Not less religious. More spiritual.

The client

The Bible Society is not a religious organisation. That distinction matters. They are a secular institution that believes the Bible — as a work of literature, philosophy, and human storytelling — has profound value entirely independent of faith. As a secular person myself, this framing was what made the project possible. The brief wasn't about evangelism. It was about relevance.

The problem

Nobody was picking up the Bible. Not the religiously curious, not the culturally interested, and certainly not the growing cohort of British adults who had actively turned away from organised religion. Anti-religion sentiment was rising — for entirely understandable reasons — and the Bible had become caught in the crossfire of something it wasn't entirely responsible for.

The surface-level brief was how to make the Bible feel more approachable. The assumption behind it was that the problem was tone — that people would engage with gentler, less religious messaging. I didn't think that was right.

The insight

Working with YouGov, I found something that changed the brief completely: people in the UK aren't becoming less spiritual. They're becoming more spiritual — just outside the walls of organised religion. Meditation, Buddhism, self-discovery, introspection, even psychedelics — the search for meaning and transcendence is as strong as it has ever been. The problem wasn't spirituality. The problem was the wrapper it came in.

The idea

If the audience was hungry for wisdom, meaning, and profound human stories — but hostile to religious framing — then the answer was to meet them exactly where they were. Remove the wrapper. Let the stories speak.

Bible stories reframed not as scripture, but as profound life lessons — the kind of foundational human wisdom you find in Aesop's Fables, in Stoic philosophy, in the stories people share in therapy or at 3am or when something in their life breaks open. The idea was almost a trick: lead people to recognise that the Bible contains some of the greatest, most enduring human stories ever written — and that they'd been avoiding it for reasons that had nothing to do with what was actually inside it.

Not "here is the Bible, please engage with it." But "here is a story about grief, betrayal, forgiveness, ambition, love — and by the way, you may recognise where it's from."

Why it worked

It worked because it was honest. The insight was real — grounded in actual data about how British attitudes to spirituality were shifting. The creative idea respected the audience's intelligence rather than trying to sneak religion past them. And it gave The Bible Society a position that was genuinely theirs: not a church, not a faith organisation, but the curator of one of the most extraordinary collections of human storytelling ever assembled.

The outcome

The project resulted in a complete rebrand of The Bible Society and a new above-the-line advertising campaign — both built around the spiritual rather than religious framing. One of the strangest briefs I've worked on. Also the most fascinating.