| This project is about religious authority and the Bible in America during the evangelical surge of the early nineteenth century known as the Second Great Awakening. Those caught up in this surge focused on the authority of the Bible, insisting that individual Christians should turn away from earthly religious authorities - professionalized clergy, academic theology, established denominations - and seek their own conversion with the Bible alone as arbiter of all ecclesiastical, liturgical, theological, and moral questions. Reliance on the Bible, the rhetoric proclaimed, would unite Christians (Protestants, at any rate) under its solid, univocal authority. As it turned out, something like the opposite happened: the early nineteenth century saw an explosion of upstart denominations and new religious movements, many of them led by women, African Americans, and others with limited access to traditional forms of religious leadership. Virtually all of these movements promoted some version of the Bible's supreme authority, and yet each represented the creation of new human authorities - new and expanded movements meant new preachers, new prophets, and new forms of lay leadership. This project asks a simple question with a complex answer: how did the "Bible alone" rhetoric of antebellum evangelicalism relate to the rampant proliferation of religious authorities?;The answer, I argue, lies in the unique variety of bible culture in early-national America and the fact that the period's intense focus on biblical authority was in fact predicated on human mediation of the sacred text. Among Protestants, the ability to convincingly mediate the Bible had always been a primary part of structural and institutionalized ways of legitimating personal religious authority: ministerial training promoted scriptural and theological erudition that validated an individual's religious authority. In early-nineteenth-century America, the ability to mediate the Bible was no longer dependent on formal training or other limited, official, institutionalized channels of knowledge - it was a skill that could be gleaned in the wider world of print bible culture. Printing technology, American disestablishment, and the burgeoning consumer market conspired to change the terms of reader' interaction with printed bibles. The effect was to turn the Bible from an idealized, abstract authority into a usable, personalized tool of authority - a text that could be owned, figuratively and literally. While the rhetoric of the time appealed to the unifying authority of the "Bible alone," Americans' changing relationship to the Bible - and to their own paper-and-ink bibles - helped to inspire dramatic religious diversity. |
