Abstract

American Religion 1, no. 2 (Spring 2020), pp. 154–156 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.1.2.16 Book Review Seth Perry, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018) Daniel Vaca Brown University, Providence, USA “And you cannot deny it!” The signature phrase of the antebellum itinerant evangelist Lorenzo Dow, these words also serve as a sort of thesis statement for Seth Perry’s discerning, illuminating, and altogether excellent study of religious authority in early America. Drawing on extensive archival materials, Perry not only builds on earlier studies that have explored the proliferation and popularity of bibles and related print materials in early America but also questions a guiding premise animating much of that scholarship. Whereas scholars often have taken for granted that the Christian Bible served as “the era’s preeminent religious authority,” Perry asks how and why texts possess authority (3). He answers this question by arguing that bibles became authoritative through a variety of uses, all of which cultivated “authoritative relationships” within and between cultural communities. When Lorenzo Dow shouted his signature phrase at people in his audience, he did so in the knowledge that they already had situated themselves as religious subjects in a relationship with him and each other. Although ostensibly about bibles and the Bible, Perry’s book focuses above all on detailing processes through which early Americans became religious subjects who could not or would not deny particular authoritative claims. Daniel Vaca 155 Perry uses the concept of “scripturalization” to capture the processes through which people become subject to the authority of the Bible. Borrowing the term from the religious studies scholar Vincent Wimbush, who has challenged scholars to identify and interrogate the particular cultural ideas and practices that designate certain texts as “scriptural,” Perry defines scripturalization as the production of a “privileged distinction from other texts” and treats religious authority as the manifestation of such distinctions (6-7). Over five chapters, Perry not only details the features of bible production and distribution that shaped Bible culture in early America but also presents these features as contingencies through which religious authority and subjectivity took shape. The two chapters in Part I trace the history of bibles and bible readers in early America. Emphasizing that real and imagined readers shaped “the circuit of writing, production, distribution, and reception,” Perry argues in the book’s first chapter that Protestant bibles in Britain and early national US America premised their scripturalization on the idea that their readers required pedagogical intervention (39). Eighteenth-century British bibles often imagined readers as uneducated and male, while early American bibles increasingly cultivated an explicitly American national identity and treated women as consumers who had primary responsibility for buying bibles and teaching children to read them. The second chapter argues that early American readers scripturalized the Bible by applying it and expanding upon it through practices of citation, cross-referencing , and the creation of countless “parabiblical texts.” In Part II, Perry examines practices of scripturalization that do not involve explicit references to the Bible itself. Chapter three presents several examples of people using bible-based rhetorical gestures and physical actions to claim power and make themselves visible “in a culture where the Bible was the textual ground for the constitution of subjects” (68). Examples of “performative biblicism” include the behavior of Lorenzo Dow, who cultivated authority by acting and dressing like a biblical apostle, as well as the ministry of the African American itinerant Zilpha Elaw, who narrated her activities by drawing parallels especially with the apostle Paul. In chapter four, Perry shows how the scripturalized environment of early national America offered people new ways of interpreting spiritual visions and recounting them in writing. Focusing especially on the career of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, the final chapter illustrates how “early Mormons scripturalized, and became the scripturalized subjects of, new texts” (111). Perry details how Smith not only performed biblicism in his own writing but also cultivated perception of his revelation’s reliability by incorporating authorial strategies and prefatory materials that bible publishers had used to assuage their own readers’ concerns. American Religion 1:2 156 The...

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