the latter’s historical
association with matters of language. Whereas most anthro-
pologists will today talk about context as shaped by nondis-
cursive elements, the term has its roots in linguistics. And,
to be sure, this etymology is reflected in anthropology’s
epistemology, one in which the linguistic turn is often still
taken to the near exclusion of others, especially in semiotic
studies. My interest in ambience is part of a broader effort
to encourage attention to the sensual (Meyer 2006, 2009)
and material (Keane 2007) aspects of social analysis, espe-
cially when it comes to semiotic modalities and forms. The
question of the ambient background to any social situation,
158
cultural context, or historical current is not one that has re-
ceived much explicit attention from anthropologists, and
yet I argue here that ambience can be a helpful concept with
which to make sense of the ways in which religion can be
understood (and gets understood) as public or private.
Within Britain, the popular debate in recent years
about whether and to what extent religion should be public
or private, as well as what this means, has been framed in re-
lation to a remark made in 2003 by Alastair Campbell, Prime
Minister Tony Blair’s longtime spin doctor. What Campbell
said was, “We don’t do God.” The simple reading of this
statement is that political figures in Britain must work ac-
cording to a secular settlement in which faith remains pri-
vate. Alongside this general point, though, Campbell’s in-
tervention has other valences. By 2003, Campbell’s public
persona was that of a “devious high priest of spin,” and an
aggressive and bombastic one at that (Observer 2003). On
the occasion when he uttered the famous words about not
doing God, 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 relation-
ship with President Bush, with whom he was embarking on
a war in Iraq, that faith had become a particularly inter-
esting issue among what are often referred to in Britain as
the “chattering classes” (i.e., people who read Vanity Fair).
What was so remarked on at the time, and subsequently,
is that Campbell felt empowered—even compelled—to an-
swer on Blair’s behalf. Indeed, in one account of the ex-
change, Campbell is described as having “interrupted” the
prime minister (see, Daily Telegraph 2003). For the peo-
ple I know in Bible Society—and, indeed, a good number
of other Christians who participate in the public square—
Campbell’s attempt to keep religion “out of public” in this
memorable instance has served as a troublesome indica-
tion of just how influential a certain brand of the secular
settlement has become—a brand that is, like Campbell him-
self, understood to be rather pugnacious. And the declara-
tion was taken as relevant not only to politicians but also to
any other Christian who wanted to speak up or speak out.
The concern with controlling religion’s public presence
is also notable in non-Western national contexts where a
discourse of secular modernity has been particularly influ-
ential. Charles Hirschkind’s (2006) work in Cairo, Egypt, on
the circulation of audio cassette sermons is a good example
of this—and a good example of how ambience can be un-
derstood both as an aspect of social life and as an analytic
tool with which to make sense of publicity and privacy. As
an aspect of social life, cassette sermons help set the am-
bience of the Cairene streets; as Hirschkind tells readers at
various points in his book, it was sometimes difficult during
fieldwork to escape the sounds of sermonizing—the words
of preachers could seep out of various private or otherwise
nonpublic spaces and fill the air. State secular efforts to

render faith a private matter have been met by a robust
Islamic counterpublic discourse. There are, of course, many
aspects to Hirschkind’s case in showing this, but the point
I want to highlight here is that the ambient qualities of a
public—he calls it the “sensory environment” (2006:125)—
are indispensable to its constitution.3
Of recent anthropological work on conceptions of pub-
lic and private, Susan Gal’s (2002) on the semiotics of the
public–private distinction is particularly helpful for the
kinds of points I want to make (see also Tomlinson 2007).
Her basic argument is a simple one but often gets lost in the
objectivizing tendencies of social action and social analysis
alike: As Gal notes, public and private are relative and index-
ically linked terms. They are “dependent for part of their ref-
erential meaning on the interactional context in which they
are used” (2002:80). The distinction, then, is, as she puts
it, “fractal”—part of an internally recurrent pattern. One of
the examples she provides is the publicity and privacy of a
middle-class U.S. household. The house is a private space, a
family space, in contrast to the public space of the street, the
neighborhood, the town, and so on. Yet, within the house,
certain spaces are private, such as the bedroom, and certain
spaces are public, such as the living room. And yet, even
within public spaces like the living room privacy can be
created.
What I want to add here is a more explicit emphasis on
the extent to which sensuality can matter in the analysis of
publicity and privacy. Inasmuch as Gal takes her cues from
the semiotic models of Charles Sanders Peirce, this move to
the sensual is a natural consideration; more than any other
comparable figure, it was Peirce who insisted that a theory
of signs had to include attention to questions of history and
materiality (Engelke 2007:28–33; Irvine 1989; Keane 2007).
In this tradition, ambience can thus supplement a fractal
model of the public–private split, especially when the ma-
teriality of specific signs is integral to their effect, as I now
illustrate by turning to the angels in Swindon.
The angels
Luke needed two things to make his idea work: some an-
gels and some money to sponsor them. On the money front,
thus began a series of conversations with the council, local
businesses, the Swindon interfaith group, schools, and even
the Great Western Hospital that extended throughout most
of the calendar year. The council was open to the society’s
idea because it would not have to pay for the project; in-
deed, in the end, Bible Society covered the costs itself along
with support from several businesses, a primary school, and
the hospital. According to Luke, the interfaith group was
also very keen on the overall idea: One of the attractions of
angels, of course, is that they are common to many religious
traditions; in this sense, they successfully indexed an appeal
to something “spiritual” that Luke had hoped for. Moreover,
Angels in Swindon ! American Ethnologist
even though Christmas is a Christian holiday, representa-
tives from other faiths were firmly behind its promotion; as
far as they were concerned, any holiday or public project
that could be cast in faith terms was a good thing: no fans of
“winterval” among them.
Within the context of broader debates about religion
and multiculturalism in Britain, it is worth noting the in-
terfaith agreement on this occasion in Swindon, especially
in light of earlier points made about the self-perception
among some Christians that they are an embattled minor-
ity. To be sure, the sense of embattlement for Christians can-
not be reasonably compared with that felt by those of other
faiths in Britain, especially Islam; the claim that it might—
which has been increasingly made in recent years—has led
some prominent Christians in the public sphere, such as the
Times’s religion correspondent, to express a mixture of sur-
prise and shame.4 As in many other European contexts, the
idea of Britain as a “Christian nation” is prevalent among
some quarters of the far Right, and Islamophobia is a press-
ing issue (Bunzl 2007). At the same time, what Luke experi-
enced in Swindon is another part of the story, and an impor-
tant one to recognize. Interfaith dialogue in Britain is not as
strong as it might be; for Luke and many of his colleagues,
though, the hope is that it develops as ecumenism has since
the 1980s.
When it came to business sponsorship, representatives
to the interfaith group were less united. Some saw the com-
mercial side of Christmas as an inevitable component they
might as well work with, especially if it injected a sem-
blance of something spiritual back into the holiday. Oth-
ers expressed a concern that including businesses in the
sponsorship only fostered commercialization of what they
wanted to hold out—at least among themselves—as a sa-
cred commemoration. From the very start of the project,
then, Luke found himself walking a fine line between (for
lack of better terms) religion and the marketplace.
To design the angels, Luke approached Carl
Robertshaw, whose London-based company, Kite Related
Design, is one of the most respected in the business,
having produced kites and banners for such clients as the
pop star Björk and major London cultural venues such
as Somerset House. Robertshaw is not a Christian. This
did not matter as far as Luke and Bible Society were con-
cerned. In fact, Bible Society often seeks out relationships
with non-Christian and even more generally nonreligious
professionals because it wants to work with the best of
the best and not restrict itself to what some of the staff
refer to as “the Church ghetto” (organizations and indi-
viduals who cater specifically to Christian customers).
Working with “unchurched” people, as the staff refer to
non-Christians, is also seen as a good way to ensure their
projects are as accessible as possible; the society wants to
reach wide audiences and, sometimes, specifically non-
Christian audiences. Given that, in any case, the angels
159
American Ethnologist ! Volume 39 Number 1 February 2012

were supposed to be “spiritual,” Robertshaw’s profile was

perfect.
Luke met with Robertshaw to talk through some bib-
lical passages about angels, to give him a sense of what
the society was looking for. But they also spoke about an-
gels more generally, and it turned out Robertshaw had
an interest in the style of angels depicted in Japanese
manga (comics). It is from this genre that Robertshaw drew
inspiration for the Swindon kites. Discussions about the an-
gels project and the promotional materials that Bible So-
ciety produced almost always emphasized that the Swin-
don angels were inspired by a Japanese design, as it was
an excellent way of appealing to and even helping cre-
ate the “common domain” of which Luke spoke. I never
heard staff at the society relate much detail about manga;
the important point was that, coming from Japan, it was
clearly non-Christian and non-Western. However, to those
who knew something about the history of manga, the style’s
roots in the work of a 12th-century Buddhist monk (Allison
2006:52; Ito 2005:458) served to reinforce further the con-
ceptual point of the project’s generic spirituality. Manga is,
moreover, a style marked by its “plasticity” and a marriage
of “the mundane with the fantastic” (Allison 2006:53)—
exactly what angels perched above a shopping center in
a postindustrial English town were meant to invoke. What
Robertshaw came up with in the end was a pure white an-
gel, rather angular, with an overall wing span of four me-
ters. The society had 12 of these made and also produced
smaller versions that people could purchase and fly as kites
themselves.
The 12 showcase angels were a productive design for Figure 1. One of the angels, by night. All photos courtesy of Bible Society.
the space of the Parade. The fabrics that Robertshaw used
combined the senses of strong-and-stiff and light-and-
flexible to good effect, with the Swindon wind that had so One Wednesday morning in September 2006, at an all-
struck Luke—both literally and figuratively—becoming in- staff meeting at Bible House, Luke gave an update on the an-
tegral to the angels’ effect (although a few of the angels were gels project. Staff meetings always involve showcasing peo-
located inside part of the shopping center).5 Like the sails ple’s work for the society, because not everyone knows what
on a ship, the angels could also convey a paradoxical mix of everyone else is up to. Luke was, as I often found, an upbeat
movement and groundedness. The whiteness of the angels and compelling speaker, and it was clear that he had cap-
was likewise motivated, being both meaningful (certainly in tured the attention of his colleagues—all the more so, I sus-
Christian traditions) and unmemorable (in the sense that pect, because he was talking about something that would
the viewer is more likely to remember, say, hot pink). In a be happening in Swindon, and so most of the staff could
similar way, the genericness of the angels’ anthropocentric take advantage of it as Christian–consumer citizens. Luke
form—no marks on the bodies, no facial features—provided began by telling everyone how important it had been to
an open invitation to the onlooker to fill in the blank, to him to make use of the local environment—to incorporate
appropriate the object into one’s own life or story. Or not. that strong, cold wind he had felt on his first visit to the Pa-
As objects, then, the angels were semiotic bundles of de- rade some eight months before. The angels were going to
termined underdeterminedness. As emplaced objects, they be “quite physical,” he said—sensual art that played on the
were meant to be ambient actors yet, again, hard to pin surroundings. Luke also expressed his hope that the angels
down. What was at work here? Kite? Wind? Maybe some- might instill some “civic pride.” Swindon has a reputation
thing more? Maybe the spirit of Christmas; maybe an angel? in Britain as a “national laughingstock” and suffers an “un-
These were the kinds of questions and associations Luke fair share of slurs and sneers.”6 As Luke put it, perhaps the
hoped to provoke. society’s angels could be “angels of the south”—a reference

160

to the sculptor Antony Gormley’s famous installation “An-
gel of the North,” which sits atop a hill overlooking the town
of Gateshead, the A1 (the major north–south road that runs
near it), and the east-coast rail line (which runs between
London and Edinburgh). In the eyes of many commenta-
tors, Gormley’s Angel had come to stand for Gateshead’s
economic and cultural regeneration in the late 1990s, a sign
of public art’s ability to stir the spirit of capitalism. The
Angel also gave Gateshead and the north a sense of re-
spectability, for that region too has been laughed at in the
past. As the Guardian (2008) editorialized, “Whether viewed
as a spiritually uplifting icon or a phoenix rising from the
ashes of the abandoned coal mine beneath it, the Angel of
the North has been a joyous addition to the northern land-
scape.” Going on in this vein, the Guardian emphasized
how, after the Angel’s arrival, Gateshead was the beneficiary
of much else besides—not least, readers are informed, “a
fine restaurant.”
There had been some contention, Luke went on to
tell his colleagues, about how the project was being “mes-
saged.” The borough council had proposed calling the dis-
play “Swindon’s Mythical Christmas,” said Luke, in a delib-
erate tone of disappointment. A wave of sympathetic sighs
rolled through the room: Ooh, that wouldn’t do. The society
needs to build relationships in the wider community, but
it ought not surrender principles; implying that angels are
“mythical” would be implying that they are make-believe
and might end up serving as fodder for the aggressive sec-
ularists and atheists out there.7 So Luke pushed back a bit
and was able to get the council to agree to call the project
“Swindon’s Angelic Christmas.”
The messaging also involved designing posters to pro-
mote the project, and, on this front, the society wanted to
keep a bit closer to its biblical focus. The first suggested
text for the poster was “Good News! Hope!” Very biblical,
indeed. But the council did not like this. “The secular au-
thorities want to reduce everything to a muddle to not of-
fend anyone,” as Luke put it on another occasion—a “Bible
and Culture” seminar held in Swindon just a few weeks be-
fore Christmas Day. “‘We don’t do religion,’” Luke said, af-
fecting the voice of one of the local councilors with whom
he had worked and invoking the figure and language of
Campbell. “That’s the extreme secular line,” Luke contin-
ued, switching back to speaking as himself: “Their religion
is no religion.” All the same, of course, he went on, the so-
ciety did not want to “do religion.” That is not what an-
gels are about. But in the context of the Bible and Cul-
ture seminar, Luke could speak freely to the audience of
visitors (mostly from Scandinavia, on this occasion) about
the tension the council’s attitude created for him and his
colleagues.
At this point it is helpful to clarify the ways in which
Luke and other staff at Bible Society use the term secular.
In the December 2006 seminar, Luke was appealing to two
Angels in Swindon ! American Ethnologist
meanings of the term, meanings that are often entangled
and left purposefully so. In one sense, referring to “secular
authorities” meant simply those who work in government
roles, not church roles. Any individual person who is a sec-
ular authority might well have “private” or “personal” re-
ligious commitments but is expected to keep these sepa-
rate from the work of the state—to maintain the sense of
differentiation that is central to the normative version of a
post-Enlightenment political settlement (Casanova 1994:5).
The secular, in this sense, is cast as a kind of political and
social neutrality, and the chief commitment is to notions
of tolerance, fairness, and equality of access and opportu-
nity. In another sense, though, secular serves many of the
Christians in Bible Society (and, indeed, more widely, on
the basis of what I observed during my fieldwork) as a code
word for “antireligious” and thus invokes the figure of the
aggressor to whom I have referred at several points. The sec-
ular in this sense is not a neutral descriptive but part of an
ideological agenda—a secularist position that is perceived
as hostile to the very existence of faith. In this second use, a
secularist is presumed to be an atheist as well—and an an-
titheist atheist at that.
It is important not to conclude that secular is a bad
word for the staff at Bible Society—something to revile and
resist in favor of such presumed opposites as religion, spir-
ituality, or the sacred (see Engelke 2010). Indeed, Luke and
his colleagues often embrace what they perceive to be sec-
ular; moreover, as I go on to discuss, references to religion
can, in some contexts, invite opprobrium, for not all staff
are entirely happy with that term either.
In this sense, and despite the initial impulse to tag the
promotional posters for the angels with “purely” biblical
language, the council’s unease with the line “Good News!
Hope!” turned out to be unintentionally helpful. The coun-
cil had been quite right to want to tone the “religion” down.
The poster ended up with a more appropriate amalgama-
tion of old and new, sacred and secular. The text read: “The
Angel Said Unto Them: Don’t Worry, Be Happy!” Here, the
King James Bible—“And the angel said unto them, Fear not:
for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall
be to all people” (Luke 2:10)—meets Bobby McFerrin (1988):
“Here is a little song I wrote / You might want to sing it note
for note / Don’t worry, be happy / In every life we have some
trouble / When you worry you make it double / Don’t worry,
be happy.”8
Several months after Christmas 2006, Luke and I sat
down for an interview in one of the small meeting rooms
at Bible House to reflect on the angels project, now that
it was over. I asked Luke what he had hoped the project
would provoke. What kind of question did he want Christ-
mas shoppers to have asked? “Gosh, is the Christmas story
a spiritual one?” he replied. “Or, is the Bible a spiritual
story?” It was pretty basic, then, I said. “Totally basic,” he
confirmed:
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Really way back there, I think. I didn’t have great

hopes that they would wander along and suddenly
fall on their knees and go, “Oh yes, angels: they must
be all around me.” . . . It was as basic as that. And it
goes back to the insight that Yvonne Richmond and
Steve Hollinghurst had had—that there was something
deeply spiritual in the recognition that there are spiri-
tual beings. And therefore, where can we build bridges?
. . . I was trying to be in the place with the person who
hasn’t considered a spiritual dimension to life, [yet]
who is, apparently, quite spiritual . . . I’m trying to earth
it, make it very real, very tangible. So, the angels weren’t
effete or ethereal. They were quite tough images; they
were angular. They give a great sense of speed when
they’re turning in the wind, they were really quite vig-
orous and active—living.

If the angels and the promotional posters were not

meant to be too in-your-face—determinedly underdeter-
mined, as I put it above—there were still ways in which the
society wanted to push the envelope of what to expect. Per-
haps their most provocative idea was to have the angels
mounted as if they were heading to the end of the shop-
ping Parade, where the public toilets are located. The so-
ciety wanted to put up a nativity scene at the toilets, mak-
ing the point that, when Jesus came, he came not to the
center of society but the margins. As best the Bible Society
could figure, a public toilet in Swindon was the modern-day
equivalent of a manger in Bethlehem. The borough council
would not go for this at all, much to the amusement and
annoyance of Luke and his colleagues. Luke’s immediate
boss, Ann Holt, who runs the society’s Bible Advocacy Team Figure 2. An angel in the mall.
(more on which below), was particularly exercised. The na-
tivity itself was not the problem; what the council said
was that putting a nativity so close to the toilets might be Reception of the angels in Swindon was mixed, in
offensive to Christians. But here they were, of course, as Luke’s view, and in our interview he was eager to stress it
I was told again and again, telling this to an organization was his first major project in the arts job. There were in-
of Christians. Luke, Ann, and others cast this as evidence deed no people dropping to their knees and praising the
of political correctness gone mad and of the knots that a angels around them, as predicted. At the same time, the
“secular authority” committed to “neutrality” can tie itself angels got a bigger holiday crowd than the stars of Harry
up in. Potter had the year before: over 1,000 people turned out for
All the same, and incredulity aside, the society knew the town-center launch event in 2006. There was no evi-
such a move would be offensive to some Christians. That dence from the merchants that business had picked up be-
is precisely why they wanted to do it. Indeed, the staff at cause of an angelic presence, although here too Luke never
Bible Society are often more vexed by their brothers and seriously thought the angels could lead to that. “There are
sisters in faith than by the unchurched public; these fel- many more things,” he said, “like mortgage rates, interest
lows, the staff feel, often need some shaking up—some rates, and the state of the economy that build traffic into
prompts to connect with the more uncomfortable aspects shops at Christmas time.”
of the Gospel message (and even, as I come to below, The angels did make it into the regional news. BBC
to connect with any aspects of the Gospel whatsoever). Wiltshire featured a slide show of pictures of the angels
As one member of the staff often told me, the society on its “Wiltshire Life” website and moderated a com-
wants to cause “good trouble” for Christians. Ironically, per- ment board. There were 13 posts by 12 people, eight of
haps, the council was fulfilling its mandate for tolerance whom could be said to have been positive, and of the four
on the streets: The Parade needed to remain a “neutral” who were negative, two berated the council for what they
space. assumed was its frittering away of money, and another

162

criticized Swindon in general for trying to be “cultured,”
playing quite deliberately on the town’s abject image. There
was only one negative comment about the angels them-
selves: one man thought they looked like the prototype for
a new version of the Concorde. For him, it seems, they were
perhaps too underdetermined as signs, calling to mind not
heaven but what many Britons consider its hellish inverse:
Heathrow Airport.
Two of the positive reactions on the BBC Wiltshire web-
site stand out in relation to my argument about ambience.
One person, identified as Steve, wrote, “I think they are
beautiful! A real change to the normal lights and a won-
derful change to the environment. My 4 year-old was fas-
cinated by them!” And another, identified as Amanda Hull,
wrote, “I passed one on the street today and it was swaying
in the wind beautifully—what a clever idea! Well done Bible
Society and Mr Robertshaw.”
What interests me in these comments, and gave some
encouragement to the society, is the hint of the angels’ am-
bient effect—the extent to which their physicality and sen-
suality became affective. The Christmas season, of course,
is often drenched with mood. The Christmas season is pro-
duced through ambient media—the music in stores and
piped into the streets, the lights, the decorations. Indeed,
certainly in a place like England, Christmas is arguably the
single most effective day of the year for driving home the
power and importance of ambience. The angels, swaying in
the wind, producing a great sense of speed, were being put
forward as indexes of ambient faith—a sensual invitation to
“do spiritual.”
It is not enough to conclude, however, that the angels
were successfully ambient on the basis of a few comments
on a website forum. And I found it unproductive, stand-
ing out on the Parade, to ask passersby what they thought,
as calling attention to an ambient effect is a surefire way
of dispelling it. Ambience is successful mostly in this con-
text through its nonrecognition. And yet the success of this
project is, it ought to go without saying, somewhat beside
the point. I am not arguing on the basis of results but, rather,
intention.
Bible Advocacy and Lyfe: “Getting it out in
public”
Luke’s effort to bring angels to Swindon is part of a larger
program at Bible Society known as Bible Advocacy. To help
further situate his work, and transition to my second main
example of how ambient faith is envisioned and enacted, it
is useful to say more about Bible Advocacy.
A major part of Bible Advocacy is about getting the so-
called unchurched person to take a second look at faith is-
sues, especially as found in and through the Bible. It is not
supposed to be about proselytizing. Indeed, the society of-
ten goes to some length to message the Bible as a source
Angels in Swindon ! American Ethnologist
of inspiration and ideas that are not necessarily tied to the
Gospel—a good book, rather than the Good Book, if you
will. For the angels project, as I have shown, this involved
meeting the shopping public on what Luke hoped to be
a spiritual middle ground—trying to entice this public, in
a roundabout way, to make links between the angel kites
swaying in the air and their own nascent or florescent faith
in spirits. As he explained it to me, Luke sees his particular
part of Bible Advocacy as “working alongside those in the
visual arts—both of faith and no faith—to see the Bible as
a place of inspiration for creativity and communication.” If
Bible Advocacy is successful, it will effect a shift in what the
society understands to be widespread attitudes toward the
Bible as irrelevant, out of date, or the preserve of “fanati-
cal” Christians who spend most of their time telling other
people what they should or should not be doing. This is part
of why Luke and his colleagues came around to the idea of
referencing Bobby McFerrin in the angels poster: It was an
injection of contemporaneity and a helpful push from the
“secular authorities.”
The perceived need for Bible advocacy of this sort is
relatively new to the agenda of Bible Society. For much of
its 200-year history, the society focused on printing Bibles
and selling them at heavily subsidized prices, made pos-
sible by charitable subventions. Throughout the Victorian
era, this was often complemented by funding large-scale
translation projects; the society spread with the empire.9
In its domestic market, which covers England and Wales,
the society does similar things, albeit under very different
circumstances than are found in, say, Ethiopia. The main
difference between the work in England and Wales and the
international work is that, in the domestic market, the big
problem the society perceives is the lack of any real de-
sire to read the Bible in the first place. This perception
is reinforced by the unfamiliarity of the society itself to
the general public and its uneven recognition within the
churches. The society’s patron is the queen, but this re-
flects its onetime standing more than its contemporary
position.
Bible Advocacy is a strategy for sparking or resparking
an appreciation of the Bible within England and Wales. It is
not a sales technique; success is not understood in terms
of the trading arm’s balance sheets. Staff on the Bible Ad-
vocacy Team do not want people to go out and buy Bibles:
They want people to open the copies they have, handed
down from their grandparents or kept from a religious ed-
ucation class in school.
In addition to Luke’s work in the arts world, the Advo-
cacy Team includes a media officer, who liaises with jour-
nalists in an effort to get the Bible good press, and a par-
liamentary liaison officer, who works with MPs and others
in Westminster in an effort to support a place for faith in
public service (pace Campbell’s diktat). In 2006, the society
also founded Theos, which it tags as “the Public Theology
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American Ethnologist ! Volume 39 Number 1 February 2012
Think Tank,” whose small, London-based staff produce and
commission both polemical and research-based pieces on
politics and current events. All of these team members fo-
cus at least in part on the unchurched public and “public
square.” As with Luke’s angels project, some of what they do
has only oblique or partial connection to the biblical text.
Some of their projects are also about the production of am-
bient faith—a background effect that can be engaged with
or go unconsidered by turn.10
The team does more than ambient work. Not every
project is about a background effect. One of Luke’s other
projects, for example, was running a short film competition,
“Big Story, Little Film,” in which amateurs were asked to
relate a story from the Bible in five minutes. The film com-
petition was about sensuality, reinforcing the society’s com-
mitment to moving beyond the text. But it was not about
ambience; here, the Bible was the central focus of attention.
“Big Story, Little Film” was different as well in that it
focused more specifically on Christians and Christian au-
diences. (The winning entry was a Lego animation, “Jesus
Calms the Storm,” produced by a father and his primary-
school-age son, with the boy reading the text from Mark
4:35–41.) Most of this work is straightforwardly connected
to the Bible. It is to one of Luke’s colleagues, and the work
he has been doing in this vein to promote Bible reading “in
public,” that I now turn in an effort to round out an under-
standing of ambience as both a social concern and analytic
tool. I have chosen this second extended example because
of how it both reinforces and resituates the conceptual
issues raised thus far.
Rob Hare was hired by Bible Society to develop Lyfe
(short for Life, your faith encounters), a project aimed at
getting Christians to start Bible reading groups with their
friends and colleagues. As mentioned in passing in relation
to the nativity scene that Luke and Ann Holt had pushed
for in Swindon, one of the perceptions within Bible So-
ciety is that, even as the unchurched public needs en-
couragement to engage the Bible, many Christians do too.
Bible Advocacy is thus also about building confidence in
Christians who might feel intimidated about reading the
Bible for themselves.
Lyfe is run virtually: Anyone can register on the website
and download the materials themselves as PDF files, which
are organized around particular themes (hope, money, jus-
tice, etc.) and related to a set of passages from both tes-
taments. Rob does give presentations on Lyfe to churches
and at Christian festivals, but the society’s hope is that the
project will spread virally. Lyfe is not pitched as a “Bible
study,” which, the staff think, would come across as too in-
timidating and formal. But there is one aspect of the pro-
gram that Rob and his colleagues realize may be intimidat-
ing: When the society has its way, Lyfe groups meet not in
church halls or people’s living rooms but in local pubs and
coffee shops. Lyfe is supposed to be “public” in this sense,
164
Figure 3. Getting it out in public! A Lyfe promotional shot, here in a pub
rather than a café.
and, as I now suggest, is supposed to help set the ambience
of the public square—to be literally part of the “background
noise” of daily life. As Rob put it to me, “I mean, that is a
huge leap. When I talk to people about Lyfe and they go, ‘Oh,
we have to go to Starbucks?’ I say, ‘Yeah, go to Starbucks. Get
this thing we call the Bible. Get our Christian faith outside
of our comfortable homes and go somewhere public.’”
To encourage this “leap,” Bible Society has produced
a short promotional video about Lyfe, which Rob shows to
various church groups and which can be played on Lyfe’s
web and Facebook pages. The video opens with catchy
music (modern, upbeat), carried throughout, before cut-
ting to a statement that flashes up against a white back-
ground: “WE USED TO HIDE IT.” Then the video cuts to a young
woman. “I have to say sometimes I feel quite embarrassed,”
she says, hand on chest. Then back to another statement:
“WE USED TO BE ASHAMED OF IT.” Then another woman: “It’s
open in my handbag and you can’t tell what it is,” she says,
hands on her Bible, which flops open easily from so much
use. “BUT NOW WE’RE GETTING IT OUT IN PUBLIC,” flashes the
next message, and then the video cuts to footage of a cof-
fee shop. “Aw, shucks,” says the second woman in a voice-
over, “if it can’t happen in Café Nero, then where’s it gonna
happen?” (Café Nero is an Italian-style coffee-shop chain in
Britain.) More messages appear: “SHARING IT WITH OTHERS.”
“ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, ANYHOW.” “What’s great about being in
a pub is, it’s a relaxed atmosphere,” says one man. Another
message: “UNLEASHING ITS POWER.” “It’s saying that the Word
of God is relevant irrespective of where we are,” says an-
other man. “Bookshop, pub, someone’s kitchen table, wher-
ever it might be,” says a third man. “You and your mates in a
normal setting,” he later adds. “It starts conversations with
people sometimes. That’s a bit surprising. You’re in a pub
with a Bible. I mean, [someone asks] ‘Jesus didn’t drink, did
he?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, of course, yes, he did.’” “It doesn’t
feel like doing church or doing religion.”

In just under four minutes, this promotional video aims
to convey a sense of understanding the embarrassment that
Christians might feel about “being Christian” in public—
especially about reading the Bible. By playing on a language
with sexual undertones, complete with a transgressive sug-
gestion of “getting it out in public,” the society is situating
the Bible at the heart of debates about public mores and
manners. Is this something that should take place outside
the home? Simultaneously, the video provides reflections
from Lyfe participants who can attest to the program’s value.
The comments throughout by Lyfe participants first rein-
force and then challenge what is perceived to constitute a
“normal setting” for engaging with Scripture: the privacy, as
nested fractally within this instance, of one’s church life. In
the process, they testify to the potential for both outreach—
“it starts conversations”—and an inner experience of faith
and what it should be—“it doesn’t feel like doing church or
doing religion.”
During the spring of 2008, I joined Rob’s Lyfe group,
which he ran with some friends from the Baptist church he
attended in suburban Surrey. Dutifully, we met not in the
church hall but in a nearby Café Nero. Sometimes my fel-
low group members brought a pocket Bible, but more often
than not we worked from nondescript PDF printouts. Each
Tuesday afternoon at 2 p.m., we gathered in the café’s spa-
cious seating area, settling into the fake leather armchairs.
There were usually four or five of us, and we met for about
an hour, competing for space with young mothers meeting
up for chats and the occasional pair or trio of office work-
ers on a late lunch or early afternoon break. As in many
such situations—when one is asked to put one’s thoughts
on the line, in front of others—the sessions began some-
what slowly. No one ever wanted to be the first to speak up
on whatever theme we were addressing, and we only eased
into discussion of the Lyfe materials after casual chitchat.
But, eventually, everyone unwound, and some quite ani-
mated discussions could ensue. It did not happen on ev-
ery occasion, but there were at least regular moments when
the conversations went above the decibel level normally
deemed appropriate by the English—and especially the
English of a well-heeled county such as Surrey. Again, the
details of these conversations are not central here; what I
want to remark on is the sense in which the awkwardness
of the whole exercise slowly transformed itself into a “joyful
noise” of sorts—not the noise of song as expressed in Psalm
100, from which the phrase comes, but a heartfelt exchange
that helped shape the ambience of the café floor. If we were
not quite reconstituting the public sphere that emerged
out of London’s coffee houses in the 18th century (see
Habermas 1989:27–42), we were nevertheless, in our own,
ambient way, “getting it out in public.” No one from nearby
tables ever stopped what they were doing to ask us what
kind of coffee Jesus drank, but we were an undoubted sen-
sual presence that, for the members of the group, served as
an important sign of faith and act of public engagement.
Angels in Swindon ! American Ethnologist
As in the angels project, the production of ambient
faith in a Lyfe group depends on at least two refusals: the
refusal to accept the distinction between public and pri-
vate when applied to religion and the refusal to be satisfied
with the very idea of “religion” itself. In many ways the argu-
ment about public and private here simply reinforces what
I considered in relation to the angels project: Ambience be-
comes a way of undercutting the distinction between them,
of, in the Lyfe case, allowing for the possibility of a “private”
conversation to be overheard. Not unlike what Hirschkind
(2006:125–128) found in Cairo, here a “public noise” of faith
can sometimes push, or be pushed, to the foreground.
In Lyfe, however, the paradoxical way in which this “re-
fusal” becomes possible is better evident than in the an-
gels project: Bible Society undercuts one normative public–
private contract (the religious one) by undertaking another
(the commercial one). Getting it out in public is made pos-
sible, in other words, as much by the cappuccino on the ta-
ble as by the Bible or piece of paper in one’s hand. What
the cappuccino stands for is the commercial transaction
that has taken place between the store and the customer.
Lyfe members, are, in effect, buying the right to subvert the
public–private iteration of religion, but only by acknowledg-
ing that Café Nero constitutes a public space for its paying
customers. It is, in this sense, the kind of private public-
ity that does not obtain in the space of a shopping mall or
high street. As can now be further appreciated, it matters
that the angels were not mounted in the Parade’s shops but,
rather, in the more public spaces that connected them. All
the same, there is a difference between the joyful noise of
Lyfe and that of, say, Cairo’s streets. It goes back to some-
thing of the theological commitment that undergirds the
society’s historically important theological “no comment.”
In both the Parade and the coffee shop or pub, it is up to
the other—pedestrian or patron—to engage. On the basis
of what Hirschkind describes, that engagement is often not
negotiable. Bible Society does not do megaphoned mes-
sages, and that matters in terms of how the link between
sensuality and faith gets cast.
There is one more comparison to draw. For Luke, the
refusal of religion played out in the main by his appeal to
a broader discourse on the spiritual; in Lyfe, the intention
is somewhat different and best captured in one of the final
remarks in the promotional video, emphasized above in my
reading of what I called the “inner experience” of partici-
pants: “It doesn’t feel like doing church or doing religion.”
For many of the Christians who work for Bible Society, or
involve themselves in Bible Society projects, the very idea
of “religion” itself is, indeed, often spoken of as an impo-
sition. For the members of Rob’s Lyfe group, for instance,
participation was not about being “religious” or “spiritual”
at all; they spoke about what they were doing as “biblical”
and “Christian.” Staff at the society often spoke in this way
too, especially when I tried to frame questions in relation
to “religion.” Recall here as well that staff often express an
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ambivalence toward the church, at least part of which needs
to be understood in light of this reluctance to support “insti-
tutional religion.” Many staff, in fact, are influenced by fig-
ures in the “Emerging Church” movement, which places a
strong emphasis on postinstitutional modes of sociality and
in which the very kind of small-group, nonhierarchical in-
teractions encouraged by Lyfe become the norm.11 “I mean,
I would love for there to be an established church that was
of some use,” one staff member once said to me. “And if I
thought for a moment that I could influence it to be that, I
would go.” In the meantime, she never went to services, and
did not belong to a church. On Sunday mornings she stayed
in bed, at most switching on the radio to have a church
service playing in the background.
Conclusion
Gal emphasizes that every recalibration of the public and
private is something new: You cannot transpose their
relation from one scale to another and preserve their mean-
ings in every respect. Although a dichotomy, then, “the
semiotic logic forms a scaffolding for possibilities of em-
bedding and thus for change, creativity and argument” (Gal
2002:85). Thus, combining a concern for the structural with
the historical, Gal refers to her position as metastructural:
“an attempt to sketch the semiotic conditions for making
a structuralist argument” (2002: 92, n. 2). And yet, for all
the dynamism in a fractal semiotic model—for all the pos-
sible changes it allows—even a metastructural position is,
by definition, grounded in a certain immutability of the
terms. It suggests that change can never be total. When
all is said and done, one is still talking about public and
private.
It is here that the Bible Society’s strategy of “public en-
gagement,” in which a harnessing of the ambient plays a
key role, can serve as an illustrative case for the analyst. It
is here that a metastructuralist semiotics benefits from at-
tention to materiality and sensuality, because the produc-
tion of ambient faith is not only an effort to foster change,
creativity, and argument in relation to the public–private
distinction: It is about obviating the need for such a dis-
tinction altogether. What the society’s staff would like is for
Christianity to be above qualification—they wish for a world
in which there is nothing to be gained by referring to re-
ligion as public or private in the first place. This is the
kind of public religion, in other words, that offers “coun-
terfactual normative critiques of dominant historical trends
. . . by crossing boundaries [and] by raising questions pub-
licly about the autonomous pretensions of the differenti-
ated spheres” (Casanova 1994:43).
Secularization as a theory of differentiation is primar-
ily told as a story of the separation of religion from politics.
I have considered in this article how that differentiation is
brought about by a further nesting of differentiations—of
166
public and private. Another kind of study might well high-
light others: faith–knowledge, passion–reason, and more.
In the examples of Bible Society projects presented here,
this master story of differentiation is very much part of the
background—a kind of conceptual ambience in itself. What
this background provides is a way to foreground another el-
ement of the story, however. For, one thing that the society’s
projects make clear is that questions of public religion are
also often questions of religion’s publicity—of its manifesta-
tions not in politics per se but, rather, the market. As shown
in other studies of religion and modernity, not least those
that focus on shifts to “spirituality” (Bender 2010; Carrette
and King 2005; Heelas 2008), the market square becomes
as important as the public square for articulating positions
on public–private divides (see also Casanova 1994:63–65).
The Bible Society’s focus on Christmas, on a shopping mall,
and on coffee shop chains is not a contingent choice of sea-
sons and sites through which to advance its agendas. By
way of conclusion, then, it might be productive to move the
discussion beyond a focus on religious projects to sug-
gest how an interest in ambience has been taken up
elsewhere.
In 1978, Brian Eno released his path-breaking record,
Music for Airports. This was the first self-consciously pro-
duced “ambient music”; the term itself was coined by Eno.
His motivation was to counter what he saw as the leveling
effects of the by-then ubiquitous muzak, which he defined
as “familiar tunes arranged in a lightweight and derivative
manner” (Eno 1978). Rather than beginning with mass pro-
duction, then, and making an environment fit the product,
Eno wanted to turn things around, to celebrate the speci-
ficities of a space and time—or, as he put it, “acoustic and
atmospheric idiosyncrasies.” Such site-specific composi-
tions should contain within themselves a whole series of
possible levels of engagement. At its best, ambient music
should be capable both of stirring thought and sweeping
it away: “It must be as ignorable as it is interesting” (Eno
1978).
There is a danger in Eno’s approach of making a mis-
take highlighted by Walter Benjamin (1968): insisting on the
connection between an original work of art and its aura.
There is nothing inherent in muzak that prevents it from
being “interesting.” And the more general point that any
music can be ambient music also holds, at least in what
might be called a weak sense of the term. If music is part
of the background noise, it is ambient. What this highlights
is how, for Eno, ambient music in his sense of the term—the
“strong” sense, if you will—is an intentional creation. It is
supposed to be in the background, created as such. If this
is the case, ambient music also relies on a paradox, for it
is intentionally nonintentional. What it “does” to or for the
listener is supposed to be up to the listener. It tries to be
nothing or, perhaps more accurately, anything. Eno’s mu-
sic, then, also raises important questions about the extent

to which a sensual form can be intentionally produced—
or controlled. Likewise, ambient music can also be related
back to Gal’s model of public and private as nested and frac-
tal. For one function of ambient music, whether in the weak
or strong sense, is to allow people to have privacy in public.
Eno’s ambient projects are a critique of music’s mar-
ketization, its mass commodification. Yet is should proba-
bly come as no surprise that the concept of “ambience” has
been equally well harnessed by those who want to extend,
rather than restrict, the reach of the market. The emergence
of what is known as ambient media advertising demon-
strates this extension.
In the context of advertising, ambient media refers to
the promotion of a product in site- and material-specific
forms, most of which will never have been previously rec-
ognized as appropriate spaces for advertising purposes. So
this promotion is “ambient” because it foregrounds what
would normally be understood as the background to a tra-
ditional advertising space or medium. If one thinks of the
cars and taxis passing a billboard on the road as part of the
expected “background” to the context of “billboard adver-
tising,” then taxis that are painted with ads, or as ads, can
be understood as ambient media.
Most people are now so used to taxis-as-ads that the
ambient move will have lost its intended effect, which is
to prompt a kind of figure–ground reversal that challenges
understandings of the organization of public space. Even
though, these days, taxis may not be particularly controver-
sial platforms, it is not unusual for forms of ambient adver-
tising to cause a stir and, in some cases, disapproval. One
campaign that generated ire was the decision of the CBS
television network to promote its programs on the shells of
35 million eggs (New York Times 2006). Most of the ads were
pitched as puns, as in a “hard-boiled drama,” “leave the
yokes to us,” and so forth. Disagreement over this campaign
hinged in part on whether and to what extent this should
be seen as an invasion of privacy—a battle cry of “Eggs are
not public!” Of course the specificity of the product and its
packaging was itself an intentional provocation, because,
before buying eggs, people open the cartons to make sure
they are not broken. The consumer thus becomes impli-
cated in the process of bringing the ad concept to fruition,
and much was also made about breakfast time becoming a
commercial event. Such implications are also pronounced
in ambient media campaigns in which potential consumers
are interpolated into the ads themselves—when one’s body
becomes part of the media message. One increasingly com-
mon ad type in London, for example (and likely elsewhere),
has been to emplace headless bodies on the sides of buses,
such that the heads of actual passengers complete an ad-
vertisement image. Another is to incorporate a mirror into
an ad so that someone’s reflection becomes part of the ad.
These ambient campaigns are a metacomment on what
viewers already know, which is that the market is mount-
Angels in Swindon ! American Ethnologist
ing a major challenge to the subject–object distinction—yet
another fractal at work.
These two brief examples of ambient music and ambi-
ent media are only indicative. But I hope they are enough
to highlight that the question of “differentiation” stands at
the heart of a range of contemporary projects and concerns
with the constitution of public–private divides. “Ambience”
is a useful mediating concept in these various projects, a
way of challenging the sufficiency or aptness of a fractal.
Throughout this article, I have suggested how the sense
of ambience gets imagined as the background for a fractally
recursive conception of publicity and privacy in the work of
one Christian organization. As I hope to have shown, Bible
Society’s appeal to ambience can be good to think. With a
sensual semiotics, scholars can better understand, and even
push beyond, both the metastructure and metaphysics of
the public–private distinction. The society’s ambient faith
is supposed to be “interesting,” as Eno might have it. Yet,
as I have also suggested, by linking this move to longer-
term commitments to producing and circulating texts as if
“without comment,” the potential to be interesting is de-
pendent on what Eno might also recognize as the potential
to be ignored. The theology behind the society’s not having
a theology hinges on choice, a value central to the mind-
set of the marketeer and evangelical alike. What is being
played out here, through the ambient, is a tension between
the material, as a bathos of modernity, and the spiritual, as
an equally modern lure.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Research for this article was funded by a New
Researcher Award from the Annual Fund of the London School
of Economics and the Suntory and Toyota Centres for Economics
and Related Disciplines (STICERD) as well as a British Academy
Small Research Grant (SG-47097). A version was first delivered as
a keynote to a workshop on the Anthropology of Christianity at
the University of Copenhagen in April 2009 and subsequently to
the Porticus Foundation Global Seminar on Religion, Media, and
Culture in Accra, Ghana, as well as at Durham University, Birk-
beck College, the University of Virginia, and Cornell University. I
would like to thank the organizers and participants in these venues
for feedback on those occasions, including particular comments
from Andreas Bandak, Jonas Adelin Jørgensen, Anthony Shenoda,
Birgit Meyer, David Howes, Michael Carrithers, Gordon Lynch,
Magnus Fiskesjö, Terence Turner, Susan McKinnon, and Eve
Danziger. Above all I would like to thank Bible Society for hosting
my research and, for their comments, Luke Walton, Rob Hare, and
the anonymous peer reviewers.
1. My fieldwork on Bible Society ran from July 2006 to
December 2009. I conducted an institutional ethnography, with a
focus on particular individuals and projects. Other than the revela-
tory moment Luke experienced on Swindon’s shopping Parade—
which happened before I arrived and is based on his account
to me—I collected the material on his project by following him
in his weekly work routine, much of which was devoted to de-
veloping the shopping center’s Christmas display, during the late
167
American Ethnologist ! Volume 39 Number 1 February 2012
summer of 2006 (August and September). More generally, from July
2006 to October 2007, I spent part of each week at the society’s
head office in Swindon or meeting with staff in London or Greater
Manchester (where another major project was underway), attend-
ing staff meetings and team meetings as well as interacting with
staff more casually in the Swindon office’s canteen. I conducted
74 tape-recorded interviews with Bible Society staff, trustees, sup-
porters, and colleagues or opposites in other institutions. In ad-
dition to the projects discussed in this article, I followed a major
advertising campaign in Greater Manchester, the development and
launch of the society’s think tank (Theos) in London, and the work
of the society’s liaison officer in the Houses of Parliament. I also at-
tended dozens of society-sponsored events (workshops, public lec-
tures, staff away days) and equal numbers of events and Christian
festivals in which various staff participated. Although most of the
research took place in Swindon, London, and Greater Manchester,
the project also took me from churches and fairs and vicars’ living
rooms in rural and suburban England and Wales to the environs of
Cape Town, South Africa, and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where I ob-
served the society’s international work.
2. For the full census results, see Office for National Statistics n.d.
Although the figure of 72 percent has been contested as an indi-
cation of “belief,” the census is often cited by Christians in pol-
itics, policy circles, and the churches when it comes to making
arguments about the character of the nation and the importance of
supporting religious institutions. See Day 2009 for a discussion of
the concept of “belief” and the figures on religion in the 2001 cen-
sus. Some researchers and social campaigners prefer the figures on
religion in the annual British Social Attitudes surveys, which con-
sistently suggest that approximately 50 percent of the British pop-
ulation should be labeled “Christian;” see Day 2009 and Voas and
Crockett 2005 for discussion of the surveys and how to gauge “be-
lief” vis-à-vis “cultural affiliation.”
3. This example of an “Islamic” ambience is also, of course, rele-
vant to debates in Europe and various anxieties about certain kinds
of religious presence, more specifically Muslim presences. Laı̈cité
in France, as inscribed in and through the controversy of wear-
ing the veil in schools, is a well-known recent example (see Bowen
2008); perhaps less well known but certainly apt given this article’s
focus, was the refusal by King’s College, London, in October 2002, to
sell the site of St. Thomas’s Hospital, which is located directly across
from the Houses of Parliament, to Aga Khan, who wanted to turn it
into an Islamic cultural center. The Aga Khan Foundation had bid
£24 million for the site—more than twice the bid of the hospital’s
Charitable Foundation. Two years earlier, the Ministry of Defence
had similarly rejected an offer from the Aga Khan to purchase the
Royal Army Medical College at Millbank—also quite close to Parlia-
ment. See London Evening Standard 2002. It is worth noting, how-
ever, that the lines being drawn in this case did not necessarily con-
form to a stereotypical “Christendom versus Caliphate” model; the
Guardian reported on “suggestions” that the outgoing archbishop
of Canterbury, George Carey, “had been supporting the Aga Khan
in his bid” (2002).
4. Ruth Gledhill (2010) posted a video on the Times website, ex-
pressing her dismay, as a Christian, with this claim: “We’re hear-
ing a lot of complaining from Christian people that they’re be-
ing persecuted in Britain,” she said. “This is absolute nonsense;
Christians are not being persecuted. The victims in Britain are the
poor and the deprived. The victims are Muslims, who are suffering
from Islamophobia. And there is still anti-Semitism.”
5. Wind, of course, is a key index for the presence of the Holy
Spirit in Christian traditions and serves more generally within
many other cosmologies to indicate the presence of spirits and as a
symbol of life; see Hsu and Low 2007.
168
6. As put in this case by the travel writer Paul Torpey (2007).
7. One such well-known perceived aggressor, the philosopher
A. C. Grayling, has, indeed, been known to mock a belief in angels;
see, for example, Grayling 2007:28.
8. The aptness of Bobby McFerrin being spliced into the Gospel
of Luke was reinforced for several of the staff at Bible Society be-
cause, throughout 2006, politicians, pundits, and even academics
were declaring the importance of happiness and well-being as
the best measures of a successful society. The economist Richard
Layard helped set the grounds for discussion in his best-selling
book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (2005). What most in-
terested the staff at Bible Society was Layard’s argument that money
cannot buy happiness—an old adage, of course, but one that
Layard set out, in his “new science,” in what many readers appar-
ently found a particularly compelling portrait, on the basis of an
analysis of “happiness levels” in industrialized countries since the
1950s. This economist was not the only one to weigh in on the
matter. Conservative Party leader Cameron told the Google Zeit-
geist Europe conference that “there’s more to life than money” and
that “improving our society’s sense of well-being is . . . the central
political challenge of our time” (BBC News 2006). Cameron even
got the Conservatives talking about GWB: “general well-being”—
a clear contrast to GDP (gross domestic product), which is what
voters might expect Conservatives to be more interested in. Staff at
Bible Society were reading Layard and other happiologists—such as
Oliver James—and they were listening to the political parties trade
platitudes about well-being. What they felt was missing from these
discussions was a faith element—a sense of how spirituality could
serve as a counterbalance to the demands of the 21st-century rat
race. The angels project was part of their effort to put it into the
equation. The groundwork set by Layard, Cameron, and others was
ripe for the cultivation of life’s “spiritual” dimensions.
9. Indeed, the official name of the society is the British and For-
eign Bible Society, but this is never used by staff in the domestic
context and appears these days only in such contexts as the annual
accounts; it sounds very colonial.
10. One example of this is a Pentecostal-style prayer session I at-
tended in the Houses of Parliament in June 2008; the pastor leading
the session, who had been invited by the parliamentary liaison, fell
into tongues, as did several of the other 20 participants. We were in
a meeting room, and the door was closed, but the session was very
loud, and we could certainly be heard in the hallway and adjacent
meeting rooms.
11. See Bielo 2009 for an account of the Emerging Church in the
United States; in the context of the focus here on sensual engage-
ments, note that Bielo recounts one Emerging Church–style service
he attended during which bread was baked, so that the congrega-
tion could appreciate and savor the smell. More generally, there has
been of late renewed attention to the senses in Protestant traditions
of Christianity; see Meyer 2010 and Pickstock 2010.
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