Heathen: Religion and Race in American History

by Kathryn Gin Lum

Overview

Philip Schaff Prize, American Society of Church History
S-USIH Book Award, Society for U.S. Intellectual History
Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians

“A fascinating book…Gin Lum suggests that, in many times and places, the divide between Christian and ‘heathen’ was the central divide in American life.”—Kelefa Sanneh, New Yorker

“Offers a dazzling range of examples to substantiate its thesis. Rare is the reader who could dip into it without becoming much better informed on a great many topics historical, literary, and religious. So many of Gin Lum’s examples are enlightening and informative in their own right.”—Philip Jenkins, Christian Century

“Brilliant…Gin Lum’s writing style is nuanced, clear, detailed yet expansive, and accessible, which will make the book a fit for both graduate and undergraduate classrooms. Any scholar of American history should have a copy.” —Emily Suzanne Clark, S-USIH: Society for U.S. Intellectual History

In this sweeping historical narrative, Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the heathen has been maintained from the colonial era to the present in religious and secular discourses—discourses, specifically, of race.

Americans long viewed the world as a realm of suffering heathens whose lands and lives needed their intervention to flourish. The term “heathen” fell out of common use by the early 1900s, leading some to imagine that racial categories had replaced religious differences. But the ideas underlying the figure of the heathen did not disappear. Americans still treat large swaths of the world as “other” due to their assumed need for conversion to American ways.

Race continues to operate as a heathen inheritance in the United States, animating Americans’ sense of being a world apart from an undifferentiated mass of needy, suffering peoples. Heathen thus reveals a key source of American exceptionalism and a prism through which Americans have defined themselves as a progressive and humanitarian nation even as supposed heathens have drawn on the same to counter this national myth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674297326
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/08/2024
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.06(d)

About the Author

Kathryn Gin Lum is a historian of religion and race in America and the author of Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Christian Century. She is Professor of Religious Studies in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University.

Table of Contents

A Note on Terms ix

Prologue: Returning the Gaze 1

Introduction: A Heathen Inheritance 7

Part I Imagining the Heathen World 21

1 Precedents 26

2 Origin Stories 47

3 Landscapes 73

4 Bodies 97

Part II The Body Politic 125

5 Barometer 129

6 Exclusion 151

7 Inclusion 175

Part III Inheritances 195

8 Preservation and Pushback 198

9 Resonances 222

10 Continuing Counterscripts 250

Epilogue: "The Aforesaid Heathen Peoples" 272

Postscript: The More Things Change … 279

Notes 285

Acknowledgments 337

Index 341

Editorial Reviews

Expansive…As much as this book is about the historical underpinnings of religious colonialism, it is also about how the circulation of texts—in the form of ethnographic research, Western classics, religious propaganda, and scripture—give imaginative shape to worlds.

Englewood Review of Books - Joshua E. Livingston

This is a fantastic book. In a sweeping history of religion and race in the United States, Kathryn Gin Lum’s Heathen offers an elegant narrative that succeeds as both archivally compelling revisionism and stunning synthesis…Indispensable reading for anyone seeking to understand either American religion or American racism.

New England Quarterly - Ben Wright

A sweeping history of the origins, development, and applications of the concept of heathenism as a way of constructing and maintaining White supremacy from the early modern period to the present. Heathen offers a clear, compelling argument defended with extensive evidence from an impressive range of sources. A particular strength is the analysis of ‘counterscripts’ that resist the dominant racial narrative and reveal the stakes of this crucial historical work.

Heather D. Curtis

Heathen is a rare intellectual achievement of discernment, analysis, and clarity. By interpreting the cultural dimensions of race and religion in America through the prism of heathen identity, Gin Lum refracts a visage of fraught history to reveal colors of truth that disturb and inform with lightning courage. This is transformative scholarship at its best.

Sylvester A. Johnson

Offers a dazzling range of examples to substantiate its thesis. Rare is the reader who could dip into it without becoming much better informed on a great many topics historical, literary, and religious. So many of Gin Lum’s examples are enlightening and informative in their own right.

Christian Century - Philip Jenkins

A fascinating topic has found the ideal author. Heathen is an absolute pleasure to read—the prose fluid and crystalline, the argument nuanced and sophisticated. Gin Lum demonstrates how important ‘heathen’ was over centuries for the mental and moral coordinates of Anglo-American Protestants’ imaginations. She makes the compelling claim that even when the term fell out of favor, the images of otherness it expressed did not; ‘the heathen world’ became reenvisioned as ‘third world’ and ‘developing world,’ perpetuating a divided, racialized world view.

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Holds up…a harsh and timely mirror to Christians in the United States.

National Catholic Reporter

A fascinating book…Gin Lum suggests that, in many times and places, the divide between Christian and ‘heathen’ was the central divide in American life.

New Yorker - Kelefa Sanneh

A powerful and important book. Lum writes elegantly and passionately, with both scholarly acumen and personal insight…[this] masterful study pushes us to think deeply about these urgent questions…[and] serves as an important reminder of the value of writing broad narratives.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion - Katharine Gerbner

Heathen presents the reality of the world we are living in today and the stories that formed it.

Sojourners - Yanan Rahim Melo

This brilliant book definitively refutes the idea that race simply replaced religion as modernity’s primary marker for difference. Gin Lum shows how the concept of heathenism continues to inform American attitudes about race and the global other—and how those marked as heathens have spoken back to shape a more just world. Along the way, she challenges both historians and religion scholars to see their work anew.

Tisa Wenger

A striking, persuasive account of the enduring power of the concept of ‘the heathen world.’ With impressive research and incisive analysis, Gin Lum shows how white Americans’ application of a ‘heathen barometer’ indelibly shaped American race-making and reveals the vigorous responses from groups racialized as heathens. This vividly written book is essential reading for anyone interested in religion and race.

Judith Weisenfeld

A must read for anyone doing the work of deconstructing and decolonizing a Christianity known for its name-calling…In brilliant detail, [Gin] Lum shows the historical connection between paganism and Christianity…A timely resource for Christians who are seeking a version of Christianity that does not require cultural assimilation and that does not make excuses for a religion that employed and endorsed race as a means of othering.

Good Faith Media - Starlette Thomas

Brilliant…Gin Lum’s writing style is nuanced, clear, detailed yet expansive, and accessible, which will make the book a fit for both graduate and undergraduate classrooms. Any scholar of American history should have a copy.

S-USIH: Society for U.S. Intellectual History - Emily Suzanne Clark

[Gin Lum] tells a much larger story about the durability of cultural categories, the meaning of history, and the emergence of ideas of about racial difference, which she sees as intertwined with religious difference. As Gin Lum persuasively and provocatively argues in this book, ‘racial othering has been a “heathen inheritance.”’

Anxious Bench - Melissa Borja

A story about religion but also about race, colonialism, empire and identity—particularly American identity. The concept of heathenism was used to rationalize the slaughter of indigenous people, the burning of ‘witches,’ the enslavement of Africans, the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, the abduction of Native American children, and the usurpation of U.S. territories’ and colonies’ right to self-rule.

Salon - Kathryn Joyce

02/28/2022

The concept of the heathen “stem from Americans’ conviction that other people need to be transformed” and undergirds “a White American Christian superiority complex,” according to this nuanced and illuminating study from Stanford University religious studies professor Gin Lum (Damned Nation). In a series of detailed case studies, Gin Lum emphasizes the malleability of the term and examines how it enfolds religious and racial differences from a presumed norm of Christian whiteness. By categorizing Native Americans, Africans, and Asians as “heathens,” Gin Lum explains, white Protestants attributed these groups’ alleged technological and social backwardness to their spiritual failings and justified war, slavery, and colonization as means to salvation. In the book’s most intriguing sections, Gin Lum spotlights artists and activists, including Yankton Sioux author Zitkála-Šá (1876–1938) and Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), who refashioned “heathen” from an insult into an assertion of anti-imperial pride. Ranging from King Philip’s War in 17th-century New England to “anti-Asian hate” during the Covid-19 pandemic, Gin Lum sheds light on a troubling yet overlooked aspect of U.S. religious history and issues a powerful call for change. Readers will gain new insight into the roots of “White Protestant American” exceptionalism. (May)

Publishers Weekly

A fascinating book…Gin Lum suggests that, in many times and places, the divide between Christian and ‘heathen’ was the central divide in American life.

New Yorker - Kalefa Sanneh