Watts & Yoo/Books as Bodies, 5. Being the Bible

Dorina Miller Parmenter describes the development of a very recent Bible ritual in the United States: Bring Your Bible to School Day. This attempt to counter the appearance of secularization in American schools and culture has mobilized as many as 650,000 Christian school children to carry and display their bibles at their schools. Parmenter analyzes the rhetoric around this Evangelical movement on the basis of traditional Protestant doctrines of scripture dating back to the sixteenth century. She points out how processing bibles and the images of doing so in news media, advocate websites and social media engage both Lutheran and Calvinist theologies of scripture. In the end, it is not the bibles but the children carrying them whom the books index as “showing God” to their schoolmates and teachers.