Christianity turns on a number of paradoxes. The Christian God is both imminent and transcendent; Jesus Christ is both human and divine; his Kingdom both has and has not yet arrived. These various internal tensions have proven immensely productive for anthropologists, and here Matthew Engelke is no exception. Engelke's first monograph, A Problem of Presence, examined how Apostolic Christians in Zimbabwe navigate the simultaneous proximity and distance of God by seeking direct experiences of the Holy Spirit, so much so that they reject all forms of mediation, including the biblical text. Engelke's new book, God's Agents, explores a very different group of Christians (with, it must be said, a very different relationship to Scripture), the British and Foreign Bible Society.

Engelke has already established himself as a skilful ethnographic writer, and in God's Agents he is in fine form. It is not easy to create compelling descriptions of the mundane workings of a nonprofit organization, but in this book even board meetings and the drafting of press releases are made to matter because Engelke has situated them in a game with stakes we've come to appreciate. In addition to ethnographic description and the firsthand narrations of his informants (as anthropologists call the people they study), the text is dotted with quotations from newspaper articles and blogs, as well as the words of Christian writers who have influenced the Bible society staff. These voices give the book a texture that extends the analysis beyond a particular Christian organization to contemporary Britain more generally. One of the primary implications of this wider focus is that God's Agents is very much an ethnography of secularism. What we learn from Engelke's analysis is that the secular is multifaceted, and that the Bible society has a long and complicated relationship with it.

Engelke focuses on the work of the Bible society at home in Britain, much of which amounts to "Bible advocacy," attempts to convince an increasingly indifferent public that the Bible, and Christianity more generally, have not become irrelevant. These goals point to the most obvious way that the Bible society understands and engages with the secular, namely as secularism—that is, the exclusion of religion from public life. The barrier between these spheres is something that the Bible society hopes to break down. In what is perhaps true British fashion, they often seek to do so not by direct confrontation, but rather by creating what Engelke calls "ambient faith." Efforts toward this end include a Christmastime display of angels at a Swindon shopping center and a series of Bible studies designed to be done in pubs or cafes as a means of "getting the Word out." Angels fluttering above a Marks & Spencer or a group of people reading 1 Corinthians over coffee are meant to challenge the distinction between what is public and what is private that defines this particular reading of secularism. The long-term hope of Bible advocacy is that eventually such efforts might render this distinction unnecessary, that religion will not be only public or private but everywhere, thoroughgoing in its presence.

In this first reading of the term, the "secular" is no friend to Christianity, and Bible advocacy aims to eat away at its territory, bringing religious ideas and actions into spaces not usually marked as religious. At the same time, people at the Bible society are keen to use linguistic and aesthetic markers from outside the church (i.e., from the "secular" world, in the above sense). For example, a massive advertising campaign in Manchester presented biblical narratives in the language of newspaper headlines in hopes of sparking public interest in the Bible. Seen from this angle, the secular is a repository of resources to be mined in the service of Bible advocacy, a source of possibilities as much as problems.

Under certain circumstances, the "secular" can even be incorporated into a public Christian position. Engelke devotes the last three chapters of his book to Theos, the Christian think tank launched and partially funded by the Bible society. In its first publication, Theos staked a claim in the public square by arguing that the secular public square is itself a Christian legacy. In this argument, the charge to give to Caesar that which is Caesar's makes sense only if Caesar's rule is encompassed by the rule of Christ; it was Christ's overarching authority that therefore made the idea of the secular possible in Western thought. Insofar as this is the case, "Jesus was, in a way, a secularist."

While the Bible society has to be "church-facing" in much of its work, first and foremost because it depends on the financial support of churches, Theos works hard to distance itself from certain kinds of Christians. Of particular concern is the "nutters brigade," to use one oft-quoted epithet—the sort of Christians who might picket an art exhibition or theatrical performance because they find the content offensive. The best example of Theos' carefully charted line is the "Rescuing Darwin" campaign, which coincided with the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth—and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of the Species—in 2009. Through a series of reports and public events, Theos sought to rescue Darwin from both the antitheism of the New Atheists, who often use him as a battering ram in their fight against religion, and the anti-intellectualism of creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design, who see Darwin as wielding his own battering ram against their faith. Theos' aim was to demonstrate that Darwin did not think that his theory was antithetical to religious commitment. "Rescuing Darwin" emphasized the possibility that Christianity and natural selection were not mutually exclusive, primarily because they respond to different types of questions. Here again, we see one of the cardinal principles of secularism at work, the cordoning off of religious belief to certain domains of life, where faith, rather than science, is paramount. In "Rescuing Darwin," then, "reasonable religion works with rather than against the epistemological divisions set up in the eighteenth century." The secular is not only made to serve religious ends, but is domesticated by Christian faith.

Given these various readings of the secular, it should come as no surprise that in Engelke's analysis people at the Bible society emerge as deeply ambivalent about it. In their efforts to dismantle it, they have wound up using many of its parts. The result is that those at the Bible society are, in fact, very much like the people they are trying to influence. These Christians have become all things to all people, as Scripture puts it, so much so that "the trajectory of these evangelically minded social actors is only a few degrees different from the perceived norm"—a critique that, incidentally, has been leveled at the Bible society by other British Christians. Engelke is clear that for Bible society advocates, this sort of capitulation to "the world" is a means to an end, "a sacrifice today to the secular in the service of tomorrow for salvation." As such, he concludes, their work tells us something important about "publicity," about what it takes to be able to participate in public discourse in the contemporary West, about "the fine line between being able to have a conversation and to shape that conversation."

One of the most helpful insights that Engelke draws from this analysis has to do with the way that contemporary Christians, especially evangelicals, understand culture, a topic that they spend a great deal of time talking about. Whereas the opposite of culture in anthropological thought is generally nature, when Christians speak of culture (especially "the culture") they typically oppose it to the church. While anthropologists would see Christianity as part of culture, evangelicals often view the church as outside "the culture." This observation helps us see Engelke's conclusion—that people at the Bible society are deeply embedded in secular paradigms—as more than a simple "gotcha" move that reveals Christians to be something they would likely claim, or at least hope, they are not. Instead, what Engelke offers is a careful tracing of what it means for British Christianity to be British, and to stake out a position for itself in British public life. His analysis explores the difficulty of being both in the world and not of it. This, of course, is another of Christianity's core tensions. What God's Agents provides us is therefore an important new example of how Christians work to navigate their paradoxical religion.

Naomi Haynes is a Chancellor's Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostalism, Social Life, and Political Economy on the Zambian Copperbelt.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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