Lifting the Chair You’re Standing On: Theorizing Scripturalization in the Nineteenth Century

This paper reconsiders nineteenth‑century American scripturalization by shifting analytical attention from social relations and interpretive practices to scriptures as textual objects that work to support their own authority. While scholars have rightly emphasized scripturalization as a relational, metadiscursive process, this emphasis risks underestimating the work scriptural texts do for themselves at the level of form, content, and presentation. I argue these texts share a conceited self‑reference, explicitly instructing readers how they should be read, studied, cited, or prayed over. These moments of self‑reference allow texts to perform authority they do not yet possess and to obscure their own contingency. I further suggest that nineteenth‑century scriptural creativity was shaped not only by the Bible and post‑Revolutionary social disruption, but also by the American founding documents. Attending to scriptures as objects clarifies both why nineteenth‑century America proved so fertile a site for new scriptures and how textual characteristics contribute to scriptural authority.