Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Perry Mueller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Construction Sites ◽  
European Descent ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Religious Writings

This chapter introduces the book’s main argument: that the three original American races, “black,” “red,” and, “white,” were constructed first in the written archive before they were read onto human bodies. It argues that because of America’s uniquely religious history, the racial construction sites of Americans of Native, African, and European descent were religious archives. The Mormon people’s relationship with race serves as a case unto itself and a case study of the larger relationship between religious writings and race. During the nineteenth century early Mormons taught a theology of “white universalism,” which held that even non-whites, whom the Bible and the Book of Mormon taught were cursed with dark skin because of their ancestors’ sin against their families, could become “white” through dedication to the restored Mormon gospel. But Mormons eventually abandoned this “white universalism,” and instead taught and practiced a theology of white supremacy.

Abandoned Quarries

2018 ◽  
pp. 129-136
Author(s):  
Seth Perry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Early National ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Period

This concluding chapter discusses the consequences of biblicism in the early national period for subsequent American religious history. It considers bible culture in the later nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on how the corporatization of religious printing amplifed the Bible's status as an abstract commodity. Responding to the arguments put forward by W. P. Strickland in his 1849 History of the American Bible Society, the chapter argues that attaching the Bible's importance to American national identity could not leave the Bible unchanged, because that is not how scripturalization works. It also explains how the Bible's availability for citation and re-citation fundamentally changed the desire, effectiveness, and circumstances of its citation. Finally, it uses the abandoned quarry—empty because it has flled other places—as a figure for the themes of citation, performance, and identity explored in this book.

Women Preachers in the Bible Christian Connexion

2004 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Organizational Structure ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Important Case ◽  
Formal Organization ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Equal Footing ◽  
Women Preachers ◽  
The Bible

In 1862 Mary O'Bryan Thorne, daughter of the founder of the Bible Christian Connexion and a Bible Christian local preacher, wrote in her diary: “At our East Street anniversary I spoke at 11, and Serena [her daughter] at 2:30 and 6; one was converted in the evening.” She regarded this as a routine engagement; something she had been doing since her sixteenth year, and that her daughter had every right to continue. Female traveling preachers (itinerants) were important, perhaps crucial, in establishing the Bible Christians as a separate denomination and their use was never formally abandoned. The persistence of this tradition makes their history an important case study of women preachers’ experience in nineteenth-century Britain, showing a trend toward marginalization similar to the experience of many other nineteenth-century women who sought to enter increasingly professionalized occupations open only to men. Even in the early years of the Connexion when the organizational structure was fluid and evolving, women were never on an equal footing with male preachers. With the development of a formal organization in the 1830s their numbers started to drop and the gap between male and female responsibilities widened, with women never assigned the full duties of male ministry.

The Distinctiveness of American Denominationalism: A Case Study of the 1846 Evangelical Alliance

1976 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest R. Sandeen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
European History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Characteristic Shape ◽  
American Protestantism

The Chicago school in American religious historiography, especially its two most distinguished representatives, W. W. Sweet and Sidney E. Mead, has emphasized the growth of religious liberty as a crucial factor in accounting for the characteristic shape of American Protestantism in the early nineteenth century. The effect of this interpretative hypothesis has been to emphasize the distinctiveness of American religious history while focusing attention so intensely upon American phenomena that evidence from European history which might have served to qualify that hypothesis has not yet received adequate attention.

Seventeen Centuries of Sin: The Christian Past in Antebellum Slavery Debates

2020 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-332
Author(s):  
Paul Gutacker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Church History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Close Study

AbstractHistorians of American religion generally agree that religious debates over slavery were characterized by a reliance on the plain meaning of the Bible. According to the conventional wisdom, antebellum Americans were uninterested in or even overtly hostile to tradition and church history. However, a close study of pro- and antislavery literature complicates this picture of ahistorical biblicism. For some defenders of slavery, not merely the Bible but also Christian tradition supported their position, and these Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists mined the past for examples of Christian slaveholding. On the other hand, both white and Black antislavery authors used religious history to bolster their cases against the peculiar institution, with African Americans leading the way in developing an antislavery account of the Christian past. The previously unnoticed historical dimensions of religious arguments over slavery prove central to understanding why these debates failed, while also modifying how we conceive of scripture, tradition, and religious authority in nineteenth-century America. Arguments over slavery show that religious Americans—even many who claimed to be biblicists—did not read the Bible alone but always alongside and in relation to other texts, traditions, and interpreters.

The (Un)Plain Bible

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lydia Willsky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Wild Fruits ◽  
Christian Culture

This article explores the phenomenon of nineteenth-century new religious movements as a reaction to the “plain Bible” religious culture of that era. The plain Bible thesis maintained that the Bible was clear in its meaning, persuasive in its message, and authoritative in all matters of truth. Through the examples of Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy and Henry David Thoreau, this article illustrates how three religious innovators reacted against the plain Bible thesis by creating their own versions of scripture which, in turn, aided in creating or strengthening alternative forms of Christianity. With his Mormon scriptural canon, including The Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price, Smith combated the notion that the Bible was clear in meaning; with her sacred text Science and Health Eddy challenged the persuasiveness of the plain Bible; and with his manuscript Wild Fruits, Thoreau undermined the plain Bible’s singular authority. This article shows that many new religious movements were not outliers in nineteenth-century Christian culture but were in fact products of that culture, albeit reactionary ones.

‘A Routh O’ Auld Nick-Nackets’ – the antiquarian collection of John Rae

2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Representative Case ◽  
National Museums ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.

Possessing the Iconic Book

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 309-329
Author(s):  
Claudia V. Camp
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Ben Sira ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Iconic Status ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Woman Wisdom ◽  
Martin Marty

I propose that the notion of possession adds an important ideological nuance to the analyses of iconic books set forth by Martin Marty (1980) and, more recently, by James Watts (2006). Using the early second century BCE book of Sirach as a case study, I tease out some of the symbolic dynamics through which the Bible achieved iconic status in the first place, that is, the conditions in which significance was attached to its material, finite shape. For Ben Sira, this symbolism was deeply tied to his honor-shame ethos in which women posed a threat to the honor of his eternal name, a threat resolved through his possession of Torah figured as the Woman Wisdom. What my analysis suggests is that the conflicted perceptions of gender in Ben Sira’s text is fundamental to his appropriation of, and attempt to produce, authoritative religious literature, and thus essential for understanding his relationship to this emerging canon. Torah, conceived as female, was the core of this canon, but Ben Sira adds his own literary production to this female “body” (or feminized corpus, if you will), becoming the voice of both through the experience of perfect possession.

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