Introduces the key concept of sacred texts and their role in religious belief and practice, focusing specifically on how the reading of sacred texts can create a spatial and temporal experience of the divine for readers.

The introduction outlines the book’s argument that biblical and constitutional debates over slavery introduced a sense of historical distance from the founding era and the biblical past. It also defines key terms, including historical distance, sacred texts, and favored pasts, and outlines developments by which the Bible maintained its status as a sacred text, while the Constitution achieved a similar kind of status in antebellum America. These developments set the stage for the process by which debates over slavery began to historicize the biblical and constitutional pasts. This process corresponded with the broader emergence of a modern historical consciousness. And yet, the nature of American religious and legal culture, and the presence of slavery, gave unique shape to American historical awareness. The book makes its most innovative move in showing how slavery encouraged interpretive shifts to read both the Bible and the Constitution as historical texts. I focus on a range of thinkers and interpreters and read their writings with an eye toward measuring historical consciouness. This approach demonstrates that the crisis over slavery in America became a crisis of historicity.

The epilogue indicates continuities and changes in American historical thought, highlighting the persistence of the ways in which politics inform historical awareness, and also showing that Americans continue to read the Constitution and the Bible in spite of – or in light of – historical awareness. While drawing attention to these continuities, the epilogue emphasizes differences in thought as well, particularly the fact that Americans today are more likely than their antebellum predecessors to engage in or to be confronted by conversations revolving around ahistorical and historical thinking. Twenty-first-century historical consciousness can be seen in aspirationalist readings of the Constitution and approaches to the Bible that deliberately account for historical distance. In attending to both continuities and changes, the epilogue underscores Americans’ continued efforts to bridge the meaning of founding documents to our new times, while also emphasizing the limitations of these approaches. A focus on the founders has allowed white Americans to avoid fully confronting the facts of slavery and racial prejudice in our past and, as a result, in our present.