The occurrence of new revelations and “bibles” in nineteenth-century America—which opened up new spiritual worlds on a grand scale—remains a perennial topic of fascination for students and scholars of American history, but these have rarely been studied in relation to each other. This panel features a selection of authors from an upcoming volume that seeks to explore new revelations and scriptural production across ethnic and linguistic lines. While by no means exhaustive of the incredibly prolific production that characterized this period, the contributors give sustained, comparative, and theoretical analysis to a wide range of newly created or “discovered” scriptures. The authors take inspiration from relational models that avoid essentializing scripture as an inherently special type of text as opposed to one given this status by a community of believers but also strongly ground their analysis within the cultural context of the nineteenth-century United States and Protestant-derived scriptural practices.
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.
This paper discusses three largely forgotten alternative gospels presented by nineteenth-century American Spiritualists. While Spiritualists often reinterpreted the Bible in unorthodox ways and supplemented it with or subordinated it to spirit communications, these new gospels were intended to supplant the canonical accounts, rationalizing them and making them conform to democratic ideals. All three accounts naturalize Jesus's miracles and fiercely attack priestcraft, authorizing Spiritualist understandings of true religion. These alternative gospels reveal tensions at the heart of Spiritualism and reflect anxieties about biblical historicity, scientific materialism, charismatic authority, and ongoing revelation. Dependent on the canonical gospels even as they sought to displace them, these gospels expose the paradox of an anti-authoritarian religious movement operating within a deeply biblicist culture. Through these neglected works, the paper illuminates the tensions that shaped Spiritualist engagements with scripture and, more broadly, the contested place of the Bible in nineteenth-century American religious life.
The Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) people, along with many other Native American nations, faced a genocidal removal in the early nineteenth century from their homelands in Illinois. Among the most important Kiikaapoi leaders of this period was Kenekuk, widely known as the Kickapoo Prophet, who long resisted removal but ultimately moved west to help his people rebuild their lives on a new reservation in Kansas. As a part of his ministry, Kenekuk carved wooden prayer sticks using Algonquian pictographic symbols to guide the prayers of his community. Kenekuk’s followers told outsiders that these prayer sticks were their Bible. Kenekuk himself taught that, although the “White Man’s Bible” was a holy book, his people had no need of it because God had given them their own instructions on how to live. His story offers new insights into scriptural practices in nineteenth-century North America, helping us see alternative forms of scripturalization and the imperial contexts in which they emerged.